Gmail vs. Outlook
What’s the best platform for managing your email?
About 10 years ago, a previous employer of mine decided to move its email provider from Microsoft to Google. I was overjoyed. At the time, Outlook was tired, clunky, and ugly, while Gmail had a beautiful interface, a proper mobile app, and the ability to enable add-ons. This included one that could delay sending your email so you could go back and edit it or, for an ill-advised 11pm rant to the boss, delete it completely in the morning.
While Gmail is still the betterlooking of the two, much has changed in the intervening years. Microsoft has improved its mobile apps, Microsoft 365 has become an integral part of the Windows 10 and Windows 11 experience, and new features such as the ability to see all your attachments in one place are genuinely useful. Gmail hasn’t rested on its laurels either, rolling out new features such as the ever-popular Smart Compose predictive text input. It has also reduced users’ storage, which combined with the back-pedaling of unlimited free Google Photos, is clearly an attempt to nudge users towards a paid subscription tier.
Let’s start with Google because it feels like the default email provider for many. Gmail launched in 2004 with the promise of “never delete another email”. It even had a ticker on the home page showing how its storage was gradually rising to cope with the new emails it was receiving.
Indeed, in 2006, Google told analysts that it was offering users “infinite storage”, as it wanted people to store the “Golden Copy” of their data online and use local-machine versions as a cache. Back then, there was less demand upon email inboxes to cope with marketing blasts, scammers, and huge file attachments, and it fitted in with Google’s stated business model, which was to harvest data to serve better advertisements. But along the way, whether due to rising storage costs, the industry’s move towards recurring revenue, or a combination of both, Google started charging users for storage. Most users now have 15GB of free storage across all of Google’s apps (the main storage hogs being Drive, Photos, and Gmail) before they are then forced to either delete content from their storage, or move onto the Basic 100GB storage plan.
Reflecting on Google’s volte-face for this article, I feel genuinely aggrieved at being hoodwinked by Google’s promise of forever free storage. I am now so hooked on its services that I essentially can’t leave. As a result, I have to use the Unattach app (unattach.app) to annually strip out the larger attachments and back them up to my NAS. Google One, the company’s storage hub, will sort and present the largest emails in your inbox, but you have to delete the entire email – you can’t strip out the files and keep the original message.
If storage is your main priority, another alternative is Yahoo Mail, which offers a huge 1TB of free storage per account. Yahoo has an excellent email import feature that would make migrating easier, but I can never quite bring myself to complete the switch as all my other online accounts are linked to my Gmail address.
Meanwhile, Outlook comes with the same 15GB of free storage for
users. However, it is better at allowing you to save space, as you can delete items from your inbox that are greater than three, six, or 12 months old with just a couple of clicks. You can’t strip out attachments, but Outlook has a “Files” tab that allows you to see all the photos and documents from your emails in thumbnail view. If you want to upgrade your storage in Outlook there’s only one way to do it, and that’s to pay for Microsoft 365, which is $10 per month and bags you 50GB of space. That’s terrible compared with Google’s 100GB for $1.99 per month, but it’s an apples-tooranges comparison, as Microsoft 365 also gets you 1TB of OneDrive storage, the Office suite of apps, an ad-free Outlook experience, premium support, and quite a bit more. True value is offered by Microsoft 365 Family, which is $13 per month and covers up to six people. Again, both offerings pale in comparison to Yahoo and its free 1TB storage.
Fast and fuss-free
If you’re in the Microsoft ecosystem with Windows or Office, then 365 is especially worth paying for, particularly OneDrive syncing in Windows. Likewise, the Mail app in Windows is set up by default with your Outlook address and is a fast and fuss-free way of managing all your email accounts. The Outlook Windows app is also available if you need more features, such as the ability to read your emails aloud. The Outlook mobile app (Android and iOS) is
well-designed, making it easy to manage all your accounts from one place. We like the ability to add your storage accounts in Outlook, including OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, and even Google Drive, and access them to send attachments from within the app or website.
On mobile devices though, particularly Android, Gmail’s app has the upper hand. You can email and video chat from within the same app, and if your company runs on Google, you’ll also see Chat and Spaces along the bottom navigation. There’s no Gmail app for Windows, but you can install Google Drive to keep your files synced across devices. The Gmail web interface is also powerful without feeling overwhelming, with a slick design housing loads of useful features.
In this always-connected world, the web interface is where most people interact with their email, and this is where Google pulls away from Microsoft. Google’s interface is nicer to look at, easier to use, and doesn’t feature ads. Important features such as “Send Later” and “Smart Compose” are enabled by default, allowing you to decide to send your email the following day or save time composing standard responses respectively. These features are available on Outlook, but you have to dig in the settings to find “Undo Send” – a delay time that you can apply to every message before it leaves your Outbox. Meanwhile, “Suggested Replies” only applies to responses, not original messages.
While the introduction of the above features has mitigated the need for add-ons in Gmail, they’re still there if you want to play around. The best ones allow you to integrate other applications such as Zoom, Todoist, and Dropbox. We particularly like Inbox When Ready, which hides the inbox when you log in, so you can focus on sending that important message without being distracted by unread emails. Outlook has lots of useful add-ins to do things like strip attachments from emails while keeping the original message, but they’re for the app, not the web interface.
Over the last few years, Gmail has gotten worse thanks to its reduced free storage policy, while Outlook has improved its mobile apps and Windows integration. However, Gmail remains the top dog, thanks to its beautiful design, wealth of features, and integration into the wider Google suite. While that 15GB storage might be a constraint over time, it’s still the best way for most people to manage their emails.
Gmail Beautiful interface, no ads, Send Later and Smart Compose features, wealth of add-ons. But only 15GB free storage limit and no Windows app. Guy Cocker
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Outlook Great apps for PC and mobile, thumbnail view for attachments, lots of Outlook app add-ins . Guy Cocker
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