Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager and email client program from Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite.

Although often used mainly as an e-mail application, it also provides calendar, task and contact management.

It can be used as a stand-alone application, but can also operate in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange Server to provide enhanced functions for multiple users in an organisation, such as shared mailboxes and calendars and meeting time allocation.

Versions for Microsoft Windows include:

• Outlook 97
• Outlook 98
• Outlook 2000, also known as Outlook 9
• Outlook 2002, also known as Outlook 10 or Outlook XP
• Office Outlook 2003

Microsoft also released several versions of Outlook for the Apple Macintosh, however, most mail features were disabled after Office 98. After Office 98, Enturage replaced Outlook on Macintosh systems, however in 2001, Microsoft released Outlook 2001 for Mac to allow Classic users to access exchange servers.

One of Microsoft's goals is for the email client to be easy to use. Unfortunately, the embedded automation features and the disregard of security features (which would inconvenience a non-sophisticated user), were exploited by numerous people leading to the phenomenon of email viruses, typically an email attachment executing on the user machine, replicating itself via mass-mailing to the machine address list. Examples of such viruses are the Melissa worm and the Sobig worm.

Microsoft took some corrective steps, and the latest versions of Outlook suffer much less from this problem.