Why do many people choose to install and use E-mail software on their PC particularly Outlook (there are others too... Eudora, Outlook Express, etc.) instead of using a web-based E-mail client (e.g. AOL, GMail, etc.)?

Personal preference is a BIG part of the decision.  For the majority of users Microsoft Outlook was an easy default choice and to give it credit it was one of the first (back in 1997-98) best solutions that most people already had.   It came with Microsoft Office worked just like Word and Excel and was one of the first tools to do a good job of integrating E-mail, address book and calendar.  It’s still on most every PC and still one of the best tools for integrating those three functions.  Outlook gets even better if you’re in a corporate setting where the address books and calendars can be shared using server software called Microsoft Exchange or very recently using the more recent Google Apps service.  (For more information on Google Apps with Outlook and especially synchronizing Outlook with web-based tools and hand-held devices see our guide titled "Syncing Smart-phone E-mail+... The What, Why, and How?".)

Many of us grew up using Microsoft Outlook to manage E-mail and easily adopted the idea of sorting E-mail messages into folders as a way to keep things of interest or that might be needed for future reference.  I can verify personally that Outlook's log of ‘Sent’ messages has become a kind of ‘work-diary/archive’ that is invaluable in trying to reconstruct recent or even years-old events.

Add to that the personality type (e.g. like mine) that wants to file rather than discard and you end up with many outlook users with years and years of files.  Inside Outlook we even have an ‘Archiving’ tool that culls out the messages by date and lets us create year-by-year folders of what’s gone by.  So I and some of my clients have large collections of E-mail dating back several years and taking up 10, 20 or more GigaBytes of space. (For more on Outlook Archiving see our guide titled "Too many Outlook messages? What, Why and How to Manage")

Are there any other reasons?

YES, Integration...
Here’s an example of the integration we take advantage of with Outlook, AT&T DSL, Yahoo and Google.  We keep a calendar in Outlook and use a tool called called 'Google calendar Sync' on the PC.  That tool keeps Outlook's local calendar and our Google calendar in sync automatically.  Our Google calendar is also synced with our Android phone automatically.  So when we enter a meeting in outlook it shows up moments later on my smart phone and vice-versa. 

When we get an E-mail that we want to make into a meeting it can be dragged to the Outlook calendar and an appointment pops up with much of the appointment data filled in.  We just adjust the date, time and reminder and press [Save] .

Separately as with most POP3 E-mail we can preview E-mail on the Android phone when we're out.  We can then reply immediately if needed or delete a message we I don’t need to see again or file.  Everything that 's not deleted is held in queue and received back in the office by Outlook where we can reply, file, etc.

Finally, if we receive an E-mail message from someone new that needs to be added to the contact list, Outlook lets us click on the incoming message sender and automatically create a contact.  It fills in as much as it can and we add the rest.  We can make an electronic update (not yet as automatic we'd like it to be) for our Google contacts which is automatically synchronized to make it show up on the Android phone.

That’s not nearly all the integration that Outlook provides within it’s own features and with other Office and Windows software but we suspect it gives you the idea.  And we hope this helps you appreciate why some folks become such loyal Outlook users.

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