When comparing PolarisMail vs Microsoft Outlook, the Slant community recommends PolarisMail for most people. In the question“What are the best email service providers?” PolarisMail is ranked 7th while Microsoft Outlook is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose PolarisMail is:
At $1/month for a 25GiB mailbox and 5GiB of cloud storage, $2.90/month for 50GiB/15GiB of each, and $6/month for a 25GiB ExchangeMail account, that's about half of what you can see for those service levels from Google, Microsoft and Fastmail. Considering the uptime numbers are above industry averages and they don't skimp on security either, that represents some of the best value in the market.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Typically half the price of brand name e-mail hosting
At $1/month for a 25GiB mailbox and 5GiB of cloud storage, $2.90/month for 50GiB/15GiB of each, and $6/month for a 25GiB ExchangeMail account, that's about half of what you can see for those service levels from Google, Microsoft and Fastmail. Considering the uptime numbers are above industry averages and they don't skimp on security either, that represents some of the best value in the market.
Pro Folder sharing
If you have multiple people responsible for answering e-mail sent to one address, say for customer support purposes or such, you can share folders between accounts to accommodate precisely that use case.
Pro Two factor authentication support
All mailboxes can be setup to use two-factor authentication using a TOTP-based application like Authy, Duo or 1Password. Separately, the Admin Panel features can also be setup to require two factor authentication which is independent of the mailboxes, which adds an extra level of security for the accounts.
Pro Unlimited account aliases
There are no limits on the number of aliases you can create for any mailbox, that includes wildcard or catch-all aliases and cross-domain aliases for other domain names you own.
Pro Fast POP3/IMAP4/SMTP access
For those that still like to access their e-mail using a bona fide client application like Thunderbird, Outlook or eM Client, there's no limit to the access provided via the standard POP3/IMAP4 servers for incoming mail and a workable limit of 35 e-mails per day sent over the SMTP server, which can be increased by written request. The Autodiscovery feature is still a bit hit-or-miss, so don't be surprised if you have to configure the client with the actual server addresses and ports yourself.
Pro Supports large file attachments (≤ 50MiB)
You can attach large files to your e-mails without a problem, so long as none are larger than 50MiB individually. For files larger than that, it's pretty easy to use the cloud storage to host the file and generate a link to share with someone via e-mail for them to get access to it.
Pro No ads anywhere
From the webmail interface to the groupware, support wiki and company website, there is not a single advertisement to be seen anywhere, on any of them. Their absence is actually pretty jarring if you're used to using the Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo! webmails, just to name a few. Their portals load fast because of it.
Pro Adjustable spam/virus filtering
The Admin Panel lets you select a value on a ten-point scale to determine how permissive or restrictive you want the spam filtering engine (in this case Rspamd, with SpamAssassin running as a secondary trap) to be on each account. It takes a bit of trial-and-error to find the correct number for each account, but works remarkably well after that, though some senders need to be whitelisted manually if they don't conform to good DMARC practices.
Pro Free e-mail migration
Most of the time you can handle this on your own since IMAP4 has been the de facto e-mail standard for so long, but some hosters don't implement it correctly and others like Google specifically mangle it to discourage you from leaving them. In the event you can't get it sorted on your own, Polaris will untangle it for you without a charge if you pay up for at least a year in advance.
Pro Free API access to Admin Panel controls
If you host a lot of e-mail accounts with them, you may want to automate their management behind a CLI or REPL, or if you're getting into the e-mail reselling game then you'll want to map their control panel behind a branded one of your own. Luckily, access to their API is free and moderately well-documented, so all of that is limited only by your imagination.
Pro Message delivery rules
It's easy to write rules to send messages that meet some criteria, say those from a certain e-mail address or domain, or those sent to one of the mailboxes aliases, to bypass the Inbox and be delivered directly to a specific mailbox folder or even just logged and deleted.
Pro 30 day backups
Automatic backups are made of your account (including deleted items) and stored for 30 days, in the event something happens to their equipment or you suddenly realize two weeks after the fact that the e-mail receipt you deleted without thinking is actually needed for something important. They can be restored at will from the Admin Panel, just be sure to export all of the e-mails you've received since then so you can reimport them one the backup restoration process has finished.
Pro Good built-in calendar
The calendar includes agenda, day, and three-day views.
Pro Integration with calendar and tasks
Quick conversion of a received email to a task with the deadline.
Pro Fun to use
clean and smooth experience, very nice and i like it.
Pro Smart lookup
Smart lookup is a feature where the Bing search engine is bundled in the app to allow users to automatically search for relevant websites, information and images based on the word highlighted by users, without need to open external browsers. The results will be shown on the right pane of the window.
Pro Priority messages
Microsoft Outlook comes with feature called "Clutter" to filter out incoming email based on the priority of the message set by user. User will be alerted when the high-priority message is incoming, whereas the low-priority message will be put in a separate folder.
Pro Attach files from cloud
Microsoft Outlook allow users to directly attach an attachment directly from cloud services without need to download an entire file before attach to the intended e-mail.
Pro VBA macros
Pro Conditional formatting
Pro Cloud
can attach files and use cloud, very good.
Cons
Con It's from Microsoft
Con Rather buggy
Con Crashes frequently
The only issue with Outlook 2017 is that when the Mail folder increases in size, it sometimes crashes for no reason it, causing loss of data.
Con Categorize email IMAP not good
Con Frustrating user experience
The "Clean Interface" approach means that normal and necessary user interface elements have been removed, such as certain scroll bars, and even the "replied to" indicator. This program becomes more frustrating with each new update.
Con No unique Inbox / global folders
Con No portable bundle available
Con No aliases
Outlook does not support email aliases other then outlook aliases