New Project: eMail Beauty Contest

Despite all the media hype eMail is still the work horse of enterprise and cross enterprise collaboration. And the bulk of workers use a traditional computer. So looking at eMail applications is surely worth a look. From my experience, having worked with MHS, MS-Mail, CCMail, Profs, CompuServe, Outlook, Notes and some more obscure packages, I can tell that details make all the difference. All applications have an Inbox, a send button and a calendar view. After all it is not enough if software works, Users have to be pleased too. So time and energy permitting I will dive into the details of a selection of eMail applications and compare: eMail, Calendar, Contact and Task management. My focus will be the user perspective and not admin capabilities or technobabble, so no diskspace or memory consumption musings. And yes, stop howling, Notes is much more than eMail, but that's not the point for this comparison. I have picked 3 eMail clients and 3 web applications for this project:

1. Lotus Notes 8.5.2 running on Ubuntu 10.10 backed by Domino 8.5.2 on Linux
2. Outlook 2010 running on Windows 7 backed by hosted Exchange 2010
3. Evolution 2.30.3 running on Ubuntu 10.10 talking to Exchange / GMail / Domino
4. iNotes Web Access 8.5.2 on Domino on Linux
5. Outlook Web Access 2010
6. gMail

This little project will run over the course of this year and I will publish installments in irregular intervals. If a software gets an update during this period I will most likely update it. To make this project successful I will need a good body of eMails, calendar invites and tasks. This is where I can use some help. Can you send some messages (richly formatted, some attachments) to the test account: BeautyContest? Please nothing NSFW. Some double byte eMail would be cool. What would you like to have compared?