Difference Between MS Outlook Express and MS Office Outlook

MS Outlook Express vs MS Office Outlook

Outlook Express and Outlook are Microsoft’s email clients that fall under messaging products. Both do the same function but depends upon the requirements can select one of them. But in general outlook express suits for home users and outlook suits for corporate. In day today work MS Outlook Express and MS Office Outlook are of great help.

MS Outlook Express

MS Outlook is email client software to fetch your emails from mail server. In earlier days it came with internet browsers like IE 4 and IE 5 and later it was combined with operating system like Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000. Outlook Express is designed with open Internet Standards so it supports SMTP (to send emails), POP 3 and IMAP  to fetch the emails. (Difference Between POP and IMAP)

On top of these, outlook express supports the following technologies LDAP, HTML, MHTML, S/MIME, NNTP that help us to read emails without worrying about underlying technologies.

Outlook Express supports to receive emails from more than one account into the same application. You can configure Outlook Express to receive emails from more than one account. There are migration tools available to import mail settings, address books from Eudora, Netscape or MS Exchange Server.

Microsoft Office Outlook

Outlook is a standalone application that is integrated into MS Exchange Server and MS Office. It is integrated with email, calendar, contact management, meeting and event management, resource management and limited personal task management. It’s an ideal client for business users.

We can create inbox rules to organize email messages in a way that we want. As like Outlook Express, here also we can configure more than one email account in the same client.

If Outlook is working with Exchange Server, it offers workgroup information sharing, workflow management, group and meeting schedules, public folders and resource management.

As like Express, Outlook is also designed to support SMTP, POP3 and IMAP protocols to support Exchange Server or any other Messaging Servers that supports MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface). It also supports LDAP, MHTML, NNTP, MIME, S/MIME, vcalendar, vCard, iClendar and full HTML support.

Outlook also provides tool to import mails and features from other clients.