I upgraded to Windows 10 a month back. Yeah I know it’s late, but hey, it’s difficult to switch in the middle of a large project. Windows 10 is probably the best windows version since XP, at least from a programmer’s point of view. Oh yes, thank you for bringing back the start menu! That Windows 8 Start Page thingy was really annoying and was the single thing which prevented me from upgrading. The other reason being, no DirectX 12 for Windows 7. Having said that, probably the worst thing on Windows 10 is the Mail application. I am using it for a month now and with each passing day, I get annoyed at it a bit more. Yes I know it’s pretty, but it’s poorly designed. I don’t know what the exact reason was, but by the looks of it every attempt was made to simplify the interface. Well, simplicity is fine, but not when it comes at the cost of efficiency or for that matter legibility. A wise man once said, “Things should be made as simple as possible, not not any simpler.”

Some basic UI mistakes seem to have been made in the app. The mail writer can be confusing to understand with little separation between the mail fields and the message. A small line separation in-between would have been great. It’s get slow as turtle – walking on top of a turtle when a email thread gets large. The incoming-outgoing mail list tree is just a mess with little or no options, no way to resize, no way to switch between list, no quick sorting header, and many more things that I just can’t believe were all taken out. This may work for a phone app, but for a desktop, the mail for windows 10 just doesn’t measure up. One more thing — the icons are just ridiculously big and so are the fonts for the UI in general. They may look good on a phone, but are unnecessary for the desktop. All this could have been tolerated had it not been for the ridiculous bugs in the software. Mails not syncing right, sent mails disappearing, poor IMAP syncing, are just some of them. All this from a company that makes Outlook!

So, for me it’s back to Thunderbird, my good old faithful mail app. It’s been there with me ever since I can remember. Old is apparently gold!