I am not ashamed to admit that I replaced my Microsoft Office 2007 suite with Office 2010 Beta, just so that I could upgrade to the sexy new Outlook 2010. And it is indeed quite sexy… when it works.
From what I’ve experienced so far, this suite is definitely a bit unstable. Straight out of the package, everything installed fine. But upon running Outlook for the first time, it crashed. The second time, it opened up fine, and I was able to customize options, add accounts, send/receive emails, etc. But on the third loading of the program, it never opened up, and doing a forceful shutdown of the program resulted in losing my just-defined settings, accounts, my life insurance quote and other important emails, etc. (By the way, this happened on two computers: my desktop PC, which is running Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit), and my laptop, which is running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit).
Since then I’ve had an issue where sending & receiving would never take place; after running through a variety of settings, removing all configured Gmail accounts, and even uninstalling the program; I found that the fix was to be had simply by removing all email accounts and adding them back. So let me repeat, for search engine purposes: if you cannot send & receive email in Outlook 2010, or if email send & receive in Outlook 2010 hangs forever, or refuses to process, try removing all of your email accounts and adding them back, one by one.
The good: Outlook 2010 is definitely sexy. And fast. I love that you can easily add one email account after another. Improvements have been made to rules, alerts, and the display options for every folder.
Will I continue using Outlook 2010? Most definitely. Will I encounter additional problems along the way? Probably, but that’s why I have webmail access to all of my email accounts if all else fails.