Using Outlook as Mail Client On New Pixel XL Or Try Stock/Gmail App

[garak0410]

I'm coming from the Note 5 and then the short lived Note 7. I've used Outlook as my mail, calendar and contacts app as it is my preference but I also signed into my GMAIL account to sync calendar and contacts to the system via the Outlook app. I also used the Outlook calendar widget.

One thing about my past experience with Android is the mess my contacts become. Seems like I go to add contacts, there are way too many places to store them. For example, on my temporary Moto G4 (my Pixel XL arrives today, any time now), if I go to add a contact, it does default to my Google Account but then I also have options to add to my google account via the Outlook app and then also two more options for the Outlook app, which are my main Outlook.com email and my work exchange account.

I want my new Pixel to be nice and neat and don't mind a Google centered ecosystem for calendar and contacts. But I'd like to continue use Outlook but not have GMAIL.

So first up, how is the GMAIL client for syncing Exchange and Outlook.com? And second, can I truly use Outlook App only to sync contacts and calendar? I am not married to the Outlook app, but I do prefer it and looking for informed opinions before my Pixel arrives in a few moments.

 

[shady195]

Your post seems a little all over the place but here we go..

You can use the GMail app to sync your work exchange accounts, as well as your personal outlook accounts. This includes, emails, contacts, calendars etc. Everything will be housed in the single app, and you can swap accounts by hitting the little 3 Bars in the top left, and select your accounts from the top.

You can also use both gmail and outlook separately, and again sync your contacts, calendars and emails, except your email will be housed in the outlook app.

If you don't use gmail for email, and only wish to use outlook. Tell it not to sync any messages or info from you gmail account and dont use it..

Regardless of which solution you choose, it may still show multiple and duplicate contacts, you can select which contacts show by going into the settings in your contacts app and selecting which ones to show.

 

[garak0410]

Your post seems a little all over the place but here we go..

You can use the GMail app to sync your work exchange accounts, as well as your personal outlook accounts. This includes, emails, contacts, calendars etc. Everything will be housed in the single app, and you can swap accounts by hitting the little 3 Bars in the top left, and select your accounts from the top.

You can also use both gmail and outlook separately, and again sync your contacts, calendars and emails, except your email will be housed in the outlook app.

Regardless of which solution you choose, it may still show multiple and duplicate contacts, you can select which contacts show by going into the settings in your contacts app and selecting which ones to show.

Sorry for the all over the place...usually take more time to proof-read but had an internet outage at work, a lot of interruptions and just posted this quickly...guess I'm excited for the FedEx guy to arrive...

I might give STOCK Android a try and move to Outlook later if I miss it...

Thanks for the tips...

 

[shady195]

Sorry for the all over the place...usually take more time to proof-read but had an internet outage at work, a lot of interruptions and just posted this quickly...guess I'm excited for the FedEx guy to arrive...

I might give STOCK Android a try and move to Outlook later if I miss it...

Thanks for the tips...

If you're not u sed to something, its most always going to be a little jarring, but googles apps are pretty solid and i rarely find myself asking "What the hell were they thinking" when it comes to their core apps that have been around forever. However, I absolutely loath the outlook app. Its nice looking ant the features are great, but its never quite worked right to me. Id have emails that would not send for no reason, that I could send from the Inbox app without issues, id get an email and click the notification and be brought to the inbox with that email missing, even after refreshing. I'd need to open up the menu and click inbox again to get it to show up.. Just tons of little quirky things that make it very cumbersome to use.

 

[tk-093]

I use the Outlook app as well for my personal and work email. It does not currently give you the option of just syncing contacts and calendar. It's all or nothing.

I don't know what kind of security policies your work deploys, but putting it in the GMail app might allow them to manage your entire device. They can't do that using just the Outlook app.

 

[garak0410]

If you're not u sed to something, its most always going to be a little jarring, but googles apps are pretty solid and i rarely find myself asking "What the hell were they thinking" when it comes to their core apps that have been around forever. However, I absolutely loath the outlook app. Its nice looking ant the features are great, but its never quite worked right to me. Id have emails that would not send for no reason, that I could send from the Inbox app without issues, id get an email and click the notification and be brought to the inbox with that email missing, even after refreshing. I'd need to open up the menu and click inbox again to get it to show up.. Just tons of little quirky things that make it very cumbersome to use.

I will give "pure" Android a good shot...(sans loading Office apps and other Microsoft centric applications)...I may still use Cortana because I like having its notifications pop up on phone and desktop. If assistant comes to Chrome on the desktop, that would be even better.

 

[garak0410]

I use the Outlook app as well for my personal and work email. It does not currently give you the option of just syncing contacts and calendar. It's all or nothing.

I don't know what kind of security policies your work deploys, but putting it in the GMail app might allow them to manage your entire device. They can't do that using just the Outlook app.

I am IT at work. IT Director and ONLY IT guy. Muahahahaha

 

[Gdwheel]

I personally think Gmail is a very poor email app, particularly if you try to use it for an exchange account. I also tried Outlook, but it was not much better. The IOS version of Outlook is very good, but the Android version is not. The best exchange apps out there, in my opinion, are Nine and Blackberry Hub. Nine is great, but does not handle Gmail accounts. BB Hub handles them both very well, but it either costs $1 a month or you have to put up with ads. You have to sort through what contacts to show and not show with all of them and when saving contacts you have to make sure they are being saved to the right account.

 

[wckesq]

I use Nine for my work exchange account and love it. Syncs to contacts and calendar on phone just fine.

 

[anon(847090)]

to avoid contacts been saved all over the place i recommend using gmail for all you email needs. at the same time disable contacts for the outlook. that way none of the contacts will sync to outlook.

I have my gmail and all contacts are synced to it

 

[anon(596177)]

I personally think Gmail is a very poor email app, particularly if you try to use it for an exchange account. I also tried Outlook, but it was not much better. The IOS version of Outlook is very good, but the Android version is not. The best exchange apps out there, in my opinion, are Nine and Blackberry Hub. Nine is great, but does not handle Gmail accounts. BB Hub handles them both very well, but it either costs $1 a month or you have to put up with ads. You have to sort through what contacts to show and not show with all of them and when saving contacts you have to make sure they are being saved to the right account.

I love the stock experience, but theres some things that stock just cant do right. Exchange email would be one of those things.

Im going to second Gmail being poor for outlook email. Last time I used gmail for outlook there were serious syncing issues... not getting email until 20 or 30 minutes after they were sent even when my sync frequency was set to "push". As I'm an IT guy as well this was very bad for on call support.

If you want a great email app I would suggest "Nine". You have to pay for it but you get two weeks to try it, and its 100% worth the price for work email alone. Gmail isnt going to give you anywhere near the amount of features Nine or even Outlook mobile would.

 

[Momi7]

I like Gmail. I use it for my main email ID. For other emails I use the default mail app. I never used Outlook. So don't know how it works. But there is some good features in every app.

 

[garak0410]

Great tips everyone...gives me a lot to chew on as I still await the FedEx truck with my Pixel XL.

 

[xweb10]

I second "Nine" as an exchange client. Absolutely perfect.

 

[thunderup]

I use Nine for my work exchange account and the Gmail app for Gmail, outlook.com, and one IMAP account. I remember the awful syncing bug with Gmail and outlook email but that's been fixed for a while now. It handles my outlook.com account flawlessly.

 

[maxburn]

I'm going to suggest Fruux for calendar and contacts sync again. It has treated me very well over a variety of devices.

 

[MHBlink8]

I also recommend Nine. I started using it when I had an original Moto X, which was basically stock Android and needed a good exchange client. It's a fantastic app. I continued using it with my GS6 and will be using it on my Pixel XL.

 

[jam4775]

I'm coming from the Note 5 and then the short lived Note 7. I've used Outlook as my mail, calendar and contacts app as it is my preference but I also signed into my GMAIL account to sync calendar and contacts to the system via the Outlook app. I also used the Outlook calendar widget.

One thing about my past experience with Android is the mess my contacts become. Seems like I go to add contacts, there are way too many places to store them. For example, on my temporary Moto G4 (my Pixel XL arrives today, any time now), if I go to add a contact, it does default to my Google Account but then I also have options to add to my google account via the Outlook app and then also two more options for the Outlook app, which are my main Outlook.com email and my work exchange account.

I want my new Pixel to be nice and neat and don't mind a Google centered ecosystem for calendar and contacts. But I'd like to continue use Outlook but not have GMAIL.

So first up, how is the GMAIL client for syncing Exchange and Outlook.com? And second, can I truly use Outlook App only to sync contacts and calendar? I am not married to the Outlook app, but I do prefer it and looking for informed opinions before my Pixel arrives in a few moments.

I very highly recommend the Nine app also!

The Galaxy phones do have a nice email app that supports exchange and when I moved from my N4 to the Nexus 6P last year I had to find something different.I tried several apps including the Outlook app and I found Nine to be the best of them all. Nine is not free but it's worth it... well at least it wasn't free at that time.

There were two big things I didn't like about the Outlook app... 1) I did not like the Focus tab, because I don't need/want Outlook telling me what emails should be of Focus... 2) the Outlook calendar does not integrate with the main phone calendar, this was a automatic disqualification for me. I found an awesome "Month" calendar widget and I need/want both my personal google calendar and exchange calendar aggregated into one main calendar on my phone. Additionally, my wife and I share events to each others google calendars, so there's not arguments about who forgot to remind the other about stuff, and there's no reason why I should have to look at two different calendars to see everything... especially when there's plenty of other exchange mail apps that will support integration with the main phone calendar.

So lets talk about contacts on your phone and integration with different accounts. When you add accounts to your phone, like gmail and exchange (through apps like Nine), these accounts will sync, by default, with the main contacts on your phone. If you don't want these accounts to sync with your main contacts you need to go into the setting of these accounts and disable the contact sync for these accounts. In the main contacts app for your phone you will see every contact for all accounts that are synced. When you add a new contact through this main contact app you will see an option to select which account you want add this new contact to... you need to pay attention to this... this is a real common issue I see people forgetting to do (I work in IT so I see this a lot)... I've seen a lot of people lose contacts because they didn't save their contact to the right account... and worse they didn't save them to any account at all, they just save them to the "Phone" option which just saves the contact to the local phone storage.

The other issue I've seen with contacts is when people get new phones and they have the store they got it from backup and restore their contacts to the new phone... when they do this for some reason it seems to take all the contacts from synced accounts and puts them on the main phone storage as a it's own contact... then you when you add your accounts to the new phone all these contacts sync back down to your phone and then are duplicated with the ones the store tech brought over. So if you are always making sure all of your contacts are saved to either your google or exchange account there is never any reason why a store tech should be backing up and restoring your contacts, because they are synced to the cloud and they'll always be synced back to your phone when you add your accounts back.

 

[MrSlippery519]

Sorry to bring this thread back up, is Nine really worth the $10? Using Gmail for my exchange email is simply not an option as it does not function how I need it to in a business setting. Also tried Outlook and while the app itself is pretty good the fact that you cannot change sync settings and how and when emails push is a deal breaker. Why in the world would Microsoft omit these features, especially for the business aspect, I do not want me work emails pushing immediately after 5PM and or on the weekend.

I actually like HTC's mail app as well (coming from an HTC M9) however you cannot seem to install that on the Pixel for some reason.

 

[shady195]

Sorry to bring this thread back up, is Nine really worth the $10? Using Gmail for my exchange email is simply not an option as it does not function how I need it to in a business setting. Also tried Outlook and while the app itself is pretty good the fact that you cannot change sync settings and how and when emails push is a deal breaker. Why in the world would Microsoft omit these features, especially for the business aspect, I do not want me work emails pushing immediately after 5PM and or on the weekend.

I actually like HTC's mail app as well (coming from an HTC M9) however you cannot seem to install that on the Pixel for some reason.

I was actually about to post in here about Nine.

I did not know about it till I saw it in this thread, yes it is totally worth the 10 bucks. It's a REALLY nice full featured app. Wish I knew about it sooner. It's fast, smooth, looks nice and has tons of features. Feels closer to a mini outlook than Microsofts own app honestly.

So thank you to whomever mentioned nine up top