Labs

Outlook 2003 is the most widely used email program for business users, due in no small part to the fact that it comes bundled with Microsoft's Office suite. But it's also available as a standalone product for a whopping £75. So what do you get for all that money?

Outlook isn't just an email program. It includes a calendar/planner and an extremely comprehensive contacts manager that enables you to keep names, telephone numbers, email addresses and personal notes on friends and business contacts in one place. This information can also be shared with colleagues who are using Outlook over an Exchange server, which you can't do with Outlook Express 6. Also exclusive to Outlook are a task list with pop-up reminders and a fairly basic Notes function.

Outlook's mail component is straightforward. It allows you to download email to your PC from a variety of mail servers, including Microsoft Exchange, IMAP and POP3. Setting up an account is easy, all the more so because Outlook is so widely used. Webmail services such as Google's Gmail, which allow users to gain access to their webmail via POP3, often provide an automatic configuration tool that fills in the necessary POP3 and SMTP details for you.

Mail is displayed in a tree of folders, with additional panes to show folder contents and preview messages. The former can be

Unlike in previous versions of Outlook, the message preview pane is disabled by default. This is a useful security measure, as the pane was previously a means by which email worms were spread, running malicious scripts embedded in HTML messages automatically.

Spam filtering is perhaps the biggest change from the previous version of Outlook. In theory, this should be part of the justification for choosing it over the free Outlook Express. In fact, it's pretty basic. You can choose to receive mail only from known addresses and block specific senders. This blunt approach would have been handy for allowing kids safe, restricted access to email, but Outlook's spam-filtering controls are applied across the board, rather than on an account-by-account basis.

Two further options - Low and High filtering - use Microsoft's SmartScreen technology to mark mail as spam. In part, this works on filter lists, which can be updated at Microsoft's website. It also determines whether or not a message is spam by examining its content. Suspicious messages are converted into plain text and links are disabled, to curb the threat of phishing scams. In practice, the High setting trapped a number of false positives - mass mails that we'd wanted to receive. The Low setting weeded out the most obvious spam, but far less effectively than the 95 per cent or so we'd achieved using McAfee SpamKiller.

Benefits such as diary and task sharing, which Outlook offers over its cut-down sibling, are really of use only to businesses, and they require Microsoft's pricy Exchange server software. Others, such as task lists, reminders and an automatic 'out of office' reply, would be handy for home users, too. But you're paying a hefty premium for the privilege.