Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager provided by Microsoft, which comes along with Office suite. It is one of the widely used email application, which includes calendars, tasks, notes, journals, contacts etc., in its mailbox. In addition, Outlook works with Microsoft Exchange Server or Microsoft SharePoint Server and provides access to Exchange Server mailbox including, emails, contacts, calendars, etc. As it is a part of MS Office suite but one can also use it as a standalone application also. Apart from this, Outlook is mainly used for storing, sending and receiving emails. As everybody knows over the years, Microsoft Outlook keeps on undergoing a number of revision and updates, therefore, there is a wide range of versions of MS Outlook that are used by the users. Thus, in order to have a clear understanding of each and every version of Outlook, we have discussed different versions of Outlook.
Before Outlook 97 there were already some clients named as Outlook packed with Exchange. They all were totally different and have nothing to do with current version scheme. Some of them are; Outlook MS-DOS, Outlook for Windows 3.x and Outlook for MAC. After Microsoft Outlook 2001 for MAC users, there was the wave of email clients that worked with MAC users such as Entourage. After all this, there are different releases of MS Outlook with different versions numbers. Therefore, in the following segment, and overview of different versions of Microsoft Outlook along with their version numbers are discussed.
Outlook 97
Outlook 97 was released on January 16, 1997. It was included in Office 97. This was the first version of the Outlook with version number 8.0. The version numbering of Outlook skipped the number 5 and 6. This was because, after Office 95, all application of Office started to share the same version number.
Outlook 98
This was version 8.5 and was initially available as a free download. It was available with books and magazines to match with the latest internet standard of HTML mail. After that introduces as a free upgrade for Outlook 97. It is a part of the active setup that also installed Internet Explorer 4.0.
It includes all new features including the most prominent feature like adding support to non-Exchange accounts. Its availability was pulled just before the release of Office 2000. Since its release cycle was not a part of the normal release of Office Suite so, Outlook 98 was almost similar to Outlook 97.
MS Outlook 2000
This is Outlook 2000 version number 9.0. It was released on June 27, 1999.It is included in Office 2000 and works with Exchange Server 2000. Outlook version 2000 to 2003 uses Internet Explorer as a rendering engine emails text and photos. It uses the version of IE currently installed on the system.
Microsoft Outlook 2002
It has the version number 10.0. It was introduced on May 31, 2000, as a part of the Office XP suite. Outlook 2002 also uses IE as a rendering engine mainly IE 7. These earlier versions of Outlook namely 2000 to 2003 has little quirks when compared to the inconsistent support of HTML/ CSS in IE. They could display alternative text and animated GIFs but could not display forms, html5 videos, images and symbols in a subject line.
Office Outlook 2003
This is the 11th version of Outlook. It was launched on November 20, 2003. It was mainly included in a standard edition for students and teachers of Office 2003. Moreover, it is bundled with Exchange Server 2003.
Office Outlook 2007
This is the 12th version of Outlook. With this version, Outlook became more professional and used Microsoft Word to render emails. Yes for the first time a Word processor is used to provide emails. This lets to a huge setback for CSS support for email in the word. This also led to some backlash in the email design community. This version of Office Outlook is included in Office 2007.
About Microsoft Outlook 2010
This edition was launched on July 15, 2010, and is the 14th version. This application is included in Office 2010 home, business, professional plus and professional. Since Outlook 2007 is the first released, support for HTML and CSS has remained unchanged despite email communities efforts to fix Outlook. You can view ALT text and symbols in subject lines but you cannot view images, forms, animated GIFs and HTML5 videos.
Microsoft Outlook 2013
Even in Outlook 2013, it provides no support for background images in table cells and DIVs, CSS position or float and text shadow; little support for margin and padding, CSS height and width and there were (where) problems with nested elements background colors. Outlook 2013 was launched on January 29, 2013, and is included in Office 2013.
Outlook 2016
This is the latest and 16th version of Microsoft Outlook. It was released for Mac OS on July 9, 2015 and for Windows platform Outlook 2016 release date was September 22, 2015. It is included in all editions of Office 365. This version adds to the updates made in 2013 and tabular support, attachment from cloud and Exchange level search.
Microsoft Office Outlook is one of the oldest and the most widely used email clients available. Having gone through multiple revisions over the years, there is a wide range of Outlook versions available for both consumers and businesses. It also has its own inbuilt spam filtering. However, recent versions of Outlook (2011- 2013) have comparatively less support for HTML and CSS. As the features and services of MS Outlook vary from versions to versions. Users can use POP3 and IMAP accounts with their Outlook. If the users configure account with POP3 or IMAP configuration then the PST file is created (for Outlook 2010 & below versions). And if the account is configured with IMAP configuration in Outlook 2013 & 2016 then the data file created will be OST. But if the user is configuring Exchange account in Outlook then OST file will be created. These two file formats are proprietary file extensions of Microsoft, but still there are few differences between OST and PST files.