I love the Bat and hate Outlook, but I've discovered a couple of things that make Outlook indispensible over the Bat.
1/
If you have an Access database of customers, Outlook can 'share' the database columns in its own 'contacts' fields. This means if you edit the Access database, your Outlook contacts get updated automatically, and if you edit the Outlook contact, the database gets updated automatically! That really is a stroke of genius in a business environment.
2/
I tried imap for the first time last night. For hours I struggled with the Bat trying to get imap to work. I eventually loaded Outlook and set-up an imap account; it worked flawlessly and completely automatically.
With the Bat, I kept having to manually refresh, syncronise and purge the folders. Even doing this, the Bat got out of sync very quickly, meaning messages left on the server had to be deleted by ftp.
Can anyone say anything at all to keep me from having to use Outlook? I really don't want to, but these two features could become integral to the way I use email.