Outlook Express was that go-to email client for a lot of people in the late '90s and early 2000s—came bundled with Internet Explorer starting in 1996, and if you had Windows 98 or XP, you probably used it without thinking twice. It wasn’t flashy, but it got the job done: checking emails, newsgroups, basic contact management. Microsoft kept tweaking it—version 5 hit with IE5 in 1999, then version 6 dropped with XP in 2001, which ended up being the final version. It was lightweight, super simple, and integrated tightly with Windows, but eventually got phased out for Windows Mail and later Outlook. No cloud, no bells and whistles—just old-school email the way we used to do it.