Well I managed once to get imap set on my dads via the control panel which touchwood has been the same since office 95.
However after I did all the crazy stuff that was setting up and making sure things were subscribed via imap, the only thing I can't seem to get used to are the message tree view and navigating from folder to folder I do not know how to do this.
If you are happy with ribbons then you can use it.
However to be frank there are still programs like thunderbird which has a lot less clutter.