You may wish to use Mozilla's Thunderbird instead (available at www.mozilla.org). If you also use the "Lightning" add-in, it has most of the features of MS-Outlook, including the Calendar and Todo lists with reminders.
Another free program called Mozbackup will backup all your mail and settings from Thunderbird, and also your settings from Firefox (and I believe other Mozilla programs). If you'd prefer not to have your email out in the cloud, but are able to do your own backups, this solution works very well.