I've retired my old 2008 Mac Pro and replaced it with a Windows 10 machine that I built. I am still using iCloud services on my MBP and iPhone (mainly mail, contacts, calendar, reminders), so I decided to install iCloud for Windows.
Oh man what a piece of crap that software is.
Outlook creates its own folder to store deleted mail, which is different from the default folder that iCloud uses. So if I want to empty out deleted mail, I need to delete from 2 places.
Outlook butchers scheduled recurring reminders set to go off at a specific time of day. It works fine for the first day, but then on the next day, the reminder goes off at midnight.
Notes is probably the biggest headache. They appear in a separate folder in my e-mail account (huh?), not in the Notes section of Outlook. And I don't see any recent notes. The latest one I see is from September 2016. I believe I upgraded to the "new" notes at that time, so maybe that's why I don't see anything recent? Still, seems pretty broken.
I know this seems like more of a rant, but I was also wondering if anyone had any tips to make this work any better. I also tested out the built in apps from Windows 10, but the mail app seems to have the same behavior described above, and there doesn't seem to be an app that handles iCloud reminders or notes.
As a Windows 10 and iPhone user, I feel your pain. iCloud for Windows sucks. The only thing I use iCloud for Windows for is syncing bookmarks between Mobile Safari and Firefox on my PC.
I don't use iCloud mail, so can't help you there
For reminders, I use Appigo Todo. It's one of the few task scheduler programs that has a program you can run on your PC that keeps Outlook tasks synchronized with the Todo app on your iPhone. I think they also have a Mac version.
As you suspected, the new version of Notes doesn't sync with Outlook. Because of this, I totally gave up on the built-in Notes app. I've switched over to MS One Note in MS Office 365, in conjunction with the One Note app for the iPhone. If you don't have MS Office, I'm pretty sure there's a free stand-alone version you can download. It may even be a part of Windows 10.
I think there are some third party apps that run on the PC for Outlook that might solve some of your problems. I looked at one a few years ago that I thought worked pretty well. (I can't, for the life of me, remember its name.) As I recall, I chose not to buy it because I thought it was overpriced. There is a big marketplace of third party Outlook apps, but, because they are oriented toward business users, tend to be surprisingly expensive.
