You are making a lot of sense Adam. -----Original Message----- From: Adam Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 11:06 PM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: MS Outlook 2000/2002
All, Outlook is so useless. I am finding this more and more with many Microsoft written programs these days that although they may be a market leader and have a good interface for their software, the core features are barely up to scratch. Take message rules. How many people do you know who have message rules set up? Heaps. I have about 15 on my own system. One is set up to parse the headers of incoming emails for "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" so that emails to this list sort into the correct folder. Another one is for a Linux list, a BSD list and a whole host of newsletters etc. There are times where I load up Outlook, it downloads mail and sorts it into the correct headers. Message Rules Annoyance #1 -- Why does Outlook need to have every single email come into the Inbox *before* its headers get parsed? It's extremely aggrovating to sit on my Inbox watching email download, move to my Inbox, get parsed and then sort to the correct box. Why? Because every time an email comes through, the contents of my inbox moves down one row and then back up one row. When you've got multiple emails coming in being sorted all the time, you keep mis-clicking things. "Why don't you wait for it to finish, then read your email?" .. Err.. Why should I! Message Rules Annoyance #2 -- Many, MANY times I load Outlook and it begins to download email, appears to parse the headers and then leaves the message in the Inbox! There have been countless times that I have loaded Outlook only to find that its left mail there that should have been sorted correctly. So I trott off to the Message Rules options to manually run the sort on the Inbox. When I get there, I have to click *EVERY* rule manually, because there's no "Select All" button. How annoying! When I run it, it works!! NEXT! Outlook takes ages to load. I have approximately 800Mb worth of email. I keep it all, because I am a hoarder. I keep mailing list archives going back as far as to the date I joined, and I used to even file my SPAM mail in a folder called "SPAM". I deleted nothing. These days I keep everything but the spam and newslettery things that I receive that I don't want to read. So due to the fact that I'm on three high-volume mailing lists, (NT2000/freebsd-questions/LinuxSA), I get quite a bit of mail every day. If I reboot, Outlook loads in about 60 seconds. It often completely freezes my computer until it has loaded. If I close Outlook and reload, its fast. Caching is great! But why does it take so long to load in the first place? I am not asking Outlook to load all of my mail before I read it, I just want to get into the program and get on with my work. I think it could have been done better. One big file for each of my mail folders seems like a massive great mistake... NEXT! The Contacts book. What a load of sh...amefulness. Let's say I have my main contacts book, and within that are three sub-groups I have created.. "Employees," "Clients" and "Suppliers". In my Employees group I have heeeeeeeeaps of email addresses because I make so much money I need heaps and heaps of employees. Now, I need to write an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I stoke up the editor by pressing the "New" button. OK. Click the "To..." button and there are no addresses listed in the address list! Why? Because Outlook is trying to read addresses from somewhere else *OTHER* than its Address Book! Dumb! The only way to send him an email without knowing his address is to go to his contact information, right click and click "Send Message to Contact". Duh. Of course you should. I mean the "To..." button is there for ordering pizza, right? So instead of doing that you decide to put in his email address manually. So you type in the following into the 'To' field: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and click Send. OOPS!! You typed ".co" instead of ".com". Too late! The email has gone. Oh well, go into the sent items box, copy the text out of the email (because there's no way to just re-send a message thats already be sent, no, who'd want to ever do that??).. Anyway, so you compose a new email and put in his email address correctly, and paste the text back into the email and press send. It goes through. *PHEW*. Two days later we need to send an email to Tom Cruise again. We stoke up Outlook and start typing his email address, and Outlook prompts us because it's remembered him from last time! How clever, Outlook!! So you look at the list of matches and it shows you two of them: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Now if we press the TAB key, it will select the first match, which is wrong. So every time we want to quickly send an email to Tom Cruise, we need to press Down--Enter. This is going to get annoying because I intend to be conversing with Tom Cruise quite a bit. I might even give up a lamb roast dinner for it. OK So this is easy. Let's just edit this list of addresses that Outlook's cached and remove the redundant entry. Where do you go to do that? Oh wait, you can't!! Hooray! NEXT! One day, we've composed an email and its sitting in the "Outbox" which means its waiting to be sent, but hasn't left the email client yet. Cool. You just want to double check that email before it goes out, so you double click on it to load it up and read it. It's all good. Then you press "Send/Recieve" and the email stays in the Outbox. You click it again and it stays there. "What the fork?," you say. You ring up IT support and they tell you that the email won't go out anymore because you've loaded it up while its in the Outbox. You need to drag the email into your 'Drafts' folder, then re-send it. If you look at it now, its in italics. After you double click to load it during its stay in the Outbox, you make it proper-case. That means it won't leave anymore. What kind of an idiot wouldn't realize that? I mean, REALLY! NEXT! "Outlook has blocked access to the attached attachments: IMPORTANT-VIRUS-FREE-EXECUTABLE.EXE" Well that's all well and good, because I know that my mate at the computer next to me just emailed me this file. But now I can't load it because Outlook won't let me. You see Outlook doesn't realize that I'm an intelligent enough person to make my own decisions when it comes to file attachments. Had it prompted me on installation to enable or disable these "security" precautions, then maybe I'd be a bit more happy. Sure I can disable them in the registry, but who wants to do that all the time? Give me the good old outlook.conf file. And we all know the real reason Outlook blocks these types of files is because it is still coded to run attachments that you haven't told it to. Like loading of HTML pages in an email. This is a work around to make Outlook look like its helping you when in fact it's only stopping itself from causing more problems on your system. Then again if you're idiotic enough to load a .VBS file that was sent to you by [EMAIL PROTECTED] then its your own fault, but then again, who designs an Operating System security system that allows an executed program to have the identical level of security to the person who ran it? Err.. NEXT! When you create an email account, why do you have to click the "More Settings" button to give it a non auto-generated name? Aaaarrrgh!! NEXT! People send you emails in HTML/Rich Text format all the time. Sure I dont mind reading them in that format, but I'd never send ANYONE an email in RTF or HTML format. Yucko! When I click reply to an RTF email, why does it reply in Rich Text mode? I have configured my Outlook to generate emails in Text only!! Oh, thats right.. G-E-N-E-R-A-T-E emails. Not reply to emails in Text Mode. Generate only. So all replies to emails go back in the format they started in. Riiiight. NEXT! The blue quote line. What a piece of garbage that is. When someone sends me an email I like to cut it up and reply to parts of it by quoting one or two lines that they had said, then responding to that. For example: ----------------- > Hello! Hey, how are ya? Cya later! ----------------- If they send that message in RTF or HTML, you reply in RTF or HTML. So Outlook auto-quotes their original message with a solid blue line down the left of it. That means you are forced to reply at the top of the email. Who replies like that? It's inconsistent, gross, and hard to follow. So if you go down and decide to break up the message a bit, you can't!! All you can do is modify the original message. But wait!! There's one way around it! Change the current format of your email from HTML into text! YESSSS that ought to do it!! "Format Menu, Plain Text". Cool. It says you'll lose your formatting, but that's what we want. So you click OK, and Outlook takes away the blue line, and doesn't prefix the original message with those lovely '>' characters. So you've got to do it manually!!!!!!!!!!! NEXT! Doing it manually will just cause Outlook to have a gross amount of characters per line, which means that any generic email clients will see it quote properly the first time, then if that original quote makes it through to a second reply, it will come out looking something like this: > This is a line of text that Outlook has played around with and > made really > dumb. So dumb in fact that it drops words so that they 'fit' > when in > actual fact they just make things look gross. Hard to read, > hard to > quote with too! NEXT! "Extra line breaks were removed in this message. To restore, click here." This is a little yellow line on the status bar in the middle between your email and your preview pane. If you actually *RESTORE* the line breaks, the email usually looks right. Amazing! NEXT! Quoting with UNC pathnames. If an originating email has a line beginning with a backslash, ie a \ character, it comes out as a link in Outlook, (underlined blue). If you then go and hit reply and reply in text mode, Outlook stops quoting the > character including and after that line. Very very wrong! I think I've had enough... I need a coffee... Maybe next week I'll bring you another Microsoft product review :-) My rating: 2/10 1 point for Looks 1 point for Interface 8 points lost for annoyances. -- No bonus points for you, Outlook! Adam Smith IT Officer SAGE Automation Ltd [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sageautomation.com Phone: (08) 8276 0703 Fax: (08) 8276 0799 Mobile: 0414 895 273 ԿԬ ************** Email Confidentiality Clause ************** The information contained within this email and its attachments is intended for the named recipients only. It may contain privileged and confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not copy, distribute or take any action in reliance on it. 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