The bat of happiness fluttered its wings and whispered to me that
Graham said on Wednesday, October 11, 2000:
Rev.>> Since Exchange client is a truly appalling piece of sh^H^Hsoftware, it
Rev.>> didn't take long for me to scrub every remnant of Calypso off my hard
Rev.>> drive.
> That's your opinion. There is much in Calypso that I like, and
> somethings I don't. The same is true of The Bat.
Absolutely. It is entirely my opinion. However, since customers'
opinions are possibly of some value to the makers of TB! I'll go on to
mention two things in particular -- sort of a warning: touch this and
I'm history.
The two worst things about Exchange client (5.0, and again only imho)
are that:
(a) it hides things from you and
(b) it f*cks with your email.
For instance (and this is an example of both faults), in Exchange's
editor when you have "Internet formatting" selected, you do *not* see
the message as others will see it. Even as an experienced user, I
too often end up with extra ">"s or missing ">"s.
TB! has just one case where it does this: it fails to display the
extra space after the sigdash. That was, however, the subject of a
disgruntled email from me to tech support. I'm one of the handful of
people in the world to whom appearance of their email is important.
If a message comes from me that looks crummy, it's because I have no
sense of style, but dammit, I made it look as good as I knew how to!
And *I* was in control of how it looked.
Oops -- one more thing where TB! thinks it knows better than you do.
If you format a paragraph in TB! and you've used two spaces after the
period (like most Americans were taught in typing class), TB! turns it
into a single space. Well, I've got news for you, TB! developers --
it shouldn't matter whether I've put one or two or fifteen spaces
after a period. That's none of your business. I wrote it that way,
and you should leave it the hell alone. You do *not* know what your
customers want their email to look like. From a purely software
engineering standpoint, when is it ever good practice to make one
functional element do two things (correct line length and respace
within the line)? I've told tech support about that one too.
So TB! is already treading on dangerous ground, at least for me. But
back to the real villains.
One of the things Exchange hides from you (I suppose it's because the
developers think you're too stupid to understand them) is headers.
In fact, it often just plain destroys headers. That means, if you
sent a message to somebody who had an alias, if you ever want to send
him email again, you're screwed.
And anybody who's had the temerity to send a non-Microsoft-proprietary
attachment format (e.g., JPEG) knows that Exchange client "improves"
your filenames, changing foo.jpg into foo.jpg.jpe. (I understand that
not every copy of Exchange client 5.0 does this, but our tech support
people have been absolutely unable to fix it, so I mark it down as a
characteristic of Exchange client).
Here's the scoop, email client builders: mail is plain old text. Yes,
I know there are some complications in the middle with unicode
character sets and MIME attachments, but there are no trapdoor
functions: text in, text out. People who use email clients are
perfectly capable of generating text all by themselves, and do not
like it when you mess with what they've done.
And btw, once the email comes down the pipe to my machine, it's mine
and don't f*ck with it then, either. I threw Eudora away (after paying
for it!) when I discovered it "improved" the filenames of attached
files (foo.html became foo.htm). Buh-bye, Eudora!
With Calypso, the final straw was a silly thing: they evaluated their
templates at program startup rather than when you composed a message.
Well, that absolutely destroys the ability of Calypso to use
sigmonsters (random signature generators). Buh-bye, Calypso!
But that's really in the realm of extra features. Basically I'm easy
to please. Don't hide stuff from me, and don't mess with my email.
It's astonishing how few email programs can manage those simple
requirements, though.
--
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
crispen at hiwaay dot net
No animals were harmed during the making of this post. Except cats.
--
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