Offspring

photos | 21 Jan 2005 | #

How not to build a mail client

Microsoft Outlook is really bothering me. It's my company mandated communication tool and it sucks.

Reasons why Outlook sucks:

1) It is very hard to change between connected and disconnected states. In fact, Outlook often gets itself into a state where no matter what you do, it ignores your attempts at going online if you've been working offline. Even stopping and restarting it doesn't help. The only recourse is to reboot.

2) When you are offline, client-side filtering rules are *designed* not to run. i.e. you can't filter your mail if you are working offline. This means that it won't filter email that you have manually retrieved - meaning that you have to manually wade thru spam and manually sort the ham into the appropriate folder, or reboot your computer and restart Outlook for filtering to work. See 1) why you can't go online easily.

3) When you are offline, you can't turn vacation on. From 1) you need to reboot, start Outlook, and then say you're going on holiday, then you can shutdown and walk away. Talk about unnecessarily delaying your attempts at going on holiday!

4) The auto-viewing of messages is a great virus trap. No more need be said.

5) Long distance syncing between client and server is incredibly slow. My Exchange server is in Australia and I'm here in the USA, and it can take up to an hour to retrive less than 50 messages every morning. In contrast, I can offline IMAP email between my Australian-based server and my Linux laptop here in the USA in a couple of minutes - and I'm pulling mail from lots of mailing lists. Did I mention that the company network bandwidth is greater than what I use to sync my personal mail? I guess I need to upgrade Exchange / Outlook to remove some of those NOPs.

Outlook is a great example of how not to design a communication tool. The Open-Source community should be thankful that Microsoft have done such a poor job, because they had the chance of doing something great before Evolution raced past it in speed, usability, functionality and security.

tech/windows | 21 Jan 2005 | #