From: David Cantrell Date: 08:57 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Microsoft Lookout Lookout, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. On second thoughts, let me not. Something so predictable would bore you all to tears. Let me just grumble about one particular hateful feature. When you select a message, and view it and read it *it is not marked as having been read*. Messages are only marked as having been read when you move to another message.
From: Jonathan Stowe Date: 10:32 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 08:57, David Cantrell wrote: > > When you select a message, and view it and read it *it is not marked as > having been read*. Messages are only marked as having been read when > you move to another message. Or when you click on the client area of the preview pane, which is even sillier. /J\
From: Ben Collver Date: 14:44 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 08:57:58AM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: > When you select a message, and view it and read it *it is not marked as > having been read*. Messages are only marked as having been read when > you move to another message. Maybe it is because you didn't view it, but you pre-viewed it in the pre-view pane. But the pre-view behavior is not consistent. To view a message you can double-click on that message. Not as friendly, but should be more consistent.
From: John Sinteur Date: 14:48 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On 19-mei-04, at 15:44, Ben Collver wrote: > Maybe it is because you didn't view it, but you pre-viewed it in the > pre-view pane. I am suddenly reminded of a Dilbert cartoon, were Dilbert didn't want to jump into a meeting without having a pre-meeting about it... with the end-result being the entire dept in a meeting room... -John
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 15:30 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout I'm surprised by the implication that there's anyone contributing to this site that's so cavalier about security as to voluntarily use Microsoft Outlook (the virus writer's best friend).
From: Ben Collver Date: 15:36 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 09:30:51AM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote: > I'm surprised by the implication that there's anyone contributing > to this site that's so cavalier about security as to voluntarily > use Microsoft Outlook (the virus writer's best friend). I didn't volunteer, I was drafted. :) Ben
From: David Cantrell Date: 15:56 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 09:30:51AM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote: > I'm surprised by the implication that there's anyone contributing > to this site that's so cavalier about security as to voluntarily > use Microsoft Outlook (the virus writer's best friend). Who said anything about voluntarily? If my employer wants me to use shit software and consequently be less productive than I could be, that's their lookout (boom boom!) And anyway, the recent email worms all relied on the stupid user to open attachments, often jumping through a million hoops on the way, to replicate. They didn't use holes in the software. But hating users is the topic of other places.
From: David Cantrell Date: 15:48 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 06:44:06AM -0700, Ben Collver wrote: > On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 08:57:58AM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: > > When you select a message, and view it and read it *it is not marked as > > having been read*. Messages are only marked as having been read when > > you move to another message. > Maybe it is because you didn't view it, but you pre-viewed it in the > pre-view pane. No, I viewed it. With my eyes. If viewing the message in one type of window makes stuff behave differently to viewing it in another, that is just another thing to Hate.
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 15:57 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On Wed, 19 May 2004, David Cantrell wrote: > No, I viewed it. With my eyes. If viewing the message in one type of > window makes stuff behave differently to viewing it in another, that is > just another thing to Hate. One of my clients uses some kind of retarded emailed time tracking application -- definitely something you could only code in the incestuous MS world. They email you a document (or an app? I'm not even sure) as an attachment every week, and you open it, fill it out, and submit it. The catch is that you can't click on the little paper clip in the corner of Lookout; you have to double click the email to open it, and then you have to double click the attachment to open it. No, you can't save the attachment to disk. If you do anything else, it will look exactly like it's working fine, except that your attempt to submit will result in an email saying that your attempt failed. Now you have to retype everything, because there's no state. And, of course, once you've successfully submitted the document, it's now stored in some central (probably MSAccess) database, so you can't modify it; you have to request a new timesheet (and once you've requested it you don't get notified that the request was accepted, you just start getting emails warning you that your timesheet is late) and retype everything. But no, you don't get to look at what you typed before; you have to have it all stored elsewhere. I haven't bothered to submit that one before because 1) WTF do we expect from crap like that? and 2) I'm not sure that actually qualifies as software. It's scarily stupid, though, and even though everyone at the company knows how stupid it is, the email you get with your timesheet doesn't mention any of the idiocy, so first-time users never get their timesheets to work. *shudder*
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 15:59 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On Wed, 19 May 2004 15:48:49 +0100, David Cantrell wrote > No, I viewed it. With my eyes. If viewing the message in one type > of window makes stuff behave differently to viewing it in another, > that is just another thing to Hate. Part of the problem is with the security bugs involved with the preview pane. IIRC, infected e-mails can be activated just by being read in the preview pane, and are not just activated when fully-opened for read. Part of the behavior you're seeing may be related to how the Outlook "engine" may now display the message in the preview pane to prevent an infected payload's activation. Regardless, it's a good reason for more hate. -Jon -- Jonathan Katz, J. Random Guy.
From: Foofy Date: 19:00 on 19 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On Wed, 19 May 2004 08:57:58 +0100, David Cantrell <david@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xx> wrote: > Lookout, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. While we're all hating Outlook (which I don't use anymore, thank god) I'd just like to mention one of my other major Outlook hates: After restoring my backed up Outlook folders to a new Outlook install, it no longer recognized my Contacts folder as my "address book." When I clicked on the little "To" button in a new email, it just gave an error about the address book and showed no contacts. But of course, Outlook could start to autocomplete the addresses of people I emailed 8 months ago...
From: Phil Pennock Date: 14:02 on 20 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout </lurk> On 2004-05-19 at 08:57 +0100, David Cantrell wrote: [ OE ] > When you select a message, and view it and read it *it is not marked as > having been read*. Messages are only marked as having been read when > you move to another message. I'm still working on persuading my fiancee to switch from OE. She's used to it and reluctant to switch. That's my excuse for knowing this next fact. The mail in the preview pane will be marked as read automatically. After ten seconds. I'm not aware of a way to change that timeout. It says something about how bad the UI is that it's assumed it takes 10 seconds to read any email. The idea of a UI which changes the state of anything except itself after some arbitrary timeout is just hateful. On the bright side, after she pointed out that it would be marked read after ten seconds and I starting dry sobs punctuated by arghs and waving of clenched fists at the screen, I was consoled and hugged close. Made it worthwhile, in a way. -Phil
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 14:11 on 20 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On Thu, 20 May 2004 15:02:08 +0200, Phil Pennock <phil.pennock@xxxxxxx.xxx> wrote: > I'm still working on persuading my fiancee to switch from OE. She's > used to it and reluctant to switch. That's my excuse for knowing this > next fact. > > The mail in the preview pane will be marked as read automatically. > After ten seconds. > > I'm not aware of a way to change that timeout. It says something about > how bad the UI is that it's assumed it takes 10 seconds to read any > email. Eh? I definitely remember this being an easily-configurable value in OE as far back as '98. *goes and looks* Yep, and it still is on the latest one. First thing on the "Read" tab in Options. -- Yoz
From: Phil Pennock Date: 15:36 on 20 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On 2004-05-20 at 14:11 +0100, Yoz Grahame wrote: [ auto mark-read after time ] > Eh? I definitely remember this being an easily-configurable value in > OE as far back as '98. > *goes and looks* > Yep, and it still is on the latest one. First thing on the "Read" tab > in Options. So it is. Slightly less hateful -- it can be disabled. Live and learn. Anyone have recommendations for the least hateful MUA for Win32 platforms, for general users? No need for office tools, just mail. What I've seen is pushing me towards Pegasus. Least hateful. Mutt's introductory quote is half-right. -Phil
From: Philip Newton Date: 09:31 on 21 May 2004 Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout On 20 May 2004 at 16:36, Phil Pennock wrote: > Anyone have recommendations for the least hateful MUA for Win32 > platforms, for general users? No need for office tools, just mail. > What I've seen is pushing me towards Pegasus. If you don't mind living with "all the world uses iso-8859-1", perhaps. I've been using Pegasus for years, and my pet hate is that it *still* can't cope with character sets other than iso-8859-1. Specifically, utf-8 email, which isn't all that uncommon, gets mangled if it includes non-ASCII characters such as, say, German umlauts. Which is not too handy if you live in Germany. 'Twould be nice to handle other 8-bit charsets such as iso-8859-2 as well (such as the way Forte Agent does). Look. If I'm on Windows 98 (as I was for quite a while), I can understand that it may be a bit more difficult to display characters that aren't in the current codepage. But it shouldn't require Captain Nuclear to at least display utf-8 encoded mails that only contain characters from the current codepage? And now that I'm on Windows XP, it should be able to handle Unicode fairly easily, wouldn't you think? But perhaps I've just not figured out how it works... /me half-remembers an RFC or something issued by some email consortium thing that said, essentially, "All email programs written or updated after the year X that don't support utf-8 can be considered broken", where X was on the order of 2000, I think. Cheers, Philip
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