Microsoft Outlook ruins my evening | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Outlook ruins my evening

markshroyer.com

55 pointsNiten22 comments

The key part that's worth knowing about:

> I did some googling and the pieces slowly began falling into place. It turns out there’s a horrific bug in recent Outlook versions’ handling of read receipts: unread messages deleted from an IMAP folder can send a “not read” MDN, even if you’ve explicitly configured Outlook not to do so.

Yikes, that's annoying.

Outlook support for IMAP is extremely poor. It always has been.

I'm truly not one for conspiracy theories, but the fact that IMAP is barely compatible with Outlook certainly can't be hurting Exchange server sales.

Doesn't really surprise me, Exchange and Outlook are pretty much a linked server/client pair - it is hardly surprising that Microsoft pays little attention to minority of people who use one without the other.

It doesn't help that IMAP servers are banned inside Microsoft, so absolutely nobody uses it (you could still connect to external IMAP servers from inside MS, but I don't know anyone who does it)

Outlook just sucks in general. What's most laughable is it's incredibly piss-poor search capabilities.

Try Lotus Notes. Outlook is a shining unicorn in comparison. Urgh.

I agree with this, but I will say that Outlook 2010's search is a vast improvement over the previous versions.

Agreed, they are improving, but frankly they didn't have much of anywhere to go but up.

I find Xobni helps a lot to find lost stuff in Outlook, although the latest update to Xobni seems to have made it a bit of a CPU pig. :-(

Could this be a case for stripping the: X-Confirm-Reading-To: Disposition-Notification-To: or Return-Receipt-To:, lines out of the message header? It seems like this is something a SPAM gateway could handle.

I think it's a good idea to strip read receipt request headers from mailing list messages; they just don't make any sense in that context.

But more generally, MDNs and DSNs do serve a useful purpose when used conscientiously, and I don't think it makes sense to block them for all messages. The real problem isn't the notification requests themselves, but email clients that implement the notifications badly.

49 points? People have been having problems with Outlook for well over a decade. This isn't news, and anyone still using Outlook has Stockholm syndrome (or needs to find a new job).

Isn't that what the Magic Eight-Ball says?

Outlook not so good

>As much as it has improved over the years, I think this proves Outlook 2010 is still entirely untrustworthy as an email client. Avoid using it if at all possible.

Those are some needless harsh words.Outlook shines when matched with Exchange, not IMAP. It's hands down the best email server-client combination in the market.

I believe you are dismissing Chrome+Gmail too fast. With Google Gears, i think it´s as competitive.

not if you have a lot of meetings - gmail's calendar integration just isn't as good.

do you care to elaborate on this statement? what about the integration isn't good when you have "a lot" of meetings? how many is a lot, btw?

OK, good point. Exchange + Outlook is much better for calendar management even when you have few meetings.

Exchange + Outlook are good about combining the information about your schedule based on the meeting requests you've received and not just the items on you calendar. Further, Outlook allows most email operations from your calendar (Reply/Forward/etc), and converts the calendar item into an email when needed so the user experience is much more seamless than using Gmail + Google Calendar.

hey google apps does that, too! :) i can create a calendar event right in an email, or click "create an event" to take me to google calendar. google calendar then populates data from the email and tries to guess the date and time...it actually gets it right sometimes, too. conversely, you can email attendees to a calendar event right from google calendar. not only that, you can select groups of people to email based on their response status. the integration between gmail and google calendar is very tight.

Gears is supported for Chrome and also OS X Snow Leopard, but not for Chrome on Snow Leopard. I'm guessing this is for sensible reasons but it looks kind of stupid.

My company uses IMAP and has some employees who came from jobs with Outlook/Exchange, so we hook them up with Outlook/IMAP in the hopes that they'll be comfortable in that environment. But it's a far cry... it's like moving them to a whole new client anyway.

Having used Outlook with Exchange myself, I agree that it has some wonderful functionality. But if Outlook will do something as sloppy as sending a batch of read receipts when it makes absolutely no sense to do so, that doesn't instill a lot of confidence in the software in general.

Excuse me?

I'm curious to know by what definition Outlook shines when matched with Exchange. At least in all of the installations I've seen, I far prefer using gmail to using Outlook. And that is before you get into the fact that Exchange seems prone to crashing.

It may well be that I'm simply not in the target audience for Outlook. What I want is to get through my email, and then get on with real work. On a typical day I arrive at work with several hundred emails in 50 or so threads to go through. I generally get through it in less than half an hour, and the reading part I can do only hitting the j and space keys. Back when I was forced to use Outlook, it took me much longer to go through much less email.

Actually it seems very likely that I'm not in the target audience. Any time anyone talks about how great Outlook is, one of the first things that comes up is how good the calendar integration is. But I like living on a maker's schedule, not a manager's one. And therefore "good calendar integration" is a solution to a problem that I really don't want to have. And it is one that, if you're a manager, you should be deliberately not inflicting on your developers. (See http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html for more on that.)

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