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Comment by nmstoker | Hacker News Reader

Part of what makes it worse is that many of the pain points are such low hanging fruit.

Being stuck with Outlook due to corporate inertia, most days i run into simple silly things that have been inconvenient for years:

- non standard shortcuts (what modern windows app doesn't use Ctrl F for Find which you would think would let you search an open email for text except it does something else!

- fragmented unintuitive disttribution of functions over tabs

- remarkably unhelpful use of space in the inbox views, such that columns rarely show enough of what you need to see

- annoying assumptions (eg typing a user name into the inbox search defaults to using From: when i frequently need to search with it as To: when I've got folders of email where I'm a co-recipient and need to search who the mail was address to)

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> what modern windows app doesn't use Ctrl F for Find

For this, in Outlook, the explanation is (per Raymond Chen): Bill Gates

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...

Thank you for this bit of history! Looks the benevolent dictator wins again.

Not so benevolent at that time :)

Not so benevolent now: https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/24/waivers-for-me-not-for-th...

Thanks for the informative read. I hadn’t read Cory Doctorow in years but I’ve bookmarked that site.

The Outlook web interface is substantially better than the desktop app at this point for UX

For this reason, I use OWA exclusively

I've been using OWA for a while as my primary work email and it's nice. I probably pin too much shit, but it's overall a good app. And since MS is web tech obsessed, OWA will replace Outlook at some point in the future. Project Monarch / One Outlook is still super half baked and predictably an awful RAM hog compared to the native app, but the writing is on the wall.

I had an issue logging into my work account on the actual outlook application recently so I tried the web version in the interim and it really is a lot better. I am not saying it is a world-beater but when they couldn't figure out my issue, I just let the ticket close.

Still waiting for them to replace the desktop app on macOS with an Electron app. The fact that no mobile/desktop client for Outlook doesn't have the like feature like Outlook Web is frustrating.

Check out the Outlook web interface, it's so much better. They got the navigation delay down to 3-4 seconds! Also they have this safety feature where the delete button doesn't work unless you first archive and un-archive the message. The actual content view gets closer to a third of the screen space too, which is almost enough to load someone's 5 paragraph email signature. Now that's Enterprise Ready!

> - remarkably unhelpful use of space in the inbox views,

I agree with you here. The one time we saw a progression with Google Inbox (which showed cards of events, photo-previews, etc.: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vRLmb7RDrySSxylcMGIoV7dWTK8=...), it was quickly followed by a regression: they closed it, I suspect because the previews were costing them too much bandwidth. The day I see a well-made OSS replica of Google Inbox is the day I go back to doing my own email.

I will say that it sucks just as a much from the developer front. I had to build some email templates for a project a few weeks ago and I was shocked how wired it was compared to regular webdev.

Using a framework is almost a requirement if you don't want to spend all your time on little differences between email clients. The layout is really wired too, with the recommendation to use a ton of nested tables. Not to mention wired bugs like Apple Mail not rendering a background unless you have an image on the page.

The best solution I've found thus far is to use MJML React [1]. This sorta normalizes things and lets you write normal react code that gets transpiled into some abomination that Outlook can read. But it sucks that the only two options that are actually worth a damn seem to be MJML[2] and Foundation[3].

And even with those frameworks it's no silver bullet. I noticed an issue with one provider where they did not respect the `display` css property, making my mobile and desktop layouts both render on the page.

If someone works on these clients I would love to know why there is such difficulty in rendering email?

[1]: https://github.com/wix-incubator/mjml-react

[2]: https://mjml.io/

[3]: https://get.foundation/emails.html

Check thunderbird beta. Is amazing

is it substantially different from the stable build?

“ i frequently need to search with it as To: when I've got folders of email where I'm a co-recipient and need to search who the mail was address to”

That seems like an odd use case that I have never needed to do. Not sure why there would be default support for that when you could just start your search with “to:”

Im not sure I agree: sometimes it's easier to remember the names of your colleagues that were a part of a certain conversation. Especially if the sender is from outside your organisation, say a client, a journalist, a subcontractor.

It's incorrect to assume that a Windows application will open the Find interface via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F. In Microsoft Word that shortcut opens the Navigation interface, and Find is now Advanced Find, which can be opened simply and intuitively via Ctrl+H - Alt+D.

Frequent revalidation training in the leverage of Microsoft products is something that would have helped your person avoid looking unprofessional.

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