Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a Email client and a PersonalInformationManager.

UnderTheHood? it's a flatfile database that is also a news and Email client.

The scourge of the internet. Microsoft's worst plot yet. PureEvil?.

Really? I thought it was just a very capable e-mail client and PersonalInformationManager. Why is it evil? Do tell!

See MicrosoftSecretFiles, and extract insight from there

No insight there that I can see

'Just the fact that there are secret files is eye opening and problematic'

The only thing 'evil' about Outlook is that it will never allow you to save attachments that are executable files. There is no way to disable this 'feature'

You are incorrect - it can be disabled, see http://support.microsoft.com/?id=290497 (BrokenLink 20070515)If you are running against an Exchange server, your Exchange administrator may have chosen to not allow you to change this, but it is at your administrator's discretion, not Microsoft's.

10/11/04: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=290497 link is dead... wonder why...

Outlook has a way of encoding attachments that is incompatible with just about everything else -- including Lookout Distress (or Outlook Express, for the humorless). It's called TransportNeutralEncodingFormat? (TNEF). It can be switched off, indirectly, but is the source of such dialog as

  "Where the hell is that attachment?"
  "It's there, I tell you"
  "No, it's not.  Send it again."
  "Okay, here it is."
  "Still no attachment!  Get your !@#$%*&! together and send it!"
  ... and so on ...

Outlook also uses IE to render HTML email. Handy for installing black-hat scripts, bypassing such inconveniences as your permission.

I don't use it unless a gun is held to my head.

Recent versions of Outlook (from late 2003 I believe) have stopped using the RFC compliant header fields In-Reply-To and References and replaced them with Thread-Index and Thread-Subject. The problem is that Thread-Index uses what looks like a uuencoded binary hash.

That means that someone using outlook and replying to an thread on a mailing list will send an email with no In-Reply-To and no References header but a microsoft only Thread-Index header. This breaks the threading on every other email client.

This is yet another example of Microsoft saying @^%#@^$@*&^#$*&^@#*&^ the standards, we are the standard.

The company I work at started switching to Outlook/Exchange to improve communication and have a global calendar (for scheduling meetings). Not using Windows, this results in nearly all email threads being broken and a near 100% of top posting with the full text included below.

That lead in turn to "$NAME, handle this" (no mention of the problem) mails from the tech support, with a customer person writing "Tech support, customer XXXX has a problem" (if you are lucky, they add the XXXX, but no summary of the problem) and below the original mail exchange with the customer. Thus one has to read half a dozend mails, backwards, drilling down to try and guess what the real problem is, since nobody ever deigns to tell what the problem exactly is. After all, it's buried somewhere down there.

Worse, you get to read everything past the first or second quoted mail in the famous Outlook/Outlook Express style: Every longer line is wrapped, often multiple times, and the wrapped around part is wrongly attributed due to insufficient quoting. That's an EyeSore?.

I'll not mention things like loss of saved IM messages (which struck for completely unknown reason at least once during the migration), loss of all filtering mechanisms set up, dropping any old mails unsorted into a single mailbox ...

... and now I am looking for a way to fake or re-build In-Reply-To and References headers using maildrop. Lucky me.

I have to use MicrosoftOutlook because that is the policy where I work. Can anyone recommend a wiki tool which will integrate well with it? -- JohnFletcher

What do you mean by "integrate well"? I use an assortment of Wikis here at work, and MicrosoftOutlook is the mandated email (and occasionally calendering) client. I've never felt any need for the one to have anything to do with the other.

I use a range of different wiki type tools for information. I want to be able to have a wiki method of access to the information which is going to build up quickly in my MicrosoftOutlook files.

What a convoluted pile of garbage (as of 2010 version). True, it has a gazillion features, but is that an excuse for being a mess? I suppose until one sees an alternative with as many features, it's hard to say there is truly a better alternative. Outlook's interface is a case of ThereIsMoreThanOneWayToDoIt, but every way sucks.

By default, Outlook 2013 displays a fairly large avatar (facial portrait) in the preview panel, which ends up wasting a lot of screen space because of the way it pushes the rest of the layout down. If there is no avatar associated with a user, it's just a big grey dummy generic Fischer-Price-toy-like filler. There is a way to turn it off, but it's not obvious. (Ideally you'd be able to right-click on the avatar, and select Properties to do it. But that's too logical for Microsoft. They had to put the option switch in a secret cave in Timbuktu.)

CategoryEvil CategoryMicrosoft