Let’s face it – software can be a really annoying thing sometimes.
Things like extraneous dialog boxes, “tips of the day”, ambiguous error messages and clippers ticking on your screen happen daily. But sometimes, sometimes, you get a stupid behaviour from a hugely popular application and you want to smash your head on the screen till it bleeds to death – two times.
While at work, I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 for managing company e-mail. I have to say, in terms of memory hogs, this thing is a winner! I cannot possibly imagine why it hangs every time with a very moderately-sized inbox, 2Gb of RAM and a 3Ghz processor, but it does.
After waiting the full 30-40 seconds for it to load, I decide to create a filter for the e-mails received by the new guy that was recently hired. Oh, and another friend that popped in my mind, a common filter for the two, named “New guys”. I enter their e-mail addresses in the appropriate field…
Ok, all fine and dandy so far. Till this:
Uhm, excuse me? Why should I, the almighty (and fairly bored) user, HAVE to go back and replace my commas with semicolons? Why? Because the programmers were too lazy to implement some kind of string replace function to do the dirty work?
Ok, help me, am I missing something with this? Is this done on purpose? I may be exaggerating, but this is one of the stupidest things software ever made me do.
4 comments on this post
KCorax #1
19.Nov.07
Normally active directory stores names as ‘, ‘ and that’s how developers and users look up for ‘Atzitzikaki, Sugarenia’ when accessing the AD. You could write for example: “sugabage@sugarenia.com; Atzitzikaki, Sugarenia” for two users and Outlook would treat them as two different contacts. However this flexibility means that Outlook needs to know how you group these, otherwise you would end up with more than two contacts and possible disambiguations. In this case sugabage is a one result lookup, Atzitzikaki another, and you would get a question asking you which sugarenia you mean of all the known ones. Yeah I know it’s complicated, but it’s also not a string replacement fix.
As for the speed, when outlook 07 shipped it was a single threaded application. Well not really, but it had many thread locks which made it behave like such. This fix (which is not in autoupdate) really changes things: http://rurl.org/cf6 . Also consider moving things to archive. They are still indexed for search (manual and search folders). The goal is to keep your main pst file under 2 gigs.
Sugar #2
19.Nov.07
@KCorax: Ok, I was exaggerating there with the “too lazy” bit, but seriously, such a behaviour should not be left in the sense of the user.
I want my mail program to handle everything I throw at it, and the case above, too simple web addresses separated by comma, is one of the most common cases of enumerating web addresses. Why should I care that the app would see lala as a contact name?
The whole thing creates confusion, I know I would never use the ContactSurname, ContactName scheme in there because I don’t know how in god’s name this would be parsed. This behaviour does not help things a lot, imho.
As for my .pst file, the whole thing, including Spam, is a ‘mere’ 240MB.
KCorax #3
19.Nov.07
Personally I fully agree, but for the sake of legacy this can’t be fixed. Consider this: You mail a list with n people and look at a list of name-surname. Each time the sw examines if it should append a word and look up for it, this leads to 2^n (Worst case after simplification) lookups.
Your mailbox is petty-small. I pack 12 GBs and another 7 in archive and I’m fast. I can’t guess what’s wrong. If you don’t need to hook up to an exchange server and need it just for offline hotmail, consider the windows live mail which doesn’t try to accomodate enterprise needs in the user experience.
Sugar #4
19.Nov.07
@KCorax: Outlook mainly locks up because of the Exchange server hoolabaloo, I guess. One thing they got right though, Outlook can be a real productivity boost, given the right circumstances.