Comments on: Microsoft Outlook 2007 really hates commas

By: Sugar

Sugar — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 18:51:07 +0000

@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.

By: KCorax

KCorax — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:15:41 +0000

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.

By: Sugar

Sugar — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 11:54:31 +0000

@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.

By: KCorax

KCorax — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 11:33:56 +0000

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.