Comments on: Microsoft’s Handling of E-mail So Poor That It Might Get Dumped; Microsoft’s VLSC Broken for Months http://techrights.org/2010/04/12/failure-in-customers-e-mail/ Free Software Sentry – watching and reporting maneuvers of those threatened by software freedom Fri, 25 Nov 2016 09:41:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.14 By: Dr. Roy Schestowitz http://techrights.org/2010/04/12/failure-in-customers-e-mail/comment-page-1/#comment-89493 Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:16:47 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/?p=29834#comment-89493

It is still based on an all in one pst database file, so performance is slow at best and it will still blow up when it gets to a file size greater than Microsoft’s primitive and flaky file systems allow.

Last week I spoke to a friend whose Outlook mailbox got ‘nuked’ when he upgraded Office. He needed to restore from backup.

]]> By: your_friend http://techrights.org/2010/04/12/failure-in-customers-e-mail/comment-page-1/#comment-89492 Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:09:08 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/?p=29834#comment-89492 Hotmail is more than a nest of spam, it is a Microsoft case study in how BSD is cheaper and more reliable than Microsoft’s “dog food” even when Microsoft software costs nothing to deploy. Microsoft, supposedly, was never able to move all of Hotmail’s services off BSD despite wasting years and billions of dollars. Besides the reliability problems of using Microsoft software, Microsoft also intentionally downgraded the interface for non Microsoft users and few people liked even the “better” version shown to Microsoft users so the service continues to lose users. Microsoft stagnated and ruined Hotmail while Gmail was busy offering users excellent threading, pop and imap download interfaces so that any client could be used, contact managment, more space and overall performance.

Microsoft is doing similar things to Yahoo’s web mail right now. They have made interface changes that users hate and are loading it with even more advertisements. I must assume that the interface changes are also designed to discriminate against people who use anything but Microsoft software but Yahoo’s webmail has always been feature poor next to Gmail.

For about a year, I’ve been forced to use Outlook at work and can say that it is the worst email client available. It does not thread well, so users are forced to look at things in chronological order. It is still based on an all in one pst database file, so performance is slow at best and it will still blow up when it gets to a file size greater than Microsoft’s primitive and flaky file systems allow. Contact auto complete is based only on email spelling, not names, so you have to type your contact’s leet aol name for the service to grab it. “Fred Baker” for example does not complete on “Ba…” or “Fr…”, only on whatever the email address is, which might be something silly like “mountaingoat@msn.com” IIS lookups are also lacking, by only being able to look things up by last name. Worst of all, Outlook wants to use other pathetically insecure Microsoft programs like IE and Word and so pulls problems from a 30 year old code base that was never intended for networking into email.

Free software users easily and quickly forget how limiting and sorry Microsoft software really is. It is shocking how stagnant the company is. The problems cited more than ten years ago for the Hotmail migration are still valid and Microsoft has made things worse by concentrating on dirty tricks instead of improving their software.

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