“Campaign for the Ridicule of Awful Programming” – C.R.A.P. – is a new theme I’ll be posting on occasionally. There is enough fodder in my working environment to keep this up for a while.

So, item #1. Microsoft Outlook.

What a pile of crap! (No acronym there.)

I’ve been keeping a text file on my desktop to keep track of the ways in which this software annoys me. Here’s a rundown on why I don’t think Outhouse (an oft bestowed moniker) should be able to call itself an email client.

• It is impossible to properly sort sent emails by addressee because Outlook simply takes the To field and sorts on it without doing any kind of parsing. This means that the sort is by the total addressee list. Looking for emails to a specific person is troublesome if ever they were not the first listed addressee.
• It is not possible to copy items by reference so every email can belong in only ONE folder. Granted Categories arguably take care of this but they are somewhat buried in the inteface. For instance, by default it is not possible to set categories on an open email – you have to select it in the inbox and apply the categories. This is counter-intuitive.
• Outlook can’t thread by reference. Email clients have been doing this almost from the beginning of email. Outlook’s nearest attempt is sorting by subject and it makes a dog’s breakfast of this because inevitably several completely unrelated emails will have the same subject line and they are sorted as a single conversation. Also, such sorting is restricted to a single folder, meaning it is impossible to see an entire conversation to which you contributed.
• Outlook appears to offer a helpful feature for ‘related items’. Open an email that you have replied to and it displays a helpful “You replied on…” message and allows you to click “Find related”. However all this does is perform a search (by subject I suspect) which then brings up all sorts of crap! (See previous point about sorting by subject). Proper threading by reference will address this shortcoming. EDIT: Apparently it does search sent items, I’ve just seen it happen. I know on a previous occasion it didn’t – must be some specific situation.
• Worse than above, the “Find related” search only searches in the same folder as the email you are looking at, meaning it won’t ever find the reply!
• Outlook ignores the RFC standard cut mark. (Two dashes followed by a blank on a line by themselves.)
• When sending within Exchange server, Outlook does not add standard email headers so it is not possible to track delivery timings and/or servers.
• While you are composing a reply to an email, the original email is tagged as having been replied to – it should wait until the reply has been sent. If you delete the reply without sending, the tag remains on the original email which is simply wrong!
• “Sent items” is a special purpose folder but does not have a special icon and sorts alphabetically with other folders making it difficult to locate.
• The editing of HTML emails is so confusing. It allows you to edit HTML structures that exist, but which you cannot newly introduce. Its ‘intelligent’ handling of line feeds and paragraph feeds defies any kind of logical analysis. Perhaps this is a mixed blessing and will dissuade users from using HTML emails.

How’s that for starters? There are free email clients which address all of these issues and there have been for bloody ages.

Get with the program Microsoft!