[sdiy] sammpa

[mcb, inc.]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Scott wrote:

> Sorry for the OT, but could someone please tell me something that
> outlook does not do, that some other email/collaboration system do do?
> I run a network technology consulting company, and spend a very large
> amount of time researching mail systems for clients.  I've never found a
> system that does as much as Exchange server and MS Outlook.

Well, this is a discussion for another list.  But a quick reply
then all followups in private or elsewhere...

You've confused quantity ("does as much") with quality ("does well"
or "does correctly").  And this is a recurring problem in
environments where checklists are used to evaluate software and
not an actual in-depth evaluation of what the software means
to users who have to work with it.  Composition's lack of
configurability has given us top-posting disease.  Beyond the
newsgroup/forum rants, it means I get *long* chains of
mindlessly aggregated babble with no proximity correlations
between antecedents and consequents.  A variation on the
"information is not data" problem.  People who use Outlook dump
data in your lap.  People who redact their posts with real
tools give you information.  The moronic data model design of
the persistent calendaring data which resulted in one of the
dumbest field upgrade procedures ever for the 2k7 timezone
changes.  (I.e. "If you really want to fix the data correctly,
have each of your users run this on their personal machines.")
And there is plenty more wrong with the replication model.
Correct handling of digest formats including correct reply
support (I don't think they have this yet, could be wrong).
Idiotic out-of-the-box defaults for NNTP reading that expire
posts.  Every O/OE user who starts reading newsgroups wonders
why old posts disappear and has to be shown where to fix the
configuration.

*pant* *gasp*  I'm done for the moment.  That felt good.  But
these *are* feature-rich piles of crap designed to sell to the
checklist crowd.  They make webmail look good.

That said, I hate most mail programs.  I used to *pay* for
Ishmail and it has since been open-sourced and needs a few
visual updates, I think.  Mail.app actually has potential
with some nice search capabilities (useful when you have
almost 20 years of email).  The mail agent in NS 4.x was
buggy and feature-deficient but I liked it for it's speed
even when dealing with huge piles of data.  Thunderbird
is a constipated elephant in comparison.

m

--
Monty Brandenberg