F.H. Muffman said:
How could you guarantee that? Every version of Outlook has allowed you to
edit an email. Many mail clients out there will let you edit the message
as well. Even back in the old days, one could edit the actual file on the
Unix server.
a) In Outlook 2007, attachments are opened as read-only. You can edit,
but in order to save, you have to do a Save As. No saving to the message
at all.
b) The saving to message functionality was pretty buggy anyways. Half
the time I'd get an unable to save message, some people say it actually
ends up deleting the attachment from the message, and, most of the rest of
the time, for me, it'd save, but the saved info wouldn't actually show in
the email attachment.
c) Pedantically speaking, you don't want it to not prompt you to save
changes. You want it to not allow you to save at all. If it didn't
prompt me, I'd be extremely concerned that it actually saved it.
Hi, F.H. Muffman:
Interesting, you bring up Unix. Unix can be held up to such a high degree
for standards because of all the collaboration between so many that goes
into it. The standards and usability has always been so high that you can
use it for compare evaluations even today. However, as stable and organized
as it was back then, it wasn't perfect.
You're right; you could edit a message and edit the spool. While you could,
it wasn't something that happened naturally while just reading the message.
It was something you had to intentionally take the initiative to do. And by
your intentional actions, you knew you were doing it.
As I mentioned, with Outlook, when just reading a message and trying to view
it as it was intended, but clicking on the option to show the images and
original spaces and line feeds, suddenly when you finish reading the message
and decide to exit Outlook, you're prompt to save something. Since it wasn't
your intentions to edit an email someone sent you, you'd think, logically,
you were saving something on your hard drive, not going out and changing the
IMAP incoming mail spool that will change the original email that someone
sent to you.
You're right; Outlook 2007 isn't the only version with this blemish. I'll
remind you that I like Outlook and don't expect for any program to be
perfect. But I was responding to the original question, and hope that the
developers would take this into consideration. I believe it's a mistake.
If they want to save the message, save it as a copy, don't so easily change
the integrity of the original email that was sent to the user.
And, yes. I wouldn't matter whether there was a prompt or not, as long as
the prompt had to do with a copy and not the original message.
By the way, when I referred to previously guarantee un-tampered original, I
meant before reading with Outlook.
Hi, Brian:
Actually it can be done by accident. There are many times some application
will finish installing and give you a countdown to exit out of programs.
Sometimes no matter how careful a person happens to be, they might
mistakenly say yes, to confirm to close and loose the changes, or click yes,
to confirm to close and save the changes, especially if you have a lot of
Windows open. And yes, people are always multitasking. talking on the
phone, listening to the news, giving instructions to subordinates.
I'm sure you'll say that when Almighty Windows give you a prompt, the world
should stop so that you can be very careful not to make a mistake, but that
won't always happen. Because of the design, many people will hit the wrong
option and modify their original email when they only wanted to read the
immediate content and close the mail.
It's something as I mentioned, I can live with. However, it's something
that I believe warrants attention on the part of the developers. But if
more people would prefer that it stays the way it happens to be, I
understand. The developers wouldn't have a reason to look at the issue. If
a few people like the original poster call it to our attention (or other
flaws), I'll respond as I did, it's a flaw we'll have to live with. This
way, the user can stop trying to figure out how to find the switch to stop
it, and the developers can have a chance to consider addressing the issue.
Finally, a number of people are responding as if we are talking about
attachments. We are not talking about attachments that we can save to the
hard drive for viewing or handling. We are talking about simply reading a
email that was sent. Some of them don't have any pictures, or any links.
Outlook might indicate that his has removed extra lines that were included.
If you opt to view the messages as it was sent with all the linefeeds,
suddenly when you finish reading the email, you're prompted with modifying
the original email. This shouldn't appear in such an easy option to do
something that wasn't intentionally desired.
-- L. James
