P
Parish
Thank you to all here who take the time to answer questions, often the
same question several times a day 'coz people can't be bothered
searching the NG first. You'll be pleased to know that I *have*
searched, and found the answers to all my questions/problems; sadly,
they weren't the answers I was hoping for, so it's......
.....Goodbye Outlook (2002), hello Mozilla Thunderbird.
I've always used Netscape/Mozilla but when I started my current job,
about 4 months ago, the laptop I was given had Outlook all setup, so I
thought, "why not, let's give it a try". Unfortunately, despite my best
efforts and intentions, I just can't get it to work the way I want.
There are four main issues that can't be resolved:
1. Our staff contact details are distributed every month or so as an
Excel spreadsheet which we import into Outlook. Many staff have a
business fax number and for those staff Outlook creates a single entry
in Contacts but two entries appear in the e-mail address selector, one
for e-mail and one for fax; alas you can't tell which is which until
you've added it to To:/Cc:/Bcc: when Outlook adds '(Business Fax)' after
the name. Apparently these double entries can't be suppressed, except by
removing the Business Fax No., even if you never use Outlook for sending
faxes.
2. I want to be able to fetch the e-mail from my personal account
(leaving it on the server so I can grab it all on my home machine as
well). No problem, or so I thought; two accounts, two servers, two
Personal Folders, two Inboxes, but no, Outlook can't handle two Inboxes,
it dumps everything in one and I'm supposed to write one or more filters
to redirect it to the other Inbox. No good I'm afraid. My personal
e-mail gets a lot of spam (up to date AV protects me) and, as we all
know, your real e-mail address is very rarely in the To:/Cc: so I end up
with most/all the spam left in the main (work) Inbox. Not acceptable,
and potentially embarrassing if I'm on a customer's site.
3. Can't view (image) attachments in-line. Duh! WTF not? I read one
reply which suggested it was because business users wouldn't want/need
to view attachments in-line. Heeellllooooo! I'm a business user; I'm a
Software Eng. and often colleagues and customers attach screen grabs to
help illustrate a problem or change so I need to be able to read the
words and see the image. With Outlook I have to save the images, open
them in another program then faff about trying to position the windows
so I can see both. I can't even print the damn thing out; all I get is
the e-mail body with icons for each of the images.
4. This seems to be a current 'hot potato'; the decision by MS to block
certain attachment types, with no option to override the blocking. As a
S/w Eng. I sometimes get send .EXE, .BAT. and .JS files and now I can't
save them. Any mail I get from colleagues passes through at 3 AV scans
and at least one spam-trap (plus I've got the intelligence to recognize
a suspicious e-mail). Our customers are all in the aerospace industry,
where security is tighter than a duck's arse in a hurricane, so anything
from them has probably received even more checking. The usual
"workround", zip "banned" files, is not so easy for our customers
because they can't just "grab a copy of WinZip and install it"; any s/w
has to go through a security/assessment process before it can be used.
At least one customer had to copy his files to a Unix box, gzip-tar
them, copy the tarball back to the PC and then send it.
BTW, don't suggest http://www.slovaktech.com/attachmentoptions.htm as
I've already seen it and don't really want to install something that
messes around with the security features on my PC and, of more concern,
what will happen if (or more likely, _when_, since it's so unpopular) MS
release another patch to undo or modify this blocking behaviour if the
hack has been used; will it screw Outlook up completely? I don't know,
do you?
Outlook has got lots of neat and, if you use them, useful features;
faxing, calendar, tasklist, etc., but I don't use or need them, all I
need is a good e-mail client that allows _me_ to make the decisions and
configure/use it the way I want/need to. Based on using it at home Moz
t-bird gives me what I need, it's not as fully featured as Outlook and,
arguably, not as stable (it may crash, but I've never lost my mailboxes
of addressbook, etc.), as Outlook but then, I don't need all Outlook has
to offer.
I did consider using OE instead but, IIRC, it has some of the same
issues (maybe manifesting themselves in different ways).
Of course, if anyone has solutions to any/all of the above, I'm willing
to try them.
Regards,
Parish
same question several times a day 'coz people can't be bothered
searching the NG first. You'll be pleased to know that I *have*
searched, and found the answers to all my questions/problems; sadly,
they weren't the answers I was hoping for, so it's......
.....Goodbye Outlook (2002), hello Mozilla Thunderbird.
I've always used Netscape/Mozilla but when I started my current job,
about 4 months ago, the laptop I was given had Outlook all setup, so I
thought, "why not, let's give it a try". Unfortunately, despite my best
efforts and intentions, I just can't get it to work the way I want.
There are four main issues that can't be resolved:
1. Our staff contact details are distributed every month or so as an
Excel spreadsheet which we import into Outlook. Many staff have a
business fax number and for those staff Outlook creates a single entry
in Contacts but two entries appear in the e-mail address selector, one
for e-mail and one for fax; alas you can't tell which is which until
you've added it to To:/Cc:/Bcc: when Outlook adds '(Business Fax)' after
the name. Apparently these double entries can't be suppressed, except by
removing the Business Fax No., even if you never use Outlook for sending
faxes.
2. I want to be able to fetch the e-mail from my personal account
(leaving it on the server so I can grab it all on my home machine as
well). No problem, or so I thought; two accounts, two servers, two
Personal Folders, two Inboxes, but no, Outlook can't handle two Inboxes,
it dumps everything in one and I'm supposed to write one or more filters
to redirect it to the other Inbox. No good I'm afraid. My personal
e-mail gets a lot of spam (up to date AV protects me) and, as we all
know, your real e-mail address is very rarely in the To:/Cc: so I end up
with most/all the spam left in the main (work) Inbox. Not acceptable,
and potentially embarrassing if I'm on a customer's site.
3. Can't view (image) attachments in-line. Duh! WTF not? I read one
reply which suggested it was because business users wouldn't want/need
to view attachments in-line. Heeellllooooo! I'm a business user; I'm a
Software Eng. and often colleagues and customers attach screen grabs to
help illustrate a problem or change so I need to be able to read the
words and see the image. With Outlook I have to save the images, open
them in another program then faff about trying to position the windows
so I can see both. I can't even print the damn thing out; all I get is
the e-mail body with icons for each of the images.
4. This seems to be a current 'hot potato'; the decision by MS to block
certain attachment types, with no option to override the blocking. As a
S/w Eng. I sometimes get send .EXE, .BAT. and .JS files and now I can't
save them. Any mail I get from colleagues passes through at 3 AV scans
and at least one spam-trap (plus I've got the intelligence to recognize
a suspicious e-mail). Our customers are all in the aerospace industry,
where security is tighter than a duck's arse in a hurricane, so anything
from them has probably received even more checking. The usual
"workround", zip "banned" files, is not so easy for our customers
because they can't just "grab a copy of WinZip and install it"; any s/w
has to go through a security/assessment process before it can be used.
At least one customer had to copy his files to a Unix box, gzip-tar
them, copy the tarball back to the PC and then send it.
BTW, don't suggest http://www.slovaktech.com/attachmentoptions.htm as
I've already seen it and don't really want to install something that
messes around with the security features on my PC and, of more concern,
what will happen if (or more likely, _when_, since it's so unpopular) MS
release another patch to undo or modify this blocking behaviour if the
hack has been used; will it screw Outlook up completely? I don't know,
do you?
Outlook has got lots of neat and, if you use them, useful features;
faxing, calendar, tasklist, etc., but I don't use or need them, all I
need is a good e-mail client that allows _me_ to make the decisions and
configure/use it the way I want/need to. Based on using it at home Moz
t-bird gives me what I need, it's not as fully featured as Outlook and,
arguably, not as stable (it may crash, but I've never lost my mailboxes
of addressbook, etc.), as Outlook but then, I don't need all Outlook has
to offer.
I did consider using OE instead but, IIRC, it has some of the same
issues (maybe manifesting themselves in different ways).
Of course, if anyone has solutions to any/all of the above, I'm willing
to try them.
Regards,
Parish