OUTLOOK DEPRESSED (Outlook Express 5.5)

Member Name: yoshitoshi

Product:	Outlook Express 5.5
Date:	16/08/01 (68 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: free, simple to use

Disadvantages: fragile in some respects

Outlook Express Version 5.5 is bundled free with Internet Explorer 5.5 and is probably the only email reader that you will use if you have Microsoft O/S unless your pretty unfortunate to be connected to AOL, or have Lotus Notes.

Outlook Express has the standard functionality required for an email reader such as sending/receiving emails, email filters, newsgroup reader, connection to various pop3/SMTP, IMAP or http accounts. If you were using Lotus Notes mail server and VIM this could be a problem if the SMTP option is not turned on.

ADDRESS BOOK

Using Outlook Express every day, I tend to find specific functionality that does annoy me. For a start with email addresses you can add them to the address book by opening the message and from the tools menu you can add to the address book. However it is impossible to add email addresses that are embedded in the actual mail if you are forwarding or replying to a mail. If you are reading a mail you can right click on an embedded email address and add to address book. But there is no option to add all the embedded email addresses making it time consuming to add a list manually to the address book.

When setting an address in the address book, you have the option of sending this as plain text. On forwarding some emails, it issues the message to send as html or plain text, it knows for those specific people it should be sending plain text so why ask? When grouping email addresses I tend to find my mind works in a hierarchical manner Work folder-US office, UK office etc etc In the address book the folder structure is flat which is confusing and inconsistent with the Windows directory file structure. I find with business cards attachments that the same address seems to get replicated if I have already added their address manually before hand. It would be nice to have a button to check for duplicate business cards so I can clear out unneeded addresses.

EMAIL STORAGE

Another
problem is that being a so-called programmer I tend to email a lot of executables for bug fixes. The size of my sent folder gets bigger and bigger, but do I get a warning message saying its filled up my C: drive and my system will now crawl like a snail on dope? Do I heck! I do not want them deleted in case I need to refer to them at a latter date. I just want a warning so I can choose the emails I want to delete. So the disk is full up I think umm compact all folders, Outlook Express replies sorry there is not enough disk space for this operation, okay delete email, Outlook Express replies sorry there is no disk space for this operation. So for the next half an hour you are looking for an unwanted data on your C: drive just so you can delete emails to create more disk space, the irony is un-bloody-believable.

The default setting of your mail inbox location on NT4 is normally on your Windows profile user name. However mailing a lot of clients with attached executables my disk space is eaten away like a swimmer in the Jaws film. Setting your mail location to another drive or mapped drive on the server can be done in Outlook Express but whether it protects the security of the emails from being read by other people is another thing to be seen.

NEWSGROUPS

With Newsgroups a group of news items can be combined into 1 file, however with emails when you forward them as one mail, it attaches the emails as .eml files rather than combining the files. This is a pain if you want to read through the email to check what you are writing and have to open the attachments or cut and paste from them for reference points.

One thing I hate when checking for new news on the Newsgroups is when you click on the newsgroup server and there are new newsgroups it prompts do you want to see new newsgroups. I am like no I don’t and I never will want to see newsgroups, I know what I wanted to look at so I don’t care what new news groups you have
so stop bugging me.

In Outlook Express the treatment of binary files is very simplistic in its approach, compared to a variety of speciality newsreaders that will automatically detect the news binary files associated to a news item and automatically combine them. Outlook express is very manual in this respect, with the order needing to be adjusted because it does not have the intelligence to order files from their file names.

ERROR MESSAGES

The thing I really hate about Outlook Express is this warning that it has shut down incorrectly. I think yes I know I was there! That waste of space Windoze just blue screened on me. Outlook Express has just figured it out by itself, maybe you should email Bill Gates directly saying “This is outlook express I just detected windows just went a bit Pete Tong, I just can not operate in this environment anymore! What’s an email reader supposed to do? If you don’t sort this out I will ask to be reprogrammed to work on a stable O/S like Linux”.

MULTIPLE ACCOUNT SETTINGS

When configuring Outlook Express to use multiple pop3 accounts I wish Outlook Express would figure out the ISP it is currently using and default to the SMTP account that is appropriate. This means if I forget to change the default send mail account I get an error when sending mail from different account when I am connected to the right ISP. To remedy this from the Outbox folder open the email change the send from account field use which is easy enough.

CONCLUSION

Apart from these drawbacks Outlook Express is free, so for minimal effort for home use you can not ask more from it. As an application it does look nicer than reading email from Telnet, but for serious heavy usage it can become a burden.

Summary: