6 ms·

Outlook’s broken—Let’s fix it

58 points by tortilla 17y ago

philfreo 17y ago
It's great that this is getting a lot of attention on Twitter. I just hope MS is willing to listen enough to fix it...
reconbot 17y ago
I don't care too much about outlook and I use it every day - I just rather plain text in email honestly, websites can stay html ;) but that twitter wall looks amazing! Looks like he may have coded it up himself - I know some activist groups would love to have one of those!
- snprbob86 17y ago
  That twitter wall definitely is cool, but the pop-in moves the text and makes it hard to read. It would be better if the new tweet tiles slid in, animated. The speech bubbles should also stay fixed, but their tails should move along with the animation.
prodigal_erik 17y ago
I hope they realize there's no shortage of email clients which wouldn't render that monstrosity the way they had in mind.
fsniper 17y ago
no html email please..
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  No freedom please, someone else might abuse it. No HTML email abuse, I agree with. Not giving me the option to put a proper table in an email instead of a hand-drawn ASCII bodge because you're afraid of junk mail, I don't agree with.
snprbob86 17y ago
Sad fact: Not going to happen anytime soon. Definitely not for Outlook 2010. They turned to Word for HTML editing/rendering in Outlook 2007 because there was no Internet Explorer team during development. IE7 was released in 2007, but Office 2007 was in development since at least 2003. No IE team means there was no one to send design change requests to. Office doesn't like being at the mercy of other teams, so they break dependencies whenever possible. The lack of an IE team was a perfect example of why this is a successful practice for them. Word offers a significantly better editing experience and most email clients only render a small subset of standard HTML anyway. Gmail, for example, throws away all headers including CSS. It was a perfectly reasonable cost/benefit trade off for the Outlook team to switch to an editor and renderer they could directly change or influence. There wasn't a big loss of compatability, but there was some. Most HTML email in actual usage renders the same between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 because they would have to be written to the lowest common denominator in order to render correctly in most other mail clients as well. Outlook 2007 added DRM to emails which, besides being the most annoying thing ever, was a feature highly demanded by customers. This feature is based on Word's DRM. So, putting on my Microsoft PM hat... let's do a cost benefit analysis of switching Outlook to use the IE8 rendering engine: Benefits: 1) HTML email authors (who don't pay us anything, by the way) will have a slightly easier time now. 2) HTML email authors will have a significantly easier time in the distant future. Costs: 1) Second release to break HTML mail compatability in a row. 2) Will need to re-implement DRM. This includes a full battery of security reviews. 3) Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements. 4) Once again at the mercy of the IE8 team, who already have a huge backlog of work and probably don't care about our DCRs. shrug Not going to happen in 2010. Probably won't happen in the next release either. When some version of IE supports 100% of all standards and is as fast as a hypothetical future Chrome, such that they have time to deal with the Outlook team, then maaaybe, just maybe they can tackle this... two releases of Office later.... If you're lucky.
- andreyf 17y ago
  Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements This is something that blows my mind. How can we have WYSIWYG editing functionality since the 70's, and when "the web" comes along, we decide to build everything on top of HTML/CSS, which is insanely hard to implement WYSIWYG on top of? Ditto for drag/drop and right click for God's sake.
chaosmachine 17y ago
Sending webpages as email is broken — let's not do it.
- dtf 17y ago
  Let's face it, email is on the way out anyway. Its future demographic consists entirely of nostalgic hackers, antiquated corporate IT regimes and orphaned spambots.
- jrnkntl 17y ago
  Try to convince the companies that rely for a large part on e-marketing. Trust me, that are a lot of companies.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    Are there studies that show HTML-mails work better for marketing? Not saying there aren't but would be interesting to know. They certainly don't work better for me, because usually they literally display nothing (since I have disabled loading of remote images).
    - Jem 17y ago
      They don't work for me either, but we're in a minority. The non-techies seem to love HTML email. My boss, even, receives all sorts of crappy offers and adverts and forwards them on to me to "check out the bargain!" We have clients that pay thousands of pounds a month for HTML newsletter services (not to us, at the moment). I like to assume they wouldn't be doing this if they didn't work. (Don't 'they' say that only one person has to click a spam mail for it to be worth sending - is this not more or less the same thing?)
    - mtw 17y ago
      I'm a techie but I love threadless's HTML emails and newsletters (as well as Apple's, zip.ca etc.)
      - Tichy 17y ago
jsz0 17y ago
Surely Microsoft can fix this problem by adding more toolbars and icons to the GUI or by further degrading Outlook's ability to search large mailboxes. At that point no one will even remember Word HTML rendering was an issue in the first place.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  Good news - Microsoft fixed that search problem over two years ago by handling it on the server in Exchange 2007, so you can search quickly from Outlook / Outlook Web Access / your ActiveSync mobile (Windows Mobile / iPhone).
  - absconditus 17y ago
    What if I'm not connected to the server?
    - jodrellblank 17y ago
      Choice of Outlook's builtin search (Outlook 2007 with up to date service packs and patches is better than Outlook 2007 as new, and better than Outlook 2003). or Windows Desktop Search 4. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/choose/windowssearch4.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktops... Or, if you're pragmatic rather than MS locked, and want really fast search, Google Desktop Search. Or, if you're quite particular and want really really fast search, you can with a bit of fiddling get Lookout to work in Outlook 2007. But the benefit of using the Outlook builtin search is that it's the same UI all the time. If you're connected to the server it searches on the server, if not it doesn't. NB: You can be out of the office and connected to the server if you use Outlook/HTTPS as your connection type.
jwr 17y ago
Are you kidding? Proper HTML rendering is the least of Outlook's problems. I blame Outlook for the mess that E-mail became. Top-posting, citing entire E-mails, people being unable to distinguish cited text from new text, unbroken long line, unreadable and unformatted E-mails.
- greyman 17y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I never had a problem with email being in html format, nor with being coded by using tables. CSS purists don't like tables, but other than that, this topic is a non-issue.
- gaius 17y ago
  To be fair, the people who do that would do it with any email client. Remember, your typical corporate email user was never on Usenet, has never been on a mailing list, genuinely doesn't know the difference between "reply" and "reply all", etc. It just so happens that these people get given Outlook and they use it. Or not, even, loads of senior managers, even at tech companies, have their secretaries send email for them and would consider reading 10 messages a day themselves "too much".
  - greyman 17y ago
    No, no, no. I use outlook at work, gmail for general email and also thunderbird for one other email address. And I really didn't come across a problem that email being coded in html tables.
ahold 17y ago
the best fix is UNINSTALL it. uninstall fixes any problem with MS software.
nopassrecover 17y ago
Heh Outlook's functionality has never been my problem (though Xobni makes it better and Gmail handles conversations better). Instead, Outlook's performance is the big issue.
st3fan 17y ago
What about "let's not use it" instead.
DanielStraight 17y ago
That website is broken beyond belief.
weegee 17y ago
so don't use Outlook. problem solved.

58 points by tortilla 17y ago

It's great that this is getting a lot of attention on Twitter. I just hope MS is willing to listen enough to fix it...

I don't care too much about outlook and I use it every day - I just rather plain text in email honestly, websites can stay html ;) but that twitter wall looks amazing! Looks like he may have coded it up himself - I know some activist groups would love to have one of those!

snprbob86 17y ago
That twitter wall definitely is cool, but the pop-in moves the text and makes it hard to read. It would be better if the new tweet tiles slid in, animated. The speech bubbles should also stay fixed, but their tails should move along with the animation.

prodigal_erik 17y ago

I hope they realize there's no shortage of email clients which wouldn't render that monstrosity the way they had in mind.

fsniper 17y ago

no html email please..

jodrellblank 17y ago
No freedom please, someone else might abuse it. No HTML email abuse, I agree with. Not giving me the option to put a proper table in an email instead of a hand-drawn ASCII bodge because you're afraid of junk mail, I don't agree with.

snprbob86 17y ago

Sad fact: Not going to happen anytime soon. Definitely not for Outlook 2010. They turned to Word for HTML editing/rendering in Outlook 2007 because there was no Internet Explorer team during development. IE7 was released in 2007, but Office 2007 was in development since at least 2003. No IE team means there was no one to send design change requests to. Office doesn't like being at the mercy of other teams, so they break dependencies whenever possible. The lack of an IE team was a perfect example of why this is a successful practice for them. Word offers a significantly better editing experience and most email clients only render a small subset of standard HTML anyway. Gmail, for example, throws away all headers including CSS. It was a perfectly reasonable cost/benefit trade off for the Outlook team to switch to an editor and renderer they could directly change or influence. There wasn't a big loss of compatability, but there was some. Most HTML email in actual usage renders the same between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 because they would have to be written to the lowest common denominator in order to render correctly in most other mail clients as well. Outlook 2007 added DRM to emails which, besides being the most annoying thing ever, was a feature highly demanded by customers. This feature is based on Word's DRM. So, putting on my Microsoft PM hat... let's do a cost benefit analysis of switching Outlook to use the IE8 rendering engine: Benefits: 1) HTML email authors (who don't pay us anything, by the way) will have a slightly easier time now. 2) HTML email authors will have a significantly easier time in the distant future. Costs: 1) Second release to break HTML mail compatability in a row. 2) Will need to re-implement DRM. This includes a full battery of security reviews. 3) Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements. 4) Once again at the mercy of the IE8 team, who already have a huge backlog of work and probably don't care about our DCRs. shrug Not going to happen in 2010. Probably won't happen in the next release either. When some version of IE supports 100% of all standards and is as fast as a hypothetical future Chrome, such that they have time to deal with the Outlook team, then maaaybe, just maybe they can tackle this... two releases of Office later.... If you're lucky.

andreyf 17y ago
Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements This is something that blows my mind. How can we have WYSIWYG editing functionality since the 70's, and when "the web" comes along, we decide to build everything on top of HTML/CSS, which is insanely hard to implement WYSIWYG on top of? Ditto for drag/drop and right click for God's sake.

chaosmachine 17y ago

Sending webpages as email is broken — let's not do it.

dtf 17y ago
Let's face it, email is on the way out anyway. Its future demographic consists entirely of nostalgic hackers, antiquated corporate IT regimes and orphaned spambots.
jrnkntl 17y ago
Try to convince the companies that rely for a large part on e-marketing. Trust me, that are a lot of companies.
- Tichy 17y ago
  Are there studies that show HTML-mails work better for marketing? Not saying there aren't but would be interesting to know. They certainly don't work better for me, because usually they literally display nothing (since I have disabled loading of remote images).
  - Jem 17y ago
    They don't work for me either, but we're in a minority. The non-techies seem to love HTML email. My boss, even, receives all sorts of crappy offers and adverts and forwards them on to me to "check out the bargain!" We have clients that pay thousands of pounds a month for HTML newsletter services (not to us, at the moment). I like to assume they wouldn't be doing this if they didn't work. (Don't 'they' say that only one person has to click a spam mail for it to be worth sending - is this not more or less the same thing?)
  - mtw 17y ago
    I'm a techie but I love threadless's HTML emails and newsletters (as well as Apple's, zip.ca etc.)
    - Tichy 17y ago

jsz0 17y ago

Surely Microsoft can fix this problem by adding more toolbars and icons to the GUI or by further degrading Outlook's ability to search large mailboxes. At that point no one will even remember Word HTML rendering was an issue in the first place.

jodrellblank 17y ago
Good news - Microsoft fixed that search problem over two years ago by handling it on the server in Exchange 2007, so you can search quickly from Outlook / Outlook Web Access / your ActiveSync mobile (Windows Mobile / iPhone).
- absconditus 17y ago
  What if I'm not connected to the server?
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    Choice of Outlook's builtin search (Outlook 2007 with up to date service packs and patches is better than Outlook 2007 as new, and better than Outlook 2003). or Windows Desktop Search 4. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/choose/windowssearch4.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktops... Or, if you're pragmatic rather than MS locked, and want really fast search, Google Desktop Search. Or, if you're quite particular and want really really fast search, you can with a bit of fiddling get Lookout to work in Outlook 2007. But the benefit of using the Outlook builtin search is that it's the same UI all the time. If you're connected to the server it searches on the server, if not it doesn't. NB: You can be out of the office and connected to the server if you use Outlook/HTTPS as your connection type.

jwr 17y ago

Are you kidding? Proper HTML rendering is the least of Outlook's problems. I blame Outlook for the mess that E-mail became. Top-posting, citing entire E-mails, people being unable to distinguish cited text from new text, unbroken long line, unreadable and unformatted E-mails.

greyman 17y ago
My thoughts exactly. I never had a problem with email being in html format, nor with being coded by using tables. CSS purists don't like tables, but other than that, this topic is a non-issue.
gaius 17y ago
To be fair, the people who do that would do it with any email client. Remember, your typical corporate email user was never on Usenet, has never been on a mailing list, genuinely doesn't know the difference between "reply" and "reply all", etc. It just so happens that these people get given Outlook and they use it. Or not, even, loads of senior managers, even at tech companies, have their secretaries send email for them and would consider reading 10 messages a day themselves "too much".
- greyman 17y ago
  No, no, no. I use outlook at work, gmail for general email and also thunderbird for one other email address. And I really didn't come across a problem that email being coded in html tables.

ahold 17y ago

the best fix is UNINSTALL it. uninstall fixes any problem with MS software.

nopassrecover 17y ago

Heh Outlook's functionality has never been my problem (though Xobni makes it better and Gmail handles conversations better). Instead, Outlook's performance is the big issue.

st3fan 17y ago

What about "let's not use it" instead.

DanielStraight 17y ago

That website is broken beyond belief.

weegee 17y ago

so don't use Outlook. problem solved.