Re: [Evolution] email and the real world

["Chad Kitching" <chadk cmanitoba com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Irwin" <kirwin14 home com>
Subject: Re: [Evolution] email and the real world

> I've heard that outlook /*does*/ have something like virtual folders and
> threading, but that it's not supported by the underlying Exchange 5.5
> (or whatever it is before Exchange 2000). Of course, I'm not sure what
> threading or the lack of it would have to do with Exchange, and why it
> has to be implemented in the backend and not for folks using outlook as
> an internet mail client.

I've never seen anything like Virtual Folders in Exchange or Outlook.  The
closest I've seen is just simple rules and filtering.  Exchange supports
threading because it executes some user rules on the server side, rather
that requiring the client be open all the time for the rules to fire.
Exchange also doesn't speak SMTP natively (at least 5.5 and earlier don't),
but rather use a connector that converts messages to and from standard SMTP
format (or Groupwise/Notes/CCMail/X.400/etc), which means that if it wants
to do threading of those messages, it has to understand how it's threaded
and how the other messages are threaded, and if it's going to do that, it
might as well do everything else, too.

> It seemed like, with the little demo I saw (and I've read nothing about
> it), that Exchange 2000 can be accessed by browser, the results looking
> a lot like the outlook client.  Even scales to your browser
> capabilities.  Then there was something like the ability to script pages
> which might summarize your mail in certain ways. Anyone else know more
> about this? (Seemed like their outlook today was taking over the entire
> operation.)

Yeah, Outlook Webaccess for Exchange 2000 scales all right -- there's one
version for Internet Explorer 5 on Windows, and one version for everything
else.  And all the HTML is contained in .DLL files so when it messes up,
there's almost no way to fix it or extend it.
Outlook Today can be extended provided you care to write CDO code to access
your mailbox and generate the page you want.  It's not for the
faint-of-heart.  Although, to be fair, it does contain a lot of built-in
customizations that you can do from Outlook -- you can add a number of
pre-defined lists to it.  Honestly, I haven't seen anyone actually use
Oulook Today, though.