Re: [Evolution] Advice

[troy hakala <troy recipezaar com>]

> > 2. Outlook Bar is good for novice users, Folder List is good for power 
> > users. But neither is good for most users. Do something good there.
>
> Oh? What's not good about the folder tree?
>     
the folder tree is VERY confusing to most users -- they see WAY too many
folders and get confused and can't find the folder they want quickly. and
the hierarchy thing does not make sense to people, believe it or not. i know
it is hard to understand, but you'd be surprised the things you see people
trying to do when you watch them actually use the product. basically, people
think of email as ONE place: their inbox. they certainly don't think of their
calendar or their contact list as a folder (when's the last time you put
a real-life calendar in a folder?). and NO ONE manages their folders in a
proper hierarchy -- most users make one flat list of folders. at most, people
go 2 levels deep ("here's my personal stuff and here's my work stuff"). after
all, when have you ever put a real-life folder inside another folder?  the
worst thing about the folder tree visually, in my opinion, is that a nested
folder doesn't look like it's *inside* the folder, it looks like it's below
and to the right of the parent folder. :)
    
99.9999% of Outlook novice users don't even know the folder list exists.
and even 80% of Outlook power users use *both* the Outlook Bar and the Folder
Tree because each is good for some things. there was work to merge the outlook
bar & the folder list into a single navigation model, so you'd have big
icons for your inbox, calendar, etc and smaller and possibly tree-like navigation
for your mail archive folders. and it'd hide Sent Items, Outbox, etc since
they're used less often. but it never made it into a released version.
> > 6. Solve Outlook's brain-dead virus attachment "feature". :)
>
> Not ever running scripts that are attached to mail is easy. The real
> problem for Outlook these days seems to be that VBA scripts could be
> lurking anywhere. We don't have that problem because no GNOME apps
> have documents with macro/scripting languages that can affect things
> outside of the document itself. But there's still the possibility of
> buffer overruns, etc...
>         
It's not limited to scripts, you can receive binaries as attachments. Outlook
refuses to believe this is a problem -- they still tell me today that it's
a user problem when they open an attachment a friend sent them that turns
out to be a virus. The solution is to run any scripts or binaries as a user
with no permissions to do anything terribly destructive. Outlook says this
can't be done because Win9x doesn't have the security that NT has (and most
of MS product groups refuse to believe NT is worthwhile, if you can believe
that, so no products take advantage of NT's strengths). But of course, unix
can do this.
        
And script in email messages is important to corporations who want groupware.
They like to send out mail that configures this or that or whatever rather
than write a instructions to tell each user to do something. So it really
is a strength of Outlook, they just feign irresponsibility when bad things
happen. (I just loved how the recent break-in at MS was caused by this problem
in Outlook!;)
        
> > People inside MS hate to use it too.
>
> Ha ha. See, Miguel! It sucks! :-)
>             
            
I don't use it either. :)   Anyone who uses Outlook without an Exchange Server
is nuts. it's a bad POP client and a miserable IMAP client.