Problems Are Best Solved Before They Begin
Sometimes you’re just glad you trusted your instincts.
At work, almost everyone uses Outlook. You more or less have to as it’s how meetings are scheduled and conference rooms booked. I’ve never got on with Outlook. Not that I haven’t tried. I can think of at least three different occasions where I gave it an honest go. But there were a few big reasons why I didn’t make the switch:
- No hotkey for next unread message. (Seriously, how do you
people live without this?)
- Crappy filtering.
- Something about ‘archiving’ messages that I still don’t quite understand.
- Storage of mail in some weird-ass .pst binary format.
Now, I’ve been told things have gotten better. And after reading Getting Things Done, I rely a lot less on the read/unread status of a message (though a hotkey would still be nice). And it is kinda PITA to have both Outlook (for meetings, etc.) and Thunderbird open at the same, with the need to occasionally switching back & forth. So I’ve given thought to switching.
That last one was always still out there, however. That last one can be a stickler if the .pst file ever gets corrupt. It’s also fairly inexcusable. Losing all your email sucks. Your mail file is probably the file that sees the most write action, so it’s probably also the most likely to become corrupt at some point. So why store it in a binary format? Why not use the bizarre, but common, mbox format? Okay, fine. But at least why not maildir? Or just something plain text so you can at least save your mail if something goes askew?
As you’ve probably guessed by this point, that happened to me today. Apparently, when checking email last night, Thunderbird chomp’ed a newline at the end of one message, destorying the ‘From -’ header of the next message, and for some reason, royally confusing Thunderbird. Basically all my mail from 6/30 (where the corruption happened) to new mail I go today disappeared. It took some twiddling with emacs & mutt, but in the end, I got my mail back.
*whew*
I think the easiest way to solve Outlooks deficiencies is to just not use it.
