Monday, September 05, 2011

A few more notes

1) Outlook is a great calendaring program, it's a great program for managing your contacts list, it's a wonderful TODO list program. But only Microsoft could produce an email program that, well, sucks at actual email. My employer uses a proxied Exchange server and every damned time I fire up Outlook, the damned thing prompts me for my email password, despite the fact that I told it to remember the password last time I fired up Outlook!. Apple Mail doesn't do that, despite the fact that it's using Microsoft's code to talk to Exchange (Apple licensed the code to do so from Microsoft). It properly remembers my password. So anyhow, the *other* issue I'm having with Outlook is that occasionally it just decides to not update my message counts. I look at 'Favorites', where I've dragged the Inbox of all my email accounts, and it shows no emails. Then I click on, say, the badtux Inbox, and suddenly it shows I have two emails -- that arrived an hour ago but I never got any sort of notification!

So anyhow, Thunderbird isn't an adequate substitute because our Exchange server doesn't export LDAP for the contacts list, and like most high tech employers, the names of many of our employees (first.last convention for email names) are unspellable by native English speakers. Grrr!

2) I have a *fine* string of music waiting for you this week, mostly folks who've never been on this blog before, and most of'em are good. So y'all come back now, y'hear?

-- Badtux the Random Penguin

2 comments:

  1. I gave up on Outlook a long time ago. I use GMAIL to not only collect all of my various addys into one place, but also use the Google mail servers to handle all of my domain mail. It comes with the calendar that can be shared with others, and it is all web-based, with an excellent spam and malicious code filter.

    My company has an Exchange server, but I never have a need to use it. I use GMail to pull mail from there and can also send mail from GMail. I can share calendars with Exchange also.

    Additionally, GMail stores all of my contacts, not only for email, but for my Android phone as well. If I tossed my phone in the lake, I don't lose any contacts. I would just fire up the new replacement phone and point to my GMail account and I am done.

    The best thing is, I have not had the need to open up Outlook for three years.

    I am so connected it scares me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unfortunately the corporate directory is not exported as LDAP, thus GMail can't get to it just like Thunderbird can't get to it. Siiiiiiigh! And no, I can't get it changed, the IT department is, like, "Use Windows and Outlook, that's all we support."

    - Badtux the Annoyed Penguin

    ReplyDelete

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