Black Hole

For some unknown reason, the foul MS Outlook has been misbehaving over the past couple of months. For no reason, emails from some people were getting through, while others languished, uncollected, on my webmail server.

So I tried to re-install the blessed thing from MS Office, whereupon Outlook apparently got into a snit and disappeared from my laptop forever. (It would also have taken my address book as part of the divorce settlement except that in a moment of rare foresight, I’d backed up my contact list a little while ago, so while I may be missing a few recent additions, the majority of them have been saved.)

Thanks to Tech Support Wizard (TSW) BobbyK, I waved goodbye to Outlook

and managed to install and configure Thunderbird as a replacement, getting in the process something like seven hundred emails that I’d never seen before.

So please excuse my apparent rudeness in not replying earlier, but I never saw your emails because Outlook. [200,000-word rant deleted]

All those who were unable to register to comment here have had their emails passed on to TSW for his attention. If you’re still waiting for a response from me on some other issue, please do me the favor of re-sending your emails if it’s still germane or necessary. Ditto if you’ve only recently started to correspond with me, so I can add your addy to Ye Olde Addresse Booke.

As for MS Outlook:

13 comments

  1. Interesting post.

    Is it just me or do others also think that the consumer software the bigs used to hand out freely or sell cheaply is becoming very bad?

    I used Google finance to track my stocks until November 2017 when Google removed the portfolios feature. A financial web-site that won’t let you track portfolios??? Yahoo finance does but it is otherwise so buggy as to be both hard to use laughable. For example, it claims to let you track stocks and cash, but it’s all manual. At least Google used to automatically add sale proceeds to cash and subtract purchase amounts.

    Oh well, at least Google no longer has my financial info to sell to advertisers, the CIA and the Russians.

    For mail I still use Microsoft Live which is, I expect, much like Outlook – requires as much care, feeding, watching and medicine as a sickly old dog.

    The less said about Microsoft Word the better. It is still not half as good as my 15 yer old version of WordPerfect.

    My smart-phone free apps get updated almost weekly, and that’s because they are chock full of stupid bugs.

    You’ll also find that Thunderbird has problems of its own. I used it for a while then gave upon it, can’t remember why. Mozilla is trying but are being dragged down by political correctness. Don’t forget, Mozilla are the arseholes who fired CEO Brendan Eich for donating $1,000.00 to California Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California. Plus the new Firefox is fast but they have removed debugging features. Plus Brendan Eich.

  2. Kim, I know I’ve told you this: the only way Microsoft will make a product that doesn’t suck is if they start making vacuum cleaners.

  3. Thunderbird >> Outlook

    I had Thunderbird for years because I “accidentally” installed all of our Outlook license on other users’ machines before I got to mine.

    But then, someone else took over that particular IT function, and now I’m stuck with Outlook.

  4. I am one who tried to email when you were in Las Vegas.

    Good thing I didn’t need a blood transfusion.

  5. Kim,
    Bully on your move to Thunderbird. I used Outlook Express starting with WIN 95 until Microsoft took it out behind the barn and shot it in the head. Stayed with it because other users of our home PC were used to it. Switching to Thunderbird was pretty smooth. It imported my entire O.E. folder structure without a hitch. Another feature I like is that you can filter out going messages as well, which makes it very easy to keep running correspondence in chronological order. That is how I know that our first exchange was in November of ’04.

    I will be re-sending you two emails shortly.

  6. “Outbreak”, as it was known among my computer-nerd friends, was considered substantially responsible for the computer virus pandemics of the late 90s/early 00s.

    It basically taught users to expect a lot of “cute” features that were unnecessary and dangerous. Many of these (like its abilty to render styled text) were initially designed with complete indifference to security. And it was shipped with a long list of security-defeating options turned on by default.

  7. I’ve used various versions of Thunderbird for years with no problems. I think this might be because all I require it to do is “go here, fetch my e-mail and place it on my screen” instead of trying to use all the bells and whistles to make it a freeware version of Outbreak.

  8. The company i work for is pushing hard to get all customers onto Office 365 (Microsoft cloud office), using, of course, outhouse for email. And needless to say we are all required to use all microsoft all the time for all the things.

    Since moving to Windows 10 in early 2016 I have had to run data file repairs almost every other month, and I’m on my 4th or 5th new email profile as outhouse shits its bed so badly repairs won’t work.

    Email clients have been going downhill since Eudora was dropped. Given a choice I’d still be running it. It was solid, reliable, fast, followed internet standards, and “just worked” (TM). That said we’ve moved a few folks from outhouse express (also called ‘outhouse, diarrhea edition’) to Thunderbird when outhouse corrupted its PST files too frequently.

    If you missed my email during SHOT, bummer. I was hoping for a KdT review from a hands-on eval, or at least look over 😉

  9. I don’t particularly like Outlook, but I use it at work because that’s what my company uses. But I will say something positive about it: I have a 4.2GB mail folder. If you’re having to “run data file repairs almost every other month” or having similar problems, then you’ve probably got an incipient hardware failure.

    As for Thunderbird, as SDN pointed out, Mozilla fired Brendan Eich, who was also one of the inventors of JavaScript and one of the people who helped wring Mozilla from the ashes of Netscape.

  10. Lo, these many years ago, I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox when I discovered that the entire download for Firefox was a third the size of the 18 MB UPDATE for IE. Having done that, I took a look at Thunderbird, liked what I saw and switched to that.

    Since then I’ve tried to weed out all the Microshit stuff I can, and go with free open source software. Feels so good to give MS the finger!

    Now, having built my own computer I’m going to install one of the many flavors of Linux and see how that goes.

    I just wish I could find a smartphone that didn’t have anything to do with MS, Google or Apple.

    1. I’m running Linux MINT 18.3 Cinnamon and love it.
      Go to the website, download and burn an iso image DVD and have at it.

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