At the mercy of Microsoft

We have been at the mercey of Microsoft for almost a quarter of a century.

Don't get me wrong. I've always been a Microsoft user ever since DOS came around in 1981. We probably wouldn't be where we are now did they not come out with Windows OS.

But here's the problem. What bothers me is that when a company has no competition, they are able to get away with the most ridiculous things. For example, I was trying to archive my 10000+ emails at work today on Microsoft Outlook. I was a happy camper until I saw this hilarious yet absurd error message on my screen.


I couldn't help but start cracking up at my cube. Oh ok let's see.
Some items could not be opened. They were either:

• moved
• or deleted
• or access was denied.

The developer or the product manager was so lazy that they wanted to fit three completely different error cases into one error message. And, on top of this, it does not really tell you what you need to do to fix the problem. Am I supposed to try selecting one email at a time and archive it manually until I find the email that was either moved, deleted, or access was denied? No logs. No further suggestions. Nada. This is a classic developer mentality where he assumes that his code is supposed to work 99% of the time, and for those 1% that run into an ambiguous problem such as this, good luck to you. Thanks for choosing Microsoft Outlook.

I know this sounds really funny, but it really bothers me that I keep getting the "mailbox full" message every 15 minutes now since I am unable to archive my emails!!

Hopefully, mozilla will enhance their Thunderbird email client to support Outlook Exchange. Until then, I am still at the mercy of Microsoft...

Read up on why you should use Thunderbird here.