On Target

Email Chronicles - A Tale of Woe
Lauri Smith, Marketing Director
Email is great. It keeps us in touch with each other no
matter where we are or what time it is. A recent study
found that In 1999 the USPS was delivering over 600 million
pieces of mail per day but by 2007 electronic mail
outnumbered postal mail by 1000 to 1. The study also
revealed that email is much older than the Internet. It was
never invented; it evolved from very simple beginnings.
Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972.
Like many of the Internet inventors, Tomlinson worked for
Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor.
He picked the @ symbol from the computer keyboard to
denote sending messages from one computer to another.
Now more than 700 million people internationally use
email.
However, email can wreak havoc and crash your PC. All
sorts of viruses can be attached to email by masquerading
as love letters, photos of family and friends, security
passwords, program updates, and almost anything else
you can think of. These viruses bring chaos to many users
of the internet every single day.
One of the most popular email programs used in offices
today is Microsoft Outlook. Countless people rely on this
program every day. While it is not perfect, Microsoft Outlook
is fairly reliable as an email client with great potential
for organizing—virtual folders, fast search, solid spam
and phishing filters, and seamless integration with to-do
lists and scheduling. While Outlook is a fairly stable program
and has a multitude of features and functions, it's
cousin, Outlook Express, is a loose cannon. In my opinion,
Outlook Express is miserable and needs to be exterminated.
The question on my mind is how Microsoft could
let this program fester like an open sore and not do anything
about it. Outlook Express also has a nasty history of
security problems.
A friend of mine, Carl, uses Outlook Express as his primary
email program at work. Recently a box appeared
while using his email prompting him to "compress files to
save space." His choices were; yes, no or cancel. Carl
thought this sounded like a good idea, so he clicked yes. I
mean who doesn't want to save space, right? The program
started to run and the familiar hum of the hard drive
was beginning to perform it's command, when another
box appeared showing Carl his progress in compacting
his email files. The box let Carl know that in about four
minutes his email would be all bundled up - saving him
some much needed space. After about one minute, the
time changed to 20 minutes for the process to be complete.
Carl was not happy with this, as he is a very impatient
man. So he decided not to wait for the process to
finish and attempted to cancel the operation. Outlook Express
didn't like this command and refused this latest request.
He tried again but to no avail. Carl figured he'd
just shut his computer off and be done with it until he had
more time to sit and wait. Since the cancel option wasn’t
working for him, Carl decided he would try a different way
7
so he hit the power button on his tower to perform a hard
shut-down. That is the WORST way to shut down a computer
but as I said Carl is very impatient and didn’t realize
the repercussions of such an act.
The next day Carl came to work and as usual, the first
thing he did was open his email. He began receiving
email much like any other day. Carl then decided to
browse a folder that he created a couple of years ago to
locate a file for someone. He opened one of the email
folders, but to his horror all of the saved emails were
missing. Carl opened other folders to find his saved
emails but they were all gone! He began to panic and with
good reason. He could not locate the past four years
worth of stored emails. These were not just chatty office
and personal correspondence but projects, documents,
notes, agendas—in short, irreplaceable work. I gave him
some assistance in locating the files but we could not import
them. So we decided it was time to give in and call
Microsoft. After jumping through the many hoops to get to
an actual human voice, Shawn offered to assist me with
Carl's problem. After several wasted minutes of trying to
understand what he was saying, he asked “Can I hold
you?” Of course he meant put me on hold. Fast-forward
one hour—Microsoft could not fix the problem with THEIR
program. They determined that the email was on the
hard drive (I already knew that), but it was corrupted.
Their advice—contact an outside computer repair company.
Thankfully, they did not charge me for the support
call.
I contacted a computer repair company and they came to
Carl’s office to evaluate his email situation. After about
90 minutes they advised me they would have to download
a program, OE Recovery Tool, that would be able to repair
the corrupted emails. The technician downloaded the
software and attempted to recover the corrupted files. No
such luck! I asked him if we could get a refund and he
said “Nope, it’s just a crap shoot anyway.” So here we
are almost $300 into this process and Carl still did not
have any way to open or view his stored emails. He’s
pretty much resigned to the fact that the emails are lost
but I have not given up. I can see that the files are on the
hard drive so there has to be a way!
The moral of the story—Outlook Express should be
avoided at all costs. If you must use Microsoft email, use
Outlook and DO NOT COMPRESS OR COMPACT! But
just remember Outlook Express enjoys a 75-80% share of
the corporate email market, which is similar to Internet
Explorer’s share of the browser market—they make the
rules. Unless of course, you change them, or Microsoft’s
competitors force them to change by offering alternatives
to Microsoft’s often bloated, buggy software. Remember
you have a choice.
To be continued…. ■