… again.

It is very difficult for me to say but… the most appreciated by me application in the Windows world was defeated. It was tough. I tried to save it but it failed… for the 2nd time in (my) history.

Last night has been a busy night trying to send 2 e-mails of ~3MB each with Microsoft Outlook 2003. I know, they’re pretty big, but in my father’s business people often exchange big files (documentation) using e-mail. Unfortunately, some servers block big e-mails or some busy people have e-mail boxes with few free space. That’s when.. (no) surprise.. the e-mails bounce back, filling YOUR e-mail box with the same e-mails you’ve sent (lots of MB included).

As I’ve said here, my ISP behaves a bit weird. I have uploaded very fast the e-mails, but they weren’t gone from Outbox. Downloading bounced e-mails took really long time. Unfortunately, Outlook sent over and over those e-mails and they bounced back, filling my father’s Inbox with ~14MB. Guess what… everything was blocked. My father couldn’t read future e-mails because those e-mails were waiting in the queue to be downloaded. Moreover, if Outlook did manage to download an e-mail, it would not delete it from the server unless all the transfer has been completed. A broken connection would have meant re-downloading everything (which did happen a few times). Great “joy”…

My father has a pretty small e-mail box, considering the tons of e-mails he gets - only 50MB maximum mailbox size. The hosting provider in Romania (actually a resaller from US) is not very competitive - I’ll make sure this changes in the future. I have to use POP3 for his e-mail in order to free his mailbox. The problem of the 14MB of bounced e-mails could only be solved by IMAP.

Enter the Outlook IMAP experience. My previous expericences with IMAP in Outlook were also not very bright. I’ve had problems before. I’ve selected the e-mails, pressed delete, but Outlook tried downloading them and everything got stuck… again. I’ve closed the laptop and got to sleep. I had enough for one night.

Today, a bright day in history, I tried again IMAP in Outlook, with no success. Last time I had the “big e-mail, everything is stuck”-problem (was one >10MB e-mail, I know: people have huge bandwidth outside Romania) I’ve used KMail to get the e-mail, remove it from the mailbox and make Outlook work again. The same thing happened now: I’ve started KMail, created an IMAP account, opened my father’s mailbox, deleted the bounced e-mails and… everything was back to normal - Outlook successfully downloaded the rest of the e-mails.

Now, I’m very sad that the only application I really liked on Windows - Outlook - behaved so bad. Outlook has probably the worst Queue Manager (& IMAP support) I’ve seen in the world of e-mail clients (I live in a very limited world of e-mail clients: Outlook, KMail, Thunderbird). Unless Microsoft does something about the Queue Manager and the IMAP Support, I’ll have to retreat the title of e-mail client from Outlook, leaving it with Best Application on Windows excluding e-mail clients .

Hope for the best in the future, or I might change my father to use Kontact when KDE is ported to Windows (with the help of Qt4 which is said to be GPLed for Windows also).