Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
The new year’s reorganisation of my email Inbox and archived message stores brought me to a practical matter that had been bugging me for a while in my everyday use of Microsoft Outlook.
One of the incidental benefits of decades of closely studying Windows is that I’m not entirely helpless when Windows programs misbehave. This is not to say that the diversion is ever anything but intensely unwelcome. I really would very much prefer that the program I have for email simply does its job. But when its misbehaviour leaves me frightened even to check for email, it is no longer just another irritation such as Windows 10 throws our way as ordinary. It is instead something that demands attention and solution.
This particular bug in Microsoft Outlook has apparently been around for at least a decade and been dismissed by Microsoft all this while. In its circumstances, a mischievous sender of email makes your computer respond in a way that you have explicitly told Outlook not to and have every reason to believe that Outlook will not do. Yet Microsoft couldn’t care less, except pehaps to blame the user.