Comments on: Outlook Insanity

By: Martin Wildam

Martin Wildam — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:32:42 +0000

This is not only mutt experiencing the problem with the extra linebreaks. But it is not only this.

Outlook is pure insanity for the whole e-mailing world!

You can’t cite correctly using Outlook – no, you can’t – you can get near, but you don’t get it how it should be and how every other e-mail client is doing.

And apart from the extra line-breaks you get them also eliminated. – And it is the old story with Microsoft: They try to think for the user and do implement plenty of features or automatic things because they again and again think they know better than the user…

By: RBL

RBL — Wed, 18 May 2011 11:49:06 +0000

The real insanity is using Outlook in the first place. I use Gmail as my client and connect it (POP) to the company Exchange server. I also use Thunderbird and connect it to Gmail via IMAP. Ditto Android. Now I can get my mail anytime from anywhere, and I don’t have to deal with Outlook’s overwhelming mess of “features” and Microsoft’s proprietary Office markup. When I have “heavy e-mail flow” days, I can bail on Gmail and use Thunderbird, which gives me a lot of mail sorting, grouping, threading, and color-coding options Gmail lacks. And because I’m on Linux, synchronizing my Thunderbird config is as easy as cloning the hidden user prefs folder via a flash drive and Grsync.

By: bochecha

bochecha — Sat, 07 May 2011 01:49:19 +0000

> What this means for Mutt users is extra line breaks. Rather than one line break, there are two, and I believe the “” tags are the culprit for adding the extra line break (seeing as though properly formatted paragraphs wrapped in tags shouldn’t do doing so).

Not only for Mutt users.

At my previous work, I had to use Outlook. So I set it to display all email as text. Well, when I received emails from other Outlook users, Outllok converted it as text and told me something like « Extra line braks have been removed, click here to readd them. »

See, even Outlook gets confused by itself.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:55:11 +0000

Definitely old news. Doesn’t make it any less insane. Also, I don’t care if others use Outlook- I care about what steps I need to take to make my mail experience a good on. I don’t use Outlook, as I think was clear in the post, but I still have to deal with its headaches.

By: nnonix

nnonix — Fri, 06 May 2011 17:16:03 +0000

Welcome to 2004. This is all old news. The sad thing is, although your assertions are technically correct, the world does business with Outlook so …. you’re essentially bitching about caller-id overhead while using two Dixie cups and a string to make a phone call.

The answer, as much as you will hate it, is to use a real email client. That said, allowing email to deliver anything but plain text has got to be on the top 100 worst ideas of all time list.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 06 May 2011 16:31:25 +0000

Mutt displays the mail in plain text, so if you don’t use something to parse the HTML, and spit the plain text result to Mutt, Mutt will display all the tags to you, so it gets very chatty. Thus, some 3rd party utility should parse the HTML, such as /etc/mailcap, which results in the extra line breaks mentioned.

So, if you know a 3rd party utility that will do better than /etc/mailcap for treating the “” tags, I’m paying attention.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 06 May 2011 16:25:33 +0000

Do mutt doesn’t respect the XML namespace? Isn’t that horribly broken?