The Crooked and the Straight

I've been reading "flow | state", a fascinating UI design weblog by ex-microsoftie Jan Miksovsky. His recent entry, "Situation normal, all fouled up" had me laughing, particularly because of this part:

People who use Outlook outside of an enterprise struggle along with support for POP mail that hasn't improved appreciably in years. While POP isn’t great, at least Outlook's POP driver is reasonably solid. Outlook's IMAP driver, on the other hand, appears to have been left for dead in the jungle, where it was raised by apes.

I (grudgingly) use Outlook's IMAP support for basically all of my email needs, and the lack of fit-and-finish there is terrible, bordering on the ridiculous. For example, as Jan notes:

Among its many deficiencies, the driver can’t properly cope if you use two different machines (say, at home and at the office) to check your email. This scenario is one of the reasons for IMAP’s existence, and most IMAP clients handle this situation gracefully: if they see another client is checking the mailbox, they wait for a while then try again. If you try to use Outlook this way, however, the IMAP driver throws up the following error:

Your IMAP server has closed the connection. This may occur if you have left the connection idle for too long.

This is such an incredibly stupid behavior that I have actually written a program that does nothing but wait for this dialog to appear and then dismisses it. (It works for Outlook 2003, and if anyone would like a copy just let me know.)

And to add insult to injury, the IMAP support in Windows CE has the exact same behavior! I have my smartphone setup to check my IMAP email as well, although at much less frequent intervals than Outlook. If the two devices (my phone and my desktop) happen to check for mail at the same time, the smartphone displays an error as well!

My friend Melinda is a tester in the Office organization, and I told her that if there was a position open for someone to test (or heck, to develop) the IMAP driver in Outlook, I might just consider applying for it. I was only half joking.

[Update:] I've made my Outlook dialog-killing app available for download.