Besides being the biggest piece of bloatware on the planet (next to Apple iTunes), one of Microsoft Outlooks' biggest annoyances is when email messages get stuck in the Outlook outbox. This happens to me about once a month, where outbound email messages start to stack up in the outbox, with no hope of reaching my SMTP mail server. There's no error message, nothing... they just sit there. Just what I needed, spending time fixing an email problem. Very annoying when I'm getting ready to head out the door to meet up with a customer or business associate.
When it first stated happening I made the mistake of deleting and then trying to resend the stuck emails, thinking one of the stuck emails was the source of the problem. But the actual solution (or workaround anyway) is to delete the email account from Outlook, and simply re-add it. Suddenly, outbound emails start flowing again. You also have to go back and set the re-added account as the default (if you have more than one account in Outlook) and reestablish the email signatures with the account. Now that I know the workaround, it's a simple 1 minute solution but it's still annoying non-the-less.
One of my most important product design principles is that a product must perform it's core functions well, even flawlessly. Bells and whistles are fluff if the meat of the product doesn't work and work well, every time. How would like driving a care that doesn't start reliably, or quits every so often when driving down the road. You won't put up with the problem - You'd get it fixed or get a new car.
This Outlook bug is a simple one to work around, once you know the solution, but how does a core bug like this slip into a shipping product? It's not like the bug happened once, never to return. This problem comes back, so it certainly is something that could be recreated, corrected and fixed.
I hate bugs like this one.
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Mitchell Ashley is principal consultant at Converging Network LLC where he provides product, technology and social media consulting to emerging technology companies. A successful CTO and product innovator, Mitchell has created many successful, award winning products in the networking, security, convergence, Internet and IT industries. In addition to blogging for NetworkWorld, Mitchell regularly blogs at TheConvergingNetwork and co-hosts the widely popular StillSecure After All These Years podcast.
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Offline email messages not being sent....
I had a similar type of experience with laptops in docking stations. Users would create emails offline and when they dock no amount of effort, including introducing a suitably sized hammer would make the emails budge from the outbox. This behaviour wasn't predictable as in most cases the email would be sent.
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