Hoping a Dev at MS might take note of this message.... because their
official tech support is not exactly
top-notch nowadays.

Problem: Exchange and POP3 Accounts + Cached Exchange Mode is unusable:

- Client-side rules do not run if you start Outlook (in Cached Exchange
Mode) and are not connected to Exchange at the outset. These rules should
work... not all messages are coming in through Exchange! Is this by
design?.... NO, because....

- Interestingly, if you make Outlook always start in the *Classic* Work
Offline mode then the rules do behave as you would expect. But this mode has
huge caveats (such as outgoing POP messages sitting in the Outbox until you
hit
Send/Receieve) and was suppossed to have been rendered obsolete by Cached
Exchange Mode.

- You cannot edit client-side rules unless you're connected to Exchange.
This is just stupid.

- Outlook CONSISTENTLY downloads duplicate messages. It is a HORRID bug.
After a long night, I'll go into my Inbox and have 500 messages waiting....
of which
only 20 or so are unique! I have already troubleshooted this with an MVP and
it is an Outlook BUG and not anything else's fault. i.e. I'm not doing
anything "wrong."

I'd venture to say that my problems are not that uncommon... but most people
will just give up and use other tools (FireFox?)... which I am about to do
as well. Outlook 2003 is practically unusable.in anything but it's most
basic, always-in-the-office don't-do-anything-slightly-uncommon scenerio.

--
-C. Moya
www.cmoya.com

CMM wrote:

Hoping a Dev at MS might take note of this message.... because their
official tech support is not exactly
top-notch nowadays.

Didn't you already post this a couple of days ago?
--
Brian Tillman

I didn't see it.
Now, I realize I was looking in ms.pub.outlook but had posted it to
ms.pub.outlook.general.

--
-C. Moya
www.cmoya.com

"Brian Tillman" wrote in message
...
CMM wrote:

Hoping a Dev at MS might take note of this message.... because their
official tech support is not exactly
top-notch nowadays.

Didn't you already post this a couple of days ago?
--
Brian Tillman

Oh, and I'm sorry for the periodic tirade. But, you'd be upset too if your
Inbox looked like this every morning: http://www.cmoya.com/temp/scrnshot.htm

P.S.
I'm a pretty smart guy. And, I also empathize with developers as I am one
myself. Bugs can't be avoided as we can't always predict every scenerio. But
the bugs in Outlook 2003 are simply incomprehensible....
1) This is a ten year old program... POP3 retrieval engines were perfected
even before then. Come on now.
2) The "on-the-road" Cached Exchange features were touted highly when OL2003
was introduced. You'd think this new feature was better QA'd. It's
practically useless given some of the bugs... especially the Rules bug.
3) It shouldn't take a lifetime to fix issues. If the reason for the
ULTRA-long delay is to make sure your fixes don't break other things, then
it's a HUGE sign that your developers (or development process) is seriously
flawed.
4) Cost-benefit analysis should not always apply when deciding which bugs to
fix.... why? because it's nearly impossible to quantify the "Word of Mouth"
factor. Look at IE-- it's 4 year innovation stagnation-- bad word of
mouth.... and now the popularity of FireFox. When one of my friends asks me
whether he should switch his IT dept or even his personal machine to
Outlook, my answer is a resounding NO. You think I'm the only one?


--
-C. Moya
www.cmoya.com

"CMM" wrote in message
...
I didn't see it.
Now, I realize I was looking in ms.pub.outlook but had posted it to
ms.pub.outlook.general.

--
-C. Moya
www.cmoya.com

"Brian Tillman" wrote in message
...
CMM wrote:

Hoping a Dev at MS might take note of this message.... because their
official tech support is not exactly
top-notch nowadays.

Didn't you already post this a couple of days ago?
--
Brian Tillman

CMM wrote:

Oh, and I'm sorry for the periodic tirade. But, you'd be upset too if
your Inbox looked like this every morning:
http://www.cmoya.com/temp/scrnshot.htm

Yeah, that would be annoying. While Microsoft has addressed with Office
2003 SP2 some of the issues with Outlook's POP engine downloading the same
message multiple times, I don't think they've addresses them all and I think
some of them (i.e., it's just an opinion with little data to support it) are
the result of timing issues from accessing multiple accounts simultaneously
during send/receive cycles. My understanding is that Outlook uses multiple
threads when there are multiple accounts. I though I read an article to
that effect.
--
Brian Tillman

I'm not sure about the multiple accounts as I only have one POP3 account and
an Exchange account and it happens whether I'm connected to Exchange or not.

However, I do believe it has to do with rules moving messages to another
PST.... which I thought was a problem squashed years and years ago. It's not
like the messages are moving to the moon.... the PST is right there in the
profile. And it's not like the Server "hanging up" the download should
prevent Outlook from saving ID's of messages it has ALREADY downloaded.

--
-C. Moya
www.cmoya.com
"Brian Tillman" wrote in message
...
CMM wrote:

Oh, and I'm sorry for the periodic tirade. But, you'd be upset too if
your Inbox looked like this every morning:
http://www.cmoya.com/temp/scrnshot.htm

Yeah, that would be annoying. While Microsoft has addressed with Office
2003 SP2 some of the issues with Outlook's POP engine downloading the same
message multiple times, I don't think they've addresses them all and I
think some of them (i.e., it's just an opinion with little data to support
it) are the result of timing issues from accessing multiple accounts
simultaneously during send/receive cycles. My understanding is that
Outlook uses multiple threads when there are multiple accounts. I though
I read an article to that effect.
--
Brian Tillman

CMM wrote:

However, I do believe it has to do with rules moving messages to
another PST.... which I thought was a problem squashed years and
years ago. It's not like the messages are moving to the moon.... the
PST is right there in the profile. And it's not like the Server
"hanging up" the download should prevent Outlook from saving ID's of
messages it has ALREADY downloaded.

I don't think rules moving the messages has any bearing on whether or not
Outlook remembers what it has downloaded. However, loss of connection
during the send/receive cycle does affect that, since empirically it appears
that storing the UIDL values is close to the last thing Outlook does in the
cycle. Interruption of the cycle for any reason seems to prevent the
recording of the UIDL values.
--
Brian Tillman

since empirically it appears that storing the UIDL values is close to the
last thing Outlook does in the cycle. Interruption of the cycle for any
reason seems to prevent the recording of the UIDL values.

And, there's no reason for that unless someone forgot to add a Try Catch
block somewhere since AFAIK Outlook has to retrieve the UIDL's BEFORE it
starts to download the messages so it *knows* what id's to save at ANY point
during the message retieval process. It just freaks out and forgets to do
so. OE does not have this problem and neither does Thunderbird or any other
POP3 client on this planet that I have ever used including 15 year old
old-school Pine. ;-) Only Outlook.

I don't think rules moving the messages has any bearing on whether or not
Outlook remembers what it has downloaded.

Hmm. Haven't experimented much. But, I think if the message stays in your
default Inbox, Outlook "notices" that even sans the UIDL cache and doesn't
re-download the message. I might be wrong about that and Outlook is even
dumber than I'm giving it credit for.

--
-C. Moya
www.cmoya.com
"Brian Tillman" wrote in message
...
CMM wrote:

However, I do believe it has to do with rules moving messages to
another PST.... which I thought was a problem squashed years and
years ago. It's not like the messages are moving to the moon.... the
PST is right there in the profile. And it's not like the Server
"hanging up" the download should prevent Outlook from saving ID's of
messages it has ALREADY downloaded.

I don't think rules moving the messages has any bearing on whether or not
Outlook remembers what it has downloaded. However, loss of connection
during the send/receive cycle does affect that, since empirically it
appears that storing the UIDL values is close to the last thing Outlook
does in the cycle. Interruption of the cycle for any reason seems to
prevent the recording of the UIDL values.
--
Brian Tillman