On an overcast Sunday I decided to follow up on the news that Outlook Express is going away and download Windows Live Mail. What a mistake! First off, why do so many software companies (Google, Sun, Apple, Microsoft, pretty much everyone) try to trick users into downloading and installing junk along with the application they actually requested? That’s why so many peoples’ IE menu bars cover half their screens with all the google/yahoo/bling/crapweasel menu options on them.
OK – Live Mail installs and tries once again to add messenger, office integration, whatever else – I say no again. I open the application – but what’s this? Have I gone blind? It’s a washed out palette of grey on grey against a slightly blue-ish grey background. I can hardly read it on my laptop screen. No problem – alter the colour palette. But wait – my only choices are washed out blue, washed out green, washed out purple, etc? Have these guys ever heard of 508 compliance? It’s absurd and useless to me.
OK, forget it – this whole UI looks like it will add unicorns and my little pony icons to all my emails. Does it come with sparkles and rainbows as well?
So I download Thunderbird – perhaps their UI wasn’t designed with 9 year old girls as their target demographic. It wasn’t, but joy – because Hotmail has to connect via POP3, none of my folders show, and every email is marked unread.
Back to Outlook Express, which has now commenced to download an extra copy of every email in my inbox.
Fuck this – I’ll deal with it later. Time to go for a walk and hope it starts to rain hard on me.
(Yes I know – none of the cool kids use hotmail any more. I should be one of those people who send emails to their entire address book every six months changing their address and wondering why I never get email from old friends. Bah Humbug!)
