Your opinion of OUTLOOK as a primary email program (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

Kimmo,

What is top posting?

One thing I don't like is that it puts NEW messages on top instead
of OLDER ones. Messages should be read in order as received and
doing some right-clicking I didn't see an option to reverse it.

Also, what sort of quoting problems do you find?

Thanks

 

[Paul Padilla]

Oops...make that two. That's precisely what top posting is, Ron. Appending the most recent message on top. Personally, I prefer not to scroll down to see the most recent reply and for the few times I'm getting into the E-mail converstion late in the game, it's no trouble to read from the bottom up. It goes against our nature of L>R & top to bottom reading, but most people are used to it. From my angle the most recent information should be the most immediately accessible, but again it's just how your personal E-mail career was raised.

Here's a link to a description of some of the pros & cons. (by a pro-bottom poster, by the way.)
http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/top-posting.html

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

I think you'll find there is a noticeable group of people who dislike it, Paul. True, mostly old fogeys who've been around since before the web, or even before the Internet (gasp!)

I've become all but inured to it by now but there are still occasions where I literally seethe at it.

It's a question of what makes most sense and what is most useful. If one writes a lot of short mails and possibly gets one or two comments to that mail, then top-posting (what you describe, Ron, as Paul mentions - being "forced" to comment in a blank field on top of the mail instead of inline in the text) can actually work. It becomes a conversation... sort of like "what's up?" then "not much!" on top of that followed by "same here!"... no problems keeping track of that flow, obviously. It might even be easier than bottom posting for that particular scenario.

Then there is the other extreme, where you have, say, a two-page email with 45 separate points you want to comment on. Commenting on that in a program that does top-posting and inadequate quote handling (like Outlook, at least the 2003 version) is a nightmare.

That is where the traditional type of bottom-posting comes in handy, combined with proper formatting (the way Outlook Quotefix re-arranges it, with little arrows in front of every line where the original author wrote) where you can just put your answers in between the paragraphs of quoted text and thus get a question-answer-question-answer thing going that has all the necessary context in it so people know exactly what you are commenting on.

That is strictly speaking "in-line commenting", though, and is very difficult to do in Outlook out of the box if you want people to be able to keep track of who said what. The only chance you have there is to make sure the mail is in HTML format so the coloring can help - but if someone views his/her mail in pure text, that just goes away and you have an amorphous blob of text where there is no clear indication of who said what if you do inline comments.

I've been involved with IT and Internet (and its precursors in the electronic messaging field like bulletin boards) for upwards to three fourths of my life and top-posting was unheard of in the olden days. I blame Microsoft. Usually a safe bet.

Lots of examples and discussion of this on Wikipedia, of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting

 

[Bryan X]

I like that (top posting). It drives me nuts if it isn't that way. But like Kimmo described, I do a lot of short, back-and-forth, emails. So it's convenient to have the new message at the top.

 

[Scott L]

If Outlook had a threaded email view option it would be near perfect. Well for work anyway

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

View, Arrange By, Conversation? That's a threaded view (or at least a grouped view...) then add View, AutoPreview and you get most of the mail visible assuming people have been top-posting. Blech.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

This top loading (putting new messages at top) is driving me
crazy to the point that it might drive me back to using my other
email programs.

It would not be so bad if when reading bottom up, that with the
deletion of each read email it advances you up to the next message --
it doesn't. Reading emails bottom to top involves a lot of keyboard
play (delete then arrow up) without any auto advancements.

 

[drobbins]

I have been using Outlook for years at work. The only other e-mail I use is Hotmail, so I don't know how it stacks up against other programs. But you can sort all your messages. If you click the top of the "Subject" it will sort in Alphabetical order A-Z. Click it again & it will be Z-A. This is helpful when you want to see "threads" of many replies. The same works for the other columns also. If you are looking for a certain sender, it works for the "From" column. Click on the "Received" and it will sort from newest to oldest or oldest to newest.
Dave

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

You can set that behaviour, though there are tons of options for Outlook and they are all nastily arranged at least in 2003. In 2003, select Tools, Options, then the Preferences tab, and there click on email options. There's a drop-down box there that says "after moving or deleting an item" or some such. You can set it to "return to inbox", "go to previous message" and "go to next message". That might help, though it certainly doesn't cure top-posting.

You should also play around in the view menu, you can select a LOT about how the list of messages is displayed.

This is all for the 2003 version of course, I haven't yet gotten my hands on a 2007 version so I can't say how things have changed there.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

In the 2007 version it still toploads.

And though, as Dave points out above, there are loads of
options to sort mail exactly the way you want, the one option
that is missing is to sort OLD to NEW.

 

[drobbins]

Clicking on the "Received" sorts it from New to Old or Old to New in all the version I have used. I have not used 2007 though.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Yeah, you can actually sort the inbox in tons of ways. You can click on the user name and sort mails grouped by sender, or by date, by priority, etc.

To fix the reply windows so that you can easily add your text as bottom-posting you will need to install the macros I mention above. If it were version 2003, Outlook Quotefix would handle it beautifully, but with 2007 so far there is only the macro option (which isn't entirely simple to get going, but not impossible either).

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Another question....

Is there a way to add a "BCC" (blind "CC") to the address field?

I'm surprised that option isn't already there.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Never mind...found it in the OPTIONS area.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

You can also get at it if you bring up the address book to add a recipient, by clicking on either the to: or cc: button. In the address book you can then find the option to add names to the bcc: field.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Kimmo,

As always, Thank You.

Another question...

How good is Outlook in backing up ALL the data (emails & contacts)
so that it can be restored on another computer?

I ask this because although Outlook has a backup/restore function
built into it, there are a half dozen companies selling software to
do that function.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

If you export your mail/calendar/etc data to a .pst file using the export function, there is no problem bringing that up with another copy of Outlook. One can also export to CSV, comma separated values. That can be trickier to re-import without manual work, but it should be doable and worst-case can even be read with Notepad.

As for contacts, as long as you use the synch possibilities to have multiple copies you should be able to safeguard their survival too. I have my complete contacts list in both a PDA and my phone, so I'm feeling calm about that. You should also be able to export them to .VCF files.

You could also join Plaxo, for that matter. That way you'll have your contacts safe and you can bug your contacts to join up too. That way, if they change their info, Plaxo will take care of synching that info to your Outlook. Pretty nifty.

 

[Hanson]

I changed my wife from Outlook Express to Outlook because her database crashed twice in OE. Outlook PST files are stable and extremely portable. You can copy the PST file and open it in another computer. You can compress it with Winzip or Winrar to save space. I have one PST in shared folder, and as long as it isn't open somewhere else (the file locks immediately), I can open it up on another networked system and have all emails, contacts, distributions lists, etc. This is espcially handy when the wife is on the main system and I need to check my email. You can archive your older messages into a second PST, or you can open multiple PSTs with the same profile. You can also have multiple profiles within Outlook. We also use it at work, and I have never heard a complaint about top posting, probably because that's normal for them. Frankly, I never even thought about it.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I actually did discover a way to list the email in order of time
received, putting the OLDER messages at the top.

All you need to do is click on INBOX and select arrange by: DATE
and OLDEST ON TOP.

The only drawback to this is that unless you regularly clean out
your INBOX, you will get messages listed by previous days first.

Still, for the moment, this may be the most perfect solution for
those of us that want our email sorted in order as received.

 

[Hanson]

Actually Ron, you only need to click on the header bar of each field to arrange by any of your fields. The triangle icon pointing up or down determines whether it's ascending or descending.