F
Frank Buchan
My recent experience with support, kindly telling me that
they would not decrement my support count, after I
experienced yet another MS Outlook bug prompted me to
write this. While I understand that support cannot be
endless, nor should there ever be a charge associated with
reporting behaviour that is beyond the user's control.
The issue I experienced was that after sending a few
messages in the morning, I closed Outlook, then later
reopened it, whereupon it started to insist it was failing
to send a message via a certain account. This phantom
message made it impossible to leave Outlook open, as the
error message was a glaring pain in the arse. SO, I
dutifully wasted a couple hour sof my valuable time trying
to resolve it, then in exhausted frustration reported it
via the support website. After doing so, I took the brave
step of removing the account SMTP server name and changing
it to another, then changing it back. This 100% resolve
dthe issue, and I kindly took mor eof my time to post the
fact to help avoid anyone having to spend hours trying to
ascertain what it was.
My point and my complaint is that we users of Outlook have
been givena great application, but there are some weird
and wooly bugs in there somewhere, when the act of closing
and reopening the program can cause this kind of ultra-
bizarre stuff. That we put up with this oddball stuff is a
testament to the overall quality of the product...but the
frustration at having to flip-flop configuration, etc., at
odd times is immense.
What makes it worse is that stock MS replies end the
frustration by kindly telling us we haven't used one of
our support incidents. As a developer, I wouldn't even
raise that possibility in areply to what amounts to a bug
report. It seems disingenuous at best.
I urge everyone who has any of these peculiar problems in
the future to attach to your support message a blurb that
suggests to MS they be diligent in treating the customers
who make the effort to debug the damn product, and provide
decent accounting of its oddities, with at least the
reward of not having to be made to feel guilty about
reporting their behavioural bugs.
Frustration now spent. Thanks for listening.
they would not decrement my support count, after I
experienced yet another MS Outlook bug prompted me to
write this. While I understand that support cannot be
endless, nor should there ever be a charge associated with
reporting behaviour that is beyond the user's control.
The issue I experienced was that after sending a few
messages in the morning, I closed Outlook, then later
reopened it, whereupon it started to insist it was failing
to send a message via a certain account. This phantom
message made it impossible to leave Outlook open, as the
error message was a glaring pain in the arse. SO, I
dutifully wasted a couple hour sof my valuable time trying
to resolve it, then in exhausted frustration reported it
via the support website. After doing so, I took the brave
step of removing the account SMTP server name and changing
it to another, then changing it back. This 100% resolve
dthe issue, and I kindly took mor eof my time to post the
fact to help avoid anyone having to spend hours trying to
ascertain what it was.
My point and my complaint is that we users of Outlook have
been givena great application, but there are some weird
and wooly bugs in there somewhere, when the act of closing
and reopening the program can cause this kind of ultra-
bizarre stuff. That we put up with this oddball stuff is a
testament to the overall quality of the product...but the
frustration at having to flip-flop configuration, etc., at
odd times is immense.
What makes it worse is that stock MS replies end the
frustration by kindly telling us we haven't used one of
our support incidents. As a developer, I wouldn't even
raise that possibility in areply to what amounts to a bug
report. It seems disingenuous at best.
I urge everyone who has any of these peculiar problems in
the future to attach to your support message a blurb that
suggests to MS they be diligent in treating the customers
who make the effort to debug the damn product, and provide
decent accounting of its oddities, with at least the
reward of not having to be made to feel guilty about
reporting their behavioural bugs.
Frustration now spent. Thanks for listening.