Subject: Quiet data corruption by Outlook97
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 18:38:49 -0800
Hello Bill:
I've been using Microsoft products personally and professionally for more
than 15 years now. There's plenty to like, but there are a lot of
problems too.
One of my profound frustrations as a customer of yours is how difficult it
is to feed information back to Microsoft and get any kind of meaningful
response. I've looked for help many times in bundled documentation
(almost always full of the obvious and unable to answer meaningful
questions), the Microsoft knowledge base (a few really good hits, but a
lot of misses) and among fellow users. When it comes to unresolved
issues, however, there seem to be more obstacles than entries into your
corporation. I can understand a desire to keep the riff-raff out, but at
the same time, given the amount of time and money I've spent with
Microsoft's products, and given the number of unresolved issues, it seems
like there should be a better way.
What brings me to finally write to you is the rediscovery of something I
found a while ago with Outlook97. I've been working around it for a long
time, but I finally came to the point when I needed this basic
functionality, so I tried it again.
It's still broken, unsurprisingly. And in a profound and disturbing way.
I have an automated job that runs on a unix machine and emails me the data
every day. I move these messages to an Outlook folder. When it comes
time to process them, I want to save the files as plain text. At first, I
did them one by one, tediously. Then I discovered I could simply select
several, and save them, and they would be concatenated into the target
file.
Point and click is nice for onesy-twosy stuff, but this kind of bulk
processing was just what I needed.
Deep in the middle of the data, however, I found that the many messages
WERE NOT CORRECTLY CONCATENATED. Maybe it was just too big a job for
Outlook, I don't know. There were between 100 and 1000 messages, about 5
- 10kB each. Inexplicably, and quietly, the data was corrupted.
As disturbing as such an undetected bug is, being unable to "contact the
vendor" (as I'm told to do regularly by GPF error "dialogs") and get some
kind of satisfaction for this defective product is profoundly frustrating.
Thanks for your consideration,
