The Seattle PI recently posted about recent changes in the numbers of unique visitors for the major email services such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail, QQ, etc. According to that data, hotmail lost some users. From the first comment: I can't say I'm surprised. I have email accounts with hotmail, yahoo and...

Dare's post about human nature touches on UAC in Vista: How do you design a dialog prompt to warn users about the potential risk of an action they are about to take if they are so intent on clicking OK and getting the job done that they forget that there was even a warning dialog afterwards? There are...

Great post from Josh. Although I admit I'm biased about #4 on his list...

Outlook 2000:   Outlook 2007:   Breath with me now: Ahhhhh...   I was an Outlook tester during the 2000 release; when the icon was first released internally, we were harshly critical of it in a very public way - it sucks to be the product that gets 'yellow' as your family color because...

Following on to my short rant yesterday , I wanted to share some information from a survey we did about a year ago. We surveyed ~1400 people[1] about their email management habits, how overloaded they felt, if they used conversation views, folders, filters/rules, sorting, etc as well as asking them to...

I am so tired of reading blog posts that point the finger at email and imply that the problem is that we have too much email and that the solution are other technology streams, 1:many communication, etc. Guess what folks, email has 1:many too, call them groups or mailing lists or distribution lists or...

If you're like me and do a lot of copying content from other applications into Word and Outlook, you're probably very accustomed to using the paste smarttag to choose whether or not to use the source or destination formatting on paste. If you're tired of constantly switching it and want it to use the...

A coworker asked me today if I knew how to count up the total number of folders in his mailbox, in the process of troubleshooting a bug related to having a large number of folders. I had an old script that recursed through a mailbox to count the total number of items (also written for the purposes of...

While reviewing some custom OWA themes we're developing, one of the designers pointed out this odd orange mark halfway through one of the numbers on the calendar view, wondering if it was a bug in the CSS in the custom theme: Actually, it's one of these tiny little details that I think is so slick...

An email with a coworker who was recently acquired and is getting accustomed to Outlook after years with PINE reminded me that it's been a while since I wrote any Outlook macros. Plus, I just need an excuse to write some code, I haven't written any in several months and that part of my brain is congealing...

Just about anyone who runs mail servers needs to look at headers from time to time. This is especially true during the development of product such as Exchange, as we track down and fix bugs. I wrote this little macro to make that a little easier. Select a message, click the button to run the macro, and...

Today is the third anniversary of my first blog post . A whole lot has happened (and been blogged) in those years, including events such as: I changed jobs I started the Exchange blog (2 million hits a month later...) I helped release the custom quota service & its source I got Larry...

For certain types of folders, you may find it useful to have the folder list display the total number of items in the folder, not just the unread items (which it does by default). For example, I set this on some folders that contain messages to certain distribution lists, where there will always be...

See if Raymond's tip works for you.

While ego surfing I just ran across this handy list of cheat sheets that I wanted to share. Covers topics from HTML to networking to office apps to keyboard shortcuts to SCSI to math. Handy.

Here's Part One . OK this isn't really a continuation of the history, but rather some more rambling on some of what I discussed in part one. I just wanted an excuse to say "Part Deux". After the news reports about the first big email-borne viruses like Melissa started showing up, stories...

Several times in the last few months I've needed to send the exact same mail content to a list of people, but each mail had to be separately addressed, for the following reasons: I am expecting each recipient to reply and continue the thread with me. This way there's no risk of "Reply All...

Yikes, it's been a while since I've posted... and to think for the first 9 months of this blog, I think I posted every single day. I guess I just don't have that much content and I wore it out early... but in reality I think it's more due to my new working arrangement and being more focused when I'm...

This has happened to me a couple of times, and I don't know how, but I got into a state where when in Word, when I selected text and pressed the backspace key, it would move the cursor to the front of the word instead of deleting the text. The delete key still worked. To fix this, check this box: Tools...

3 months before I moved out here and started working at Microsoft, a friend of mine told me: "KC, you need a pilot... because you have the organizational Zen, but not the tools required to implement it". Little did I know that I would shortly find that tool, and it would be Outlook. I apparently give...

When you type ":-)" in Word, it automatically corrects it into a smiley ( J )[1], which is the letter J in the Wingdings font. If you look at the HTML, you'll see: <span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Wingdings;color:maroon'>J</span> If you would rather that it use the unicode smiley...

We recently had a debate on the internal bloggers distribution list about how MSDN bloggers need to play nice and not hard-code their font faces, colors and sizes. I admit that I'd been guilty of this myself, so I've since resolved to stop doing that, and I figured it was worth a blog post to talk about...

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. Moreover, I'm describing the history of the situation from when I actively worked on this area several years ago. Some things may have changed since then. I started my career at MS as a tester on the Outlook team, as a contractor;...

This is one of those features that a lot of people love to hate, where you have to wait a few seconds or go to the little chevron on the bottom of the menu to expand it: It doesn't bug me too much - except when it hides the MRU (most recently used) list in any Office application, which drives me...

I got myself into a bad state a while back where I was unable to open messages attached to other items. It happened while I was monkeying around with this custom form which adds a column to the view. I don't remember exactly how I got into the bad state, but I learned a few things while troubleshooting...