Monday, 29 March 1999
Yesterday I spent over five hours helping a friend to change her new personal computer's default email program from Microsoft's Outlook Express to Microsoft Outlook, which she had installed as part of Microsoft Office. She hadn't been able to get Microsoft Outlook to work with her Internet Service Provider (ISP), and asked me for help.
Converting from Outlook Express to Microsoft Outlook is supposed
to take about three minutes: Fire up Microsoft Outlook, make it
the default email program, and import the ISP account and server
information from Outlook Express. When you try to import that
information, however, you are first confronted with a list of
about ten different file formats from which you must select the
format of the file that contains the information you want to
import. At that point we didn't even know the name of the file
that contained the information. After poking around for half an
hour, I found one of the files we needed to import:
Outlook.pst.
The .pst
file format was one of the choices we had seen earlier.
Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook crashed quite reliably (with an
"invalid page fault") when we tried to import that .pst file.
These crashes must have corrupted the operating system, because
the machine generally locked up a few minutes later. I learned
to reboot the operating system every time a program crashed.
My friend already knew this. According to her, people who use Windows 98 regard rebooting the operating system as a routine operation.
After wasting more than an hour trying to import the account and
server information, we decided just to type it in all over
again. This was much harder than you might think, because the
information was scattered through almost a dozen forms that were
accessed using about half a dozen different sequences of menus
and submenus and tabs and buttons. The forms that were reached
through the menus of Microsoft Outlook were different from the
forms that were accessible through the menus of Outlook Express,
and the names of the fields were different in confusing ways.
For example, my friend's
Earthlink
account name consisted of her
email name prefixed by ELN/. When a form asked for her user
name, should we type the account name or the email name? There
were several such ambiguities for which we had to guess what to
type.
Our first guesses didn't work, and we didn't understand why. Then we noticed that there were many different versions of the configuration file that we were trying to use. Apparently each of our attempts to import the ISP information had created a new version of that configuration before crashing. Knowing that all but one of these configurations were corrupt, we decided that the safest thing to do was to remove all of them and to start over.
That was a mistake. When next we fired up Microsoft Outlook, it told us that it couldn't locate the configuration file, which is what we expected to happen, but then it entered a mode in which the menu item that we had been using, and needed to use again to create a clean version of the configuration file, was not even present. We spent about an hour trying to figure out how to get Microsoft Outlook into its normal mode of operation so we could fix the problem. Eventually we recovered by using Outlook Express to edit the configuration.
By then we had discovered Microsoft's Internet Wizard, which is supposed to make this sort of thing less painful. In a weak moment, we tried to use the Wizard to set up our configuration. The Internet Wizard didn't seem to know how to do anything more than we had already done, however, so we began a systematic exploration of the Cartesian product of the logical alternatives for the ambiguous fields of the many forms. Eventually we found a combination that allowed Microsoft Outlook to log in to the ISP and to send mail to ourselves that could not be delivered. We did, however, receive the messages that told us our test messages were undeliverable.
This partial success had taken another hour or so. For example, the Microsoft Outlook menu item that actually sends outgoing mail to the SMTP was called "Check for new mail" or something like that; it took us at least 15 minutes to discover this. Along the way we found some release notes that mentioned an Internet patch for Microsoft Outlook. Judging from the unreliable and counterintuitive behavior of Microsoft Outlook, we assumed (possibly incorrectly) that this patch had not been installed when Microsoft Office was installed. By then we were ready to believe that Microsoft Outlook just could not be made to work with an ISP without that patch, so we reverted to Outlook Express as the default email program.
But Outlook Express no longer worked! Attempts to send mail resulted in an error message saying there was no such server. The message did not tell us the name of the missing server, however. We checked all of the ISP account and server information for the dial-up network and for Outlook Express, but it was exactly as it had been when we had started.
Finally we called Earthlink technical support, where Brian
answered after we had been on hold for only five minutes. When
Brian heard the error message he said, "We can fix that", and
walked me very quickly through over a dozen steps that located
and then deleted a file named ELN that resided somewhere down
inside a directory whose name was something like VdX. That
was the fix. I asked him what had happened, and he said that
the Internet Wizard had created this file, which contained
incorrect information.
We tested Outlook Express, which was working again. We tested Microsoft Outlook, which worked for the first time. If we hadn't tried to use Microsoft's Internet Wizard, we would have succeeded in "only" three hours, instead of more than five.
I have been able to avoid direct personal experience with Microsoft products for most of the past decade, but I have been programming computers since 1971, I have a PhD in mathematics and computer science from a reputable institute of technology, and I have worked in the software industry or as a professor of computer science for my entire adult life. In short, I am a certifiable computer nerd. In the midst of our struggle to convert from Outlook Express to Microsoft Outlook, my friend asked how non-nerds manage to do what we were doing. They don't, I replied. They learn to live with the limitations of preinstalled software, or they pay someone else to install new software, or they let technical support walk them through the entire installation process. The cost of all this boggles my mind.
William D Clinger
Last updated 9 June 1999 (to correct the title).