Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

<rant>

I dislike Microsoft.

There are many reasons why, but this is one of my current peeves: Outlook’s Recall Message Feature.

In the last few days, I’ve received several emails with the body text of “<sender>would like to recall message <subject of earlier message sent by same sender>”. This generally causes my blood pressure to rise and sends me into an irrational snitfit (in the grand scheme of things, this is NoBigDeal. But it’s Microsoft, so I often feel at least *somewhat* justified in my snits…). Apparently a “feature” in Microsoft’s Outlook email software is the Recall This Message tool, which is intended to be used when a person sends an email “accidentally” and wishes to retrieve it, as if it were never sent.

This is ridiculous.

According to Microsoft’s Knowledge Base article:

Now, I am willing to wager that general users of Outlook are not aware of these limitations, and see this as a tool that should work most any time they try to use it. Unfortunately, this feature will *not* work if the recipient receives mail on a unix system (my case). This will also not work if the recipient has set up automatic filters that pre-filter incoming mail to designated folders (also my case). When an Outlook user tries to recall an email that was sent to me, all that happens is that I receive *another* message stating that they’ve tried to recall it. I’m not a special case in this regard, either - there are probably 2000-3000 non-Outlook users in my company that would not be affected by this (not to mention the many Outlook users for whom this feature also wouldn’t work because of reasons stated above, as well as the large number of email recipients outside our corporate environment who don’t use Outlook).

Mucking about with email messages once you’ve clicked that SEND button should be prohibited. Just like with snailmail, if it’s been put in the mailbox, kiss it goodbye. If you’ve made a mistake, just send another message with an apology. Microsoft has customized their mail clients/servers with a non-standard “feature” which gives many users the impression that it’s something that will work when they want it to. This is not the case, and should never be the case - I don’t want to give anyone the ability to delete messages that are already in my mailbox, or sitting on my mail server. This strikes Husband (and me) as a huge potential security problem as well - anyone know how hackable this feature is? What’s the likelihood that someone could use this to delete random messages from other inboxes??

*grumblings* Bloody Microsoft. *grumblings*

</rant>