I hate webmail.
Nov. 14th, 2003 09:38 pmAny lj post I might have been going to write yesterday was eaten by KCL's webmail. To cut a very long rant short, it is evil at the best of times: and yesterday it was being completely evil.
The basic problem with webmail (just about any webmail, I think, except maybe ones that use javascript to keep the connection alive) is that the www was not designed to be used as a text editor. So webmail programs have this alarming habit of expiring your session when you're in the middle of writing an email. It wouldn't be too bad if they saved the mail before shutting down, but they don't. So you go to send the mail that you've spent 25 minutes writing, and the damn thing logs you out. Grrr.
Having experienced this too many times, I was being ultra-paranoid yesterday. As the email was kinda important, I was hitting the "Save as Draft" button every few minutes. Did this several times, so I had a really up-to-date backup of the mail when I hit Send. But it seems KCL's dear webmail program saves its drafts somewhere internal, not in the Drafts folder used by the "real" email program that I use when I'm at college - and not only that, it eats the draft when you hit send. Even if the message doesn't actually get sent!
Fucking piece of crap software. In future, I'm going to write my email in Microsoft sodding Word. At least when that dies, you can usually recover your work from somewhere.
I suppose it's good preparation for my night of installing The Sims, though...
The basic problem with webmail (just about any webmail, I think, except maybe ones that use javascript to keep the connection alive) is that the www was not designed to be used as a text editor. So webmail programs have this alarming habit of expiring your session when you're in the middle of writing an email. It wouldn't be too bad if they saved the mail before shutting down, but they don't. So you go to send the mail that you've spent 25 minutes writing, and the damn thing logs you out. Grrr.
Having experienced this too many times, I was being ultra-paranoid yesterday. As the email was kinda important, I was hitting the "Save as Draft" button every few minutes. Did this several times, so I had a really up-to-date backup of the mail when I hit Send. But it seems KCL's dear webmail program saves its drafts somewhere internal, not in the Drafts folder used by the "real" email program that I use when I'm at college - and not only that, it eats the draft when you hit send. Even if the message doesn't actually get sent!
Fucking piece of crap software. In future, I'm going to write my email in Microsoft sodding Word. At least when that dies, you can usually recover your work from somewhere.
I suppose it's good preparation for my night of installing The Sims, though...