Re: Wave 3 makes the Hotmail UI as convenient as punch cards

Anonymous wrote:

Dear Microsoft,

And just where did you get the mistaken notion that this newsgroup is a
free venue to Microsoft support? The webnews-for-dummies interface to
Microsoft's Communities is their attempt to pretend they have forums
while actually usurping the Usenet.

WHY did you make the recent Wave 3 changes to the web interface to Classic
Live Hotmail?

Evolution does NOT guarantee change is goaled towards a successful
adaption or change. It just means change based on some influencing
pressure. For software, that pressure is dictated my folks outside the
Development group who simply do what they're paid to do. That a change
doesn't make sense to them doesn't mean they get to choose not to
implement that change.

For some reason, you decided to screw up the To: field. The basic design of
SMTP email has this field as comma-delimited text.

Wrong. SMTP *never* does have any comma-delimited, semi-colon
delimited, or other delimited field used to specify the list of
recipients. Your e-mail client will compile an aggregate list of
recipients from the To, Cc, and Bcc *fields* within its UI. Those are
fields within the application, not fields used in the SMTP commands.
Once the aggregate list is compiled, the e-mail client sends a RCPT-TO
command for each recipient to the SMTP mail host. For N recipients,
there are N RCPT-TO commands. No comma- or other character-delimited
list is used to specify the recipients to the SMTP mail host. Once all
recipients have been identified to the SMTP mail host by the RCPT-TO
command(s), a single DATA command sends the content of the message to
the SMTP mail host. The To, Cc, and Bcc fields (although Bcc should not
be included) are included in the *data* of the message and are NOT
directly used to specify the recipients. That's why spam can have
anything they want in those headers that are *data* within the message
but get delivered to a completely different list of recipients specified
by the actual RCPT-TO commands that were sent to the SMTP mail host.

That an input *field* in the user interface in the e-mail client lets
you use commas, semi-colons, or whatever it allows has nothing to do
with what gets sent to the SMTP mail host. As such, the UI in the
e-mail client can represent a list of recipients in whatever manner its
developers choose.

But for some warped
reason, you decided to implement Javascript to alter the user's typing to put
each email address in a little box with an X next to it.

As I recall, you were never able to use the prior Classic UI or even the
original MSN Classic UI for Hotmail without Javascript being enabled.
My guess is that they figure it is easier to click on an "x" button to
remove an unwanted recipient than to click around in a string field
trying to position the insert point and then having to use Backspace,
Delete, and other keys to manually edit the unwanted recipient(s).

It is now impossible to correct typos in email addresses after this box
appears. Instead, the user has to delete the address by clicking the X, and
type the whole thing over again.

If the recipient's e-mail address was wrong then it is usually smarter
to wipe it completely and rewrite the entire e-mail address than try to
edit it and get it wrong again.

And the messed up Javascript often merges two email addresses into one long
gibberish address in a single box when the user tries to type something in
the beginning of the line (the order addresses appear is important -- it
shows who the primary recipient is).

If the order is unimportant then why are you trying to insert another
recipient at the start of the To field rather than at its end?

Copying and pasting is now impossible as well.

I just tested this. In Notepad, I entered a line with 3 e-mail address
that were comma delimited. I then copied that line and pasted into the
To field shown in the new Wave 3 Classic UI for Hotmail Live. The paste
worked okay and I got 3 recipients shown (as objects) in the To field in
the Hotmail UI. Maybe you have something installed on your host that is
interfering with Javascript code.

This takes user interface design backwards about 40 years to the days before
interactive terminals -- it's as bad as punch cards, where one mistake means
you have to redo the whole chunk of typing. WHY DID YOU DO IT?

*We* peer users that comprise the community of users participating in
this *newsgroup* don't know. We aren't privy to Microsoft's marketing
group or other influencing factors that force Development to employ
changes that they may not agree with but have to implement anyway. This
is a newsgroup. Although you are using the webnews-for-dummies
interface for Microsoft's Communities, that is Microsoft pretending they
have forums by usurping Usenet.

Also, there's still no way I can find to set the default email format to
Plain Text, and the option to manually change every message I compose or
reply now takes several more clicks than it used to.

Then why are you using a webmail-for-dummies interface? Obviously it
will NEVER have all the features of a local e-mail client. You can get
a paid Live Hotmail Plus account and use any POP3/SMTP e-mail client
with it. Or you can use Windows Live Mail (WLM) as the local e-mail
client to access your freebie Live Hotmail account using Deltasync.

In a similar vein, if you want better and more potent features than
available in Microsoft's webnews-for-dummies interface, use any local
newsreader (Outlook Express, Thunderbird, 40tude Dialog, Xananews,
XNews, or whatever) to do newsgroups.

And when there's an error in the To: address, Hotmail still removes the line
breaks in the body of the message and turns it into one huge blob. How hard
is it to *not* mess with the bytes stored in a block of text? Not corrupting
the body of emails isn't rocket science -- it's basic email software design.

That's not Microsoft's fault. In HTML, multiple whitespace characters
are always compressed into a single whitespace character. If you want
to use a tab, you'll have to insert a tab. If you want multiple spaces
to remain then use the   entity code for each non-breaking space
character. Alternatively, you could use the <pre>text</pre> HTML tags
to insert "code" data that keeps its plain-text representation.

Switch from Rich Text mode (which is not the RTF mode using TNEF
formatting in Outlook but merely a generic term for non-plain text
encoding within a message) to HTML Edit mode if you want to have more
control over the HTML source code of your HTML-formatted e-mail message.
You could also switch to Plain Text edit mode which would also eliminate
the HTML default of compressing multiple whitespace characters into a
single whitespace character.

What you see happening is the same as would happen if you entered that
same text inside an .html document. HTML will compress whitespace by
default. That's not Microsoft's fault.

A reply from Microsoft would be useful, especially since their web interface
to this newsgroup implies that I'm "sending Microsoft a comment", but I don't
have my hopes up.

Again, although Microsoft is trying to usurp Usenet to pretend it has
forums, don't expect to use Usenet as a free venue to obtain free
support from Microsoft. They probably do employ scripts to trigger on
posts with the "This post is a suggestion" signature in posts submitted
into the microsoft.public.* newsgroups but don't expect any replys.
Considering it similar to repeatedly pressing the cross-walk button at
an intersection: it may be effective (but you won't know for sure) or
it's just a placebo to placate the user.
.

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