Speaking of email, I am ready to kill Outlook.

First, (didn’t I note this previously?), in Outlook Office 2003 under XP SP2, the email program does not make a clearly documented, essential feature – redirection – available to users unless they are running the application in an Exchange server environment, and the help documents make no mention of this whatsoever. At least I have the small comfort of knowing I burned a solid four hours of support time on that ludicrous question.

Second, another crucial feature is disabled for users in non-Exchange environments. There is no way to define and use a range of correspondence templates such that the boilerplate can be easily and directly inserted at the cursor or such that the user can generate replies to inbound email directly from the template. The ideal use-case in this instance should be that a control-click on the “Reply” button would generate a contextual menu that included nested menus for the email templates.

You can define email templates, and even work with them to integrate them into user-facing widgets such as toolbars. But since the majority of boilerplate correspondence in any business environment is responses to the same seven to ten queries, the current necessary workflow – open, select, copy, close, paste – is absurd in the extreme.

I was further embatsinated by the apparent impossibility of duplicating user-created toolbars other than via manual click and point. Since a toolbar is contextually specific, only toolbars bound to a given view are accessible in that view. You can’t make your toolbar of templates and then simply drop it into every window that might spawn; you have to recreate it manually each time, as far as I was able to discover.

The upshot of this is that a one-hour setup turned into an endless four hours of miserable help-file spelunking and googlations.

Last week, as I realized I needed to drop Outlook in order to gain access to redirection, I installed Eudora 6.2 on my primary machine at work. I was appalled to see my old friend in such a state; although I was able to do the specific things that Outlook will not permit, the sad truth of the matter is that Outlook now offers a vastly superior user experience, from the comprehensive use of single-click access to the user-interaction elements (including organizational tools such as folders and flags) to the carefully designed three-column default display. By comparison, Eudora now feels irrationally organized and shaky, even recalcitrant.

Perhaps the superior naive-user experience led me to expect a similar polish behind the scenes. I don’t know. I can say that my wrists and back hurt needlessly from the stress of wrestling with the odious, abject failure of the deep UI and featureset. It’s the worst email client you can use, except for all the rest.