Zman's Diary : outlook

So Microsoft - you want me to use gmail now?

zman — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 02:18:00 GMT

So I got my windows phone. I had access to some early units and read a lot so I knew I was going to be pretty happy... and I am.

I really like the people hub - with a few clicks it bought in my facebook people and my live messenger people. Where people are in more than one place you can link them and it magically keeps everything in sync. Very cool. Once I visit the phone store to get my contacts transferred I will have almost everyone in there.... ALMOST...

The bulk of my contacts are in Outlook. Sure some are duplicated on the old phone, facebook and messenger but the ones I can edit and keep up to date are in outlook. Surely Microsoft has a way to sync those... OMG NO THEY DON'T

Hey windows phone has a calendar - that would be cool to have in my pocket - how do I sync that from outlook? OMG YOU DON'T

Lets see what google says about this - it knows everything right: Survey says.....

Wow lots of choices there - and not one of them allows you to keep your master contact list or calendar in outlook. There's nothing that automtically syncs outlook to any of the 'cloud' services. I can import them but its a one shot deal. Maybe that would be OK as the primary store if outlook would then use that as its calendar/contacts list - but no thats an import the other way. Also I have my own domain for email so I really dont want to use hotmail or gmail.

Essentially the message from Microsoft here appears to be "we don't care much about the 10+ years of people and events you have in outlook if you buy a windows phone". Unless you want to pay for hosted exchange of course.

So now I begin the search for my 'cloud based' life... since google is the only one that will allow me to continue to use my domain with google apps I'm not really seeing much choice here. Hopefully some of you out there who enjoy the Microsoft lifestyle have a reasonable solution.

Comcast, I guess all the stories are right...

zman — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:22:00 GMT

I've had comcast internet for 5 years at least and I've always scoffed at those who mock their customer service. Really the only choice around here was DSL with Verizon (a company I think I have spent about a week on hold with in the past) or Comcast. In all that time I've suffered no serious downtime, didn't get bandwidth capped (I don't torrent so maybe that's why) and I've never had to call their support line.

So imagine my surprise today when I spotted all my emails piling up in the outbox and getting an error about not being able to connect to the server. I've seen this before, usually blame the email provider and switch to a different address while it gets fixed. Today ALL my outgoing emails - 4 accounts across 3 different email providers was failing. After half an hour of fiddling and googling I noticed that GoDaddy sugest using different ports if you have problems so I changed it and magically that account started to work. I hunted down alternative ports for all the accounts and everything was back to normal.

It seems comcast randomly turn off port 25. Its rumoured they monitor traffic and then block it, or they do sweeps across some servers or something. Either way they turned off a service without bothering to tell me. Nice, real nice.

If only FIOS wasn't provided by Verizon and if only they would publish the prices for FIOS and FIOS TV on the internet instead of making you phone up and talk to some sleazy agent..... and if only FIOS TV would work with my old analog DVRs.... makes you want to go back to a 56k modem and rabbit ears on top of the TV...

Outlook or Vista not indexing? Check your power options!

zman — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:59:00 GMT

Over the past few weeks (months?) I've noticed my searches in outlook getting worse and worse for accuracy. Oven more odd the searches are always accompanied by the:

"Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed. Click here for more details"

When you click you get the indexing status box (also available from Tools/Instant Search/Indexing Status) which always tells me there are 40,000+ messages to index. Quite worrying but not enough for me to do anything. Well today I couldn't find a piece of email which means me getting some money so I felt obliged to fix it.

There's various fixes out there Exchange System Management Tools breaks indexing or Rebuild the index on your computer. None of these worked for me. I even hit "restore defaults" which deletes the index and forces a reboot. I did notice that when I hit rebuild it always said "Complete" right away. Even more annoyingly it would then say "0 items indexed" and to really rub it in "Indexing speed is reduced due to user activity"

Googling for that final phrase found this: Power Options stops indexing. I checked my power settings and it was on balanced. I switched to Power and as soon as I did the index count started going up. I guess at some point in the past I had decided to be a little green and one of those settings convinces the indexing service to do ABSOLUTLY NOTHING. This wouldn't be so bad if there was any other way to search in outlook. At least Windows explorer will drop back into slow mode where it actually looks in the file but outlook just DOES NOTHING BUT SIT ON ITS HANDS while telling you that the search results at STILL incomplete. What a horrible design flaw. At least in the indexing status box put a message that says "Al Gore has decreed that indexing is bad for the dolphins so we stopped doing it".

Anyway now I have 9000 items indexed and a few of them appear to be my outlook emails since that count is now down to 33,000ish. Lets hope I put all the right keywords in here so that others can find it a bit quicker than I did.

(Yes I know that's a lot of email - I'm a VERY popular guy you know)