So the internet broke up with me today. Thankfully, it was only a short divorce. It got about as far as Fargo, then turned around and came back to me. We've reconciled our differences and will be resuming our happy marriage with fervor. However, during our brief hiatus, I caught a glimpse of what life is like without the internet. Here's a sample:
I was in the middle of composing a fairly involved email to a coworker of mine when I lost connectivity. My email is actually an Outlook account which requires a VPN connection to hit the server -- so when the network goes down, I get these lovely modal dialogs that say "cannot connect to blah blah blah." Since the net appeared to be gone forever, and I was tired of seeing these stupid dialogs, I wanted to close my email client down. However, I didn't want to lose my long email. So I tried to save a draft.
And then I found out that for my case, drafts are saved on the server and only on the server. Not locally.
I can understand saving drafts on the server. It's kind of handy to be able to write a draft at home on the desktop, then go to the airport and continue the draft from the laptop. However, what I can't understand is Thunderbird's incredibly stupid behavior when there's no connection to the Outlook server. Not everyone has stable network connections, and failing to save data when the internet is down is a horrible user experience. To a normal user (aka, not a computer geek like myself), the two don't even correlate!
Hopefully, since the net and I have resolved our differences, I won't ever have to run into this situation again. But it'd be nicer still if I never ran into it because Mozilla implemented a fall-back mechanism for saving drafts.
what version of outlook are you using? 2003? 2002? 2007 doesnt usually do that, it will pop up balloon notifications to you in the systray. You should make sure you are running in cached mode as well.
I'm using Thunderbird as my client, and connecting to an Outlook mail server. The version is unknown to me though.
There are these cool things called the clipboard and wordpad. O:)
What version of Thunderbird? When I look, there is a setting in Account Settings > #mail server name# > Copies & Folders > Drafts & Templates where you can select a specific local folder to store drafts. So far as I can tell, it can be set to have "Drafts" on your client machine even when the rest of the local folders are elsewhere.
@S-Copinger -- I'm using the latest version of Thunderbird (2.0). Your suggestion is an excellent one. However, I actually want my drafts to be saved to the Exchange server, but only if an internet connection is present. Since my network is up 95% of the time, that's very handy behavior. I'm grousing about the 5% of the time when the network is down. Failing to save a draft locally (and then bugging me about it constantly) boggles my mind. It honestly feels like they never anticipated the use case where the network goes down.
The network goes down ?
Naw ..... I mean really when does it ever not work :P
Heck if you live where I live it goes out all the time and Google Apps suck when it does.
Ever tried Google documents on a dial up modem (yeah they still have those)
There's still lots of places where 24/7 high speed is not the norm
How about that "handy" address book! If you accidentally delete a contact there is no warning and it's all over but for the crying! You'd think they would give you an option to be notified like they do for just about everything else but no. Even with the latest v3 this annoying tidbit is still there to bite you.