Posted on December 21, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 2 Comments
In a time where customer service reps are often less than helpful, we now have computers emulating that poor service. I called a colleague at his office today and got his voice mail. Since he wasn’t there I hit “0″ to get the operator. The convention for the “0″ key in most phone ACD (automatic call distribution) is to ring the switchboard. Not only did the system balk at my “0″ entry but it told me to get help elsewhere and then come back to try again. As you might anticipate, this wasn’t helpful at all.
Listen to a recording of this particularly rude computer. You can hear me hitting “0″ several times and the computer’s response.
Posted on December 21, 2007
Filed Under Internet | 9 Comments
Have you ever been one of multiple recipients on an email and gotten caught in a storm of “Reply to All” activity? I have - it’s annoying and I want a way out.
What we need is an “Opt out of this thread” option. I think implementation would only be feasible within proprietary email systems that don’t rely on Internet standards to route messages between users. (The capability to support this doesn’t exist in the Internet email protocols [e.g. smtp, pop3, and imap].) For example, I could see this implemented within the boundaries of corporate email systems (e.g. Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes) or public systems such as Hotmail or Gmail but not between separate email environments or systems.
In a sea of gimmicks to reduce email overload I think this option could have a positive effect.
Posted on December 10, 2007
Filed Under Corporate IT, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment
I’m using a Blackberry against a Lotus Notes back-end. When I receive an email message with an image pasted inline (vs. as an attachment), I can’t view the image; it’s represented as “<< image >>”. I’m not sure why the Blackberry or the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) don’t present the image as a viewable attachment, but there is a workaround. If you forward the email to your web-based email account, e.g. Yahoo or Gmail and then browse there from the Blackberry, the image(s) will either be viewable directly within the message as HTML or will show up as a viewable attachment. As a quicker alternative, some of the big email services have an applet that you can run right on your Blackberry (I downloaded Google’s Gmail application for Blackberry directly from my device at http://gmail.com/app). With this approach, I simply forward the email to my Gmail account and view it (images and all) using the Gmail app.
Posted on December 10, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 13 Comments
I use the Lotus Notes client (I assume this information applies to Microsoft Outlook against Exchange as well, but I haven’t verified) on my laptop for most of my corporate email access. By default, most people work in “online” mode, meaning that the email client is communicating directly with the server, just like when in the office. In this situation, replying to or forwarding emails with large (multi-megabyte) attachments can be painfully slow since attachments have to travel the network both ways - the email client has to bring the attachments down from the server to your machine and then send them back out again with the outgoing message. (If in fact you choose to keep a copy of the sent message, the Lotus Notes client* will actually send the attachments to the server twice, once for the recipient and once to save a copy in your mail file, for a total of 3 trips across the network!**) And since most residential Internet connections are asynchronous, the outbound delay is multiples of the inbound.
A trick for avoiding this delay is to use either your Blackberry or browser-based email access to reply to or forward the large attachments. In both cases, the attachments are kept server-side; the data never traverses the network to your Blackberry or browser.
* Tested with Lotus Notes 7.0.3 client against Lotus Domino 7.0.3 server.
** Verified using Ethereal packet sniffer.