| Recent Posts | About the Author | Navigation |
|---|---|---|
|
|
David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
|
| Recent Comments | ||
|
|
||
| Recent Photos | ||
|
|
||
15 July 2002 - 2:29 pm
Note: the following will prove to be very boring for the majority of our readers, but I need to get this off my chest.
Frequent readers might recall that I served on the committee from hell (aka the CEC Mail Advisory Board) last Fall. Our goal was to select a web-based mail client for WashU's engineering school. Like most committees, we failed to accomplish much of anything. After three months of work we came up with the three programs listed on this page. The committee members were split into two rival factions, the open-source lovers, who favored SquirrelMail, and those of use who wanted the best mail client possible, and preferred EmuMail. I don't want to go into it in any depth, but there were a number of reasons to prefer EmuMail.
Anyway, here we are 6 months later, and SquirrelMail is the only client still running, so I'm guessing it's the winner. And because I'm behind a firewall here at work, I've been using it everyday to check my email. And let me tell, SquirrelMail sucks.
Have you heard the adage "it's the little things that count?" Well, someone needs to mention it to the SquirrelMail people. They wrote their client entirely in php, a server-side language, when a combination of client- and server-side scripting would be much better. For example, there is an option to select all of the messages in the inbox so that you can delete them all or mark them all as read without having to select each and every checkbox for every message. This isn't a unique feature; sites like hotmail have had this for ages. What is unique is the bone-headed way the SquirrelMail people implemented this feature. The logical way would be to use some Javascript or other client-side scripting to select the checkbox for each message. That would be very fast for the end user, and super easy for the programmer to implement. The SquirrelMail way is to post back to the server, let the server regenerate the page on the fly, except this time it will check all of the checkboxes for you. Oh, and as a byproduct, it gets any new mail that may have arrived and checks the box next to it as well. So in addition to being unnecessarily taxing on the server, if you aren't paying close attention you can easily delete mail you hadn't read by immediately selecting delete after choosing select all. And this instance is just the tip of the iceberg; SquirrelMail is filled with UI nightmares like this. I wish I knew why the CEC chose this stupid program as its only webmail client.
Okay, I'm sorry about the boring rant. I'll stop now.
Posted by on 15 July 2002 at 2:30 PM
Comments