And so it was that on top of the fact that I have to run
Windows 2000 at work, that I'm also required to use MS
Outlook 2000 for
Exchange Server.
Outlook must be the most counter-intuitive piece of software this side of XWindows. Of course all of my software documentation has to go in Exchange's Public Folders, and multiple email accounts and message rules with Outlook 2000 is nothing short of a vigilante street fight. And then there's that meeting scheduler component, which attempts to do everything but wipe my own arse.
Sometimes I get my email automatically with Outlook, but other times I get suspicious and hit the "Send/receive" button, which will occationally prompt the Exchange Server to re-download duplicate copies of the 1000+ messages to my Inbox. Then again some other times it just downloads new mail messages, just to keep me on my toes.
Using Outlook is also great fun when you're offline. This is just like using Outlook online except you can't see the contents of any of your mail messages. This isn't anything to give you pause though, as you can still read the message subjects clear as day.
For the last three working days I've been hitting CTRL+N to check my email. I believe that starting a new mail message reminds Exchange Server to automatically send me my email, and it avoids having to resort to the unpredictability of of Outlook's built in fucktionality.
Update: Okay okay, I was half suspecting (ie should have known better) that the multiple mail messages thing was a server-side misconfiguration, however it's still amusing to check email with CTRL-N. From the perspective of the user, i find commercial Outlook not worth the trade off.