Outlook *Express*!!!

Lets be fair here... this abortion of a virus propagator and occasional e-mail client has no right to still exist, let alone to be used for anything even remotely, feasibly, possibly important. Even MS have tried to disown it as much as possibly and, very sensibly, re-wrote something pretty much from scratch for Vista (incidently they also fixed the insanely stupid "everything all in one file" storage system in the Vista mail client as well).

Anybody that still uses it really gets what they deserve.

Let me get this right. . .

OUTLOOK EXPRESS!!???

THEY USED BLOODY OUTLOOK EXPRESS FOR CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS?????

/give me a beer and my coat I give up.

"It took the Government techies so much time to realize that the email system of the most powerful man in India was not working properly for 3 months!"

That is pathetic.

It's a bigger WTF that he was using Outlook Express, surely?

"It took the Government techies so much time to realize that the email system of the most powerful man in India was not working properly for 3 months!"

3 months? It takes me 7 months to read my email on outlook.

They were using Outlook Express... for critical emails...

FFS, maybe they should have just been using IncrediMail.

Paris, because she's retarded, too.

Oh c'mon, Outlook *Express*? Please don't tell me that any businesses rely on that, let alone nations. Thunderbird beats it hands down as a POP/IMAP client, but I still wouldn't use it for business. If it was Outlook proper (you know, the one that talks to Exchange Server, the one that half the civilised world use), then the story would be "India's PM dumps MS", but actually the story is "India's PM's technical staff are fucking retarded".

Well that's what you get if you pay techies $5 an hour...

The tech people must be really dumb over there, outlook express isnt a mail server its a client you dumb jerks! whats the difference anyway everything in india is pirated so they werent paying for MS software anyway HA!

http://thetechfather.com

No seriously thats actually quite quick for any government department.

It took 6 months for the UK to notice that the recession was upon us. Its taking almost a year for GB to notice that he f it up 10 years ago with no regulation.

It took 60 visits by a social worker and then the baby actually dieing before the county council noticed that the child wasnt being looked after.

so in context of goverments 3 months is hardley a blink of an eye.

If only the UK give would go open source, at least all the millions spent on blundered IT projects wouldn't just be written off as "licensing" agreements.

Maybe they outsource their email support to India. Oh, hang on ...

...Instant Excuse. "I didn't get an e-mail about a test ban. What are you on about?"

Don't blame IT on this one. If the user doesn't report the problem how are IT supposed to know. If they did know then they could have advised a simple reboot to sort the problem out (c'mon, this is Windows). Can't excuse IT for letting them use OE though!!

And for those saying use Outlook? Hmm. Lookout Express is a piss poor program but actually stepping up to 'slightly warmer and less yellowy' piss poor isn't much of a solution. Unfortunately idiots decide what we use and they think Microsoft == good! Luckily I have a choice and my email client just works!! And it is not MS crap!

on a side note: To Chris Miller Posted Tuesday 17th March 2009 23:15 GMT

Hilarious. But it makes you think. Do they outsource their stuff to America?

It's worse than Outlook. Seriously. Our old-ass Ensim servers use it and it's bloody horrid.

Arse, I just spit coffee all over my keaybored. ;-)

Thanks for that! :-))

Did he expect an email from The Bishop of Manchester?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/17/malware_hits_church_email/

Could be related !!!

Squirrelmail is a decent browser based mail client but it's not without its problems particularly (in earlier versions at least) rendering HTML mail, attachment handling, support for multiple mail account profiles and performance issues with large mailboxes (even with multithreaded indexing enabled).

On the client Thunderbird or Evolution mail are more likely to have been deployed as replacements for Outlook.

That any security, performance or cost concious organisation should dump M$ Exchange on the mail server for UNIX / Sendmail / Qmail or similar is no real suprise.

Having said that when you consider the costs of hiring / training highly skilled technicians and engineers to run critical infrastructure superficial open-source migration costs savings are lessened. But the clear benefit is that you gain a genuinely skilled and adaptable engineering staff rather than a bunch of M$ point-and-clickware morons.

team that looks after Orange's Tech Support

It took them 6 months, 3 million escalations in India and letter from the Small Claims court to enter a bloody MAC address into a database...

their proper techies have all buggered off abroad

To admin,

I hear you and know the feeling exactly... my forehead wears thin every time I press my hands upon it with disbelief of the nonsense going on...

"we saw the Outlook Express was not working"

what the hell sort of grammar is that? My bet is it was working fine but they were too retarded to use it; as proven by the fact they let a virus into government machines.

..and how many emails a day do a i get asking me to outsource to india?

and i think i will pass, remember if you pay peanuts you get monkeys

paris - she likes to spank monkeys

The office of the Indian Prime Minister has reportedly ditched Microsoft's Outlook for open-source email following a computer virus that caused a massive breakdown in communications.

It doesn't matter WHAT email client you have, a virus will bugger up any computers email I'd have thought! Or is squirrel immune to viruses that wipe files, block ports etc!!!

And India does plenty of outsourcing in IT? It show how IT in India is sub-par in quality.

SquirrelMail?

Only three months, they had some outside help, obviously.

Couldn't have said it better myself!!

Frankly I think "sorry, we've had a computer virus" as an excuse for completely ignoring the views of their electorate is better than our Government's brazen contempt for those who put/keep them in their jobs - at least they made an effort with their BS ...

Why do you think we outsource to India? Because they're cheap! Sod the training and experience of the home grown lot, they cost too much. <sarcasm> As long as they can answer the phone and can say "Which version of Internet Explorer are you using", what's the beef? </sarcasm>

Seriously! I called up to report a fault in a dial-up server and they ask me which version of IE I am using*! My answer? Unbroadcastable.

*Especially as I was using RISC OS at the time!!!

I have been personally assured by many H1-B engineers that everything Indian is better, faster and most important of all cheaper than anything that could be found in the states. Further that all of our security concerns are unfounded and that not even physical access control is necessary. This is therefore an end-user issue and who needs all that old email anyway?

Why is everyone bashing Outlook Express? I've used it for the past seven years, is perfect for my needs - a simple and sturdy email client - and I've never had a problem with it. Never had a email virus either, but the email server is mostly to thank for that as it uses blacklists, whitelists, and greylisting, as well as virus scanning all emails before they are released for download to OE. I presently have just under 1Gb of emails stored in my OE .dbx folders (which are backed up daily), and OE shows no sign of slowing down.

It's not what you use that's important, it's how you use it and the security measures you take to safeguard your data.

As others have said, If the Indian PMO has lost emails, then they need to find out why, and not just blame OE. I very much doubt that the problem lies with OE.