I use Horde for my web-based email here at mischel.com. Not because I particularly like it, but because it’s the best of the three options I’m given by my ISP. The other two options are Squirrel Mail (aptly tagged “Webmail for Nuts!” because you’d have to be nuts to use it), and the interestingly named RoundCube Webmail, which is two oxymorons in one. Not that Horde is so much better. It’s just the best of three bad options. To date, it hasn’t aggravated me enough to make me want to go to the trouble of switching.
Tonight I went searching in my Trash folder for a message. Since their search function is, to be kind, somewhat lacking, I figured I could more easily find the message by sorting the folder by the From field. Then just scroll down to the ‘M’s, (the message in question was from my sister Marie) and locate it. So I sorted, scrolled down, and … there were no messages from Marie! Where are they? Why, they’re sorted further down with the ‘O’s, of course, because her email address starts with ‘O’.
That’s just stupid. I could maybe understand it if the program showed me the email addresses in the From field, but it doesn’t. It shows me the name. So what I have is a list that’s sorted by email address, but shown in what appears to be random order. You want a sample? How about the following? The first column shows the names as they appear in the list when I sort by the From field. The second column shows the email addresses, which aren’t shown in the user interface.
| From | email Address |
| Presidential Who’s Who | info@2009strathmore.net |
| Charterhouse Leads | info@thecharterhousegroup.com |
| Phil | info@thecharterhousegroup.com |
| jennifer@greenschoolfundraiser.com | jennifer@greenschoolfundraiser.com |
| TechWeb | msdn@e.techwebresources.com |
| Amazon.com | music-store@amazon.com |
I think you get the idea. If you’re searching for that email from Amazon, are you going to look for it with the rest of the ‘A’s, or with the ‘M’s?
(Spammers and email harvester bots, please pick up those email addresses and spam the hell out of them. They do it to me.)
Is there any wonder that people think computers are confusing? What moron decided that sorting by email address and displaying the name would be a reasonable user interface? Whoever designed and implemented that should be sentenced to three months working with Microsoft’s Business Desk, as well as a boot camp like refresher course in user interface design.
The really odd part is that sorting things the way they did it is more work than doing it the way that makes sense. The From field in an email address appears in one of two ways: either it’s a naked email address (jim@mischel.com), or it’s a name followed by an email address in brackets (Jim Mischel <jim@mischel.com>). A simple sort by the From field would have placed things in the proper order: by name if there is one, otherwise by email address. To sort the wrong way, they had to parse the From field, extract the email addresses, and then sort.
More work to produce less useful output. Yeah, that’s a good idea.
Idiots.
I’ve had enough. I’m looking for a better email solution. It has to be web-based, and it has to let me keep my current email address. Oh, and the interface has to be at least as good as Yahoo’s. (And I’d rather not use Yahoo for my email because it does stupid things.) Preferably, I can keep my current ISP and either change the DNS entry for mail, or I can have the other mail provider reach to my ISP and get the mail. Either way, I have to free my email from the Hordes. Suggestions?