Tag: outlook

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Why is There No Universal Email Web Client?

Wow. It’s been over a month since my last blog post. And who would’ve thought possible, but I think I got sunburnt today. Really? My forearms are really red…

Today I wanted to rant about a technology that should’ve existed a long time ago, but I have not found any company that offers the product I want. Back before GMail made its debut, everyone was using Outlook or Eudora (I still remember servicing Eudora clients during my college job).

However, once GMail came out, that changed how people began to use email. Shortly after, Hotmail (now Live Mail) and Yahoo followed suit, with the convenient access and the high storage capacity. And for most people, that’s enough. Most people only have 1 personal email address and 1 work email address, and GMail and these other web email solutions work out great for them.

However, one of the main reasons people I think people have stuck with Outlook or Mail is the fact it can support multiple accounts. I have 4 or 5 different email accounts that I use on a regular basis and it’s extremely convenient to be able to access all of them in 1 simple application. I can search through ALL my emails, quickly glance to see which accounts have new emails, select which email account I want to send from, etc.

In today’s model, each email service has its on web client. If I didn’t have access to my computer or smart phone and wanted to check my email through a public terminal or a friend’s computer, I would have to sign in and out of each email account on their respective websites, which is a hassle.

Why hasn’t anyone made a email client web app that supports multiple email accounts. Outlook does have a web version called OWA (Outlook Web Access), but it only works for the exchange server that is backing it. I want to be able to provide an app with my email credentials and it would go and fetch all my email into 1 convenient location, where I can access from any computer in the world.

GMail does support fetching email from external accounts into your GMail account and they even have the ability to send as a different email address (once verified), but you lose the separation of accounts, which I find important.

Before I got my smart phone, the way I got around this was remoting back into my PC at home and using Outlook on that machine. I still do that today, but with my smart phone which also has access to all my email accounts, it’s has become less of an issue. Still I find myself composing emails through the remote session since typing emails that are more than a couple sentences long is such a pain on your smart phone.

Maybe one day, my wish will come true.

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2.5 Year Old Email (Finally Read)

Just got the following read receipt:

Your message

        To: gmil****@gmail.com
        Subject: FS: ECS PT890T-A LGA775 Motherboard for $35 shipped
        Sent: 2/15/2007 4:31 PM

was read on 10/6/2009 8:51 PM.

Ungsunghero suggests it may have encountered the same fate as those recent missing UPS packages that have randomly showed up:

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Couldn’t Send/Receive Emails with Attachments Greater than ~3MB

So awhile back, I hit some weird problem with my email. I was trying to schedule weekly backups of my websites and email them to me. My HD-Trailers.net backups worked fine, but my Krunk4Ever.com backups were giving me problems. The email would come through and the size would be correct (~5MB), but the email didn’t have any attachments. I tried copying it over to another directory, and the size shrinks down to a few KB.

Thinking it might that my Krunk4Ever.com mail server has some attachment size restriction, I tried sending it to my GMail account and the same thing occurs. Do note, I have GMail mapped in Outlook 2003 as a IMAP folder. I see a 5MB email, but no attachment listed. For the time being, I concluded that someone’s restricting the attachment size and I would just go and backup manually once a week.

However, another problem occurred when I was trying to share a video with someone. It was a 3.12MB video and Outlook would just not send it. It kept on giving me the following error:

Task ‘Krunk4Ever – Sending’ reported error (0x800CCC13) : ‘Unable to connect to the network. Check your network connection or modem.’

Searching for that code resulted in some winsock error, but that didn’t get me anywhere. I decided to shoot DreamHost an email and their reply was:

Our email supports up to 40 megabytes for outgoing and incoming emails. Our webmail; however, is limited to smaller file-sizes If you need to send-receive large attachments you would need to install your own custom webmail and possibly PHP or use a full-featured email client such as outlook or thunderbird. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

It turns out not all large attachments were blocked. A few 5MB files have gotten through before, and if I just keep trying, eventually they make it through. I went to GMail (web based) and searched for previous emails where I had sent my backup databases and they were indeed okay and I could see the attachment fine. That led me to a preliminary belief that Outlook or IMAP had some sort of attachment size restriction. Testing it out in Thunderbird was something I had planned to try next, but didn’t really get around to it.

Today, I was trying to email my work email some logs that some Vista people wanted and I hit the same darn problem. I eventually uploaded it via OWA (Outlook Web Access), but then that got me angry. So I began searching around for other people who have gotten the 0x800CCC13 error, but a quick skim didn’t result in anything useful. There were a lot of mentions of firewall and antivirus, but think that my regular email came through fine, I didn’t see how a firewall or antivirus would be acting up…

Then I tried disabling my antivirus and resent the large email. Guess what, it WORKED! !@%$!$#%#!@%@%#!@% The antivirus software I use on my main box is CA (Computer Associates) eTrust, which is what we use at work. Given that Microsoft is a software company and they mandate us to use eTrust, I just assumed it was good enough. eTrust is actually rather nice. It’s small, lightweight, and pretty nice on the system resources.

So I went into eTrust to see if I could configure this weird email problem I was getting. I could not find a single email option to configure. It does mention it scans incoming and outgoing emails, but there was nothing to configure that was email based. The only possible solution I saw was to add Outlook to the exclude list which I didn’t want to do.

I eventually decided to uninstall eTrust and went with AVG which I’ve installed on most of my other machines, and my emails with large attachments appear to be working fine.