Bad webmail - no excuse
Written 20 Sep 2004
<p>In this day and age (lovely common phrase, isn't it ;) ) it is inexcusable that an Internet Company (read: Web Host, ISP, etc) provide an atrocious webmail application. With the likes of <a href="http://www.squirrelmail.org">squirrelmail</a>, <a href="http://www.ilohamail.org">IlohaMail</a> and more, there is very little to excuse such companies. However we find companies such as <a href="javascript:void(0);/*fckeditortemplink*/">1and1</a> hosting doing just that, inflicting deficient webmail programs on their users.<br/> Consider some of these deficiency:</p>
<ul>
<li>According to their webmail faq <q>1&1 WebMail provides the full functionality of an e-mail program.</q> When checking your mail, the webmail program states: <q>If you run into trouble, please use your local mail client.</q> Why?</li>
<li>Try to forward an email. The email body is blank and there is not hint of it being attached.</li>
<li>Using reply all will not work when email addresses are formated as A User <me@example.com>. Unless you consider receiving errors from the smtp server about badly formed email addresses because the webmail application changed all the > and < into HTML entities to be proper.</li>
</ul>
<p>And there is more. Plenty, plenty more. Please companies, when deciding to offer webmail, use a program that already does it right, there is no excuse anymore not to.</p>