Delete the Universe

Here is the start of my daily routine: open Microsoft Outlook to read email, start reading email, find email I want to delete, press the Delete key to delete said email, get the following error message:



I get this error message because I haven’t properly unselected the Inbox and selected the actual message I want to delete — even though I am reading the actual message I want to delete.

This is one of those examples of extremely annoying default software behaviour: I will actually want to delete my Inbox, well, probably never. I will actually want to delete a message, say, 200 times a day. Outlook would be able to figure that out, you would think: “hey, he’s reading an email and he pressed delete — he probably doesn’t want to delete his Inbox, so I’ll delete the message he’s reading.”

Comments

Andrew's picture
Andrew on July 23, 2002 - 14:23 Permalink

I have a mail folder setup in Outlook Express that all emails from my preteamRecords.com email go to. I have the same problem hitting the delete key while the folder is still selected. But unlike the inbox, folders do not give you the error, they just delete… Very annoying having to redo all the mail rules to get things back to normal.

Andrew's picture
Andrew on July 23, 2002 - 14:24 Permalink

Oh, and my mom has the same problem too. I’m sure the three of us are not alone on this one, Peter.

Jake Howlett's picture
Jake Howlett on July 24, 2002 - 17:06 Permalink

Lucky you don’t use Opera for mail. I once deleted *all* of my folders (Inbox included) by accident. Opera makes this kind of stupidity all too easy.

Thank god I do backups…

Justin's picture
Justin on July 25, 2002 - 03:24 Permalink

I deleted outlook express the day I brought my computer home. Eudora does what you want. I go to Mailboxes drop-down menu to go to my mailboxes, and to the Tools drop-down menu if I want to delete a mailbox. It’s ‘oops-proof’.