Time Warner Finds AOL Email Inadequate

DragonMagic writes "MSNBC.com carries this article describing the woes at many of Time Warner's companies after AOL's merger, where the internet giant tried to migrate them all to AOL's email services. From crashing software and attachment limits, to missing and misdirected mail, companies such as Time Magazine had to go so far as to have hard copies rushed before deadlines by cab! Plans are now to retreat from this forced migration and return to the services previously held by each company."

Comments

Now all they have to do

[Scratch-O-Matic]

is find AOL in general inadequate.

Re:Now all they have to do

[Chundra]

Hell, they might as well find the entire AOL Time-Warner conglomerate inadequate, round up all the suits, shoot them, and use their carcasses to make pet food, hot dogs, and spam. It's so easy to do (no wonder it's number 1).

*yawn*

Re:Now all they have to do

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

Hell, they might as well find the entire AOL Time-Warner conglomerate inadequate, round up all the suits, shoot them, and use their carcasses to make pet food, hot dogs, and spam.

Ewww... don't we get enough SPAM from AOL already?

Re:Now all they have to do

[Anonymous Coward]

i *told* you AOL sucked. at least we're all on the same page now

Re:Now all they have to do

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Ewww... don't we get enough SPAM from AOL already?

But just think: now the SPAM is AOL.

Ted Mail

[C. Mattix]

Wow. . and who would have thought that the "Ted Mail" commercial was true!

Re:Ted Mail

[the Man in Black]

That was the first thing I thought as well (glad it wasn't just me).

Wasn't that an IBM commercial? Man, I miss AdCritic.

Re:Ted Mail

[Anonymous Coward]

The IBM commercial I like is the one where the simian idiot is out there dribbling around a basketball with Linux written on him, and they say "he's so stupid he works for free."

I cannot understand why Linux freaks don't riot after that insult.

Re:Ted Mail

[Asprin]

Refresh my RAM - what's the "Ted Mail" commercial?

It's not too bad...

[alapalaya]

...At least you can't complain about spamming.
Maybe they designed an anti-spam filter and went a bit too further. :)

Re:It's not too bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

What AOL does with there email servers doesn't prevent spam, it just makes it inconvient for the average person to send out multiple cc to people. They are a bunch of morons!

You mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Warner merged with the Internet!?

Obviously no one paid attention

[wikki]

Obviously the person who sent out that decree has either a. never used aol mail, or b. never used email in a corporate environment. AOL limits the number of messages and attachment sizes. Only lets you save the files in "AOL" format. Folders are limited, and you can't create rules. It is made for the old grandma and grandpa to be able to communicate with their grandkids and send them pictures and other cute little notes. If someone had done just 10 mintues of thinking on this they would have realized the mistake they were making.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[great throwdini]

Obviously the person who sent out that decree has either a. never used aol mail, or b. never used email in a corporate environment.

Obviously the person who wrote the above didn't even bother to understand the situation. From the particular article referenced in the Slashdot "story":

The various types of e-mail software used by employees aren't the same as those used by America Online subscribers at home. Instead, the divisions customized AOL products, such as those from its Netscape unit.

Emphasis mine, smartass.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Netscape employee. I use an Netscape 6.2 (or Mozilla if I'm eating dogfood) for mail and it works great. I also fire up AOL client on occasion. None of the software I use is modified in any way and is exactly the same software as a user runs.

I have never seen a custom version of either product, but if they exist I doubt the changes are more than cosmetic.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[TedCheshireAcad]

This seems to be a classic example of if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it syndrome. TW's previous system seemed to handle their needs, and after the merger, they switched to AOL? Does anyone see the logic behind this? If you have a system that gets the job done without complaints, don't change it.

~my $.02

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[wikki]

does it mention what changes were made?

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[PaschalNee]

>Does anyone see the logic behind this?
I can see some logic behind it. Rather than maintaining/supporting/upgrading X different systems across the various companies why not standardise on a single system. Now the choice of system to standardise on leaves a bit to be desired but the decision itself was, in my opinion, a sound one.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[blibbleblobble]

Ironically, they wanted to cut down on licensing costs.

I'm reasonably surprised they're not using free software, given their mozilla and their linux-client projects.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Computer!]

I'm suprised that they had to migrate back. Since the Conglomerate was using custom software, why didn't they throw some of their umpteen gazillion dollars at the software, and make it work? If the email system is bulletproofed and refined, the benefits could be passed on to AOL's customers, increasing value for the service. It's sad to see them bail out so quickly on eating their own dog food.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

The decision was a sound one? And it screws up coporate email for over a year, doing irreparable harm to their business and costing AOL/Time Warner untold man hours? Admit it, the CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER either never ONCE used his own software for email, or at the very least didn't get the correct information from his subordinates.

There are free versions of competing clients (Outlook, Eudora, Pine etc. etc.) that have more features than the full version of AOL's mailer. And they WORK.

The "idea" to use their own email client might have been understandable, but the "decision" definiately was not. If it was up to me, Robert Pittman's title wouldn't be Co-Chief Operating Officer much longer.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you're an idiot.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Look mom! A sub-genius!

They were using a modified Netscape/mozilla mail, which, for them, is as open source as could be.

One requirement is that their email agent run on Windows and Macintosh, which rules out 99% of the other "free software" solutions.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[billtom]

Well, I would say that the logic is that any company that could use it's own products and doesn't opens itself up to criticism concerning the quality of said products.

If the executives at Ford don't drive Ford cars then what does it say about Ford cars? If Microsoft developers don't use Visual Studio, what does it say about Visual Studio? If AOL/TW doesn't use the email system that AOL/TW sells, then what does it say about that email system?

So when one company buys another the new company has to try to use the products of both companies, regardless of the transitionary costs (e.g. Hotmail and Microsoft server OS).

The (unforunately named) phrase is "eating your own dogfood".

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[walt-sjc]

While the CLIENT software may have been custom, it sounds like the SERVER portion was standard AOL. This would explain the attachment limits, spammer tagging, etc.

Also, since AOL is planning on using a mozilla like system replaincing IE, and has been putting big bucks into continued Netscape browser developement, my guess is that the client software was netscape 6 based. Considering how stable NS6 is, coupled with the AOL server backend, it's no wonder the system sucked.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[flatrock]

While you're right that you should have enough confidence in your products to use them yourself, there are some differences between the email needs of a home user, and Time. Unfortunately, the Suits at AOL didn't realize this before they implemented the plan. If the 2% of email becomming lost was a real problem, rather than user mistakes, then AOL isn't even suitable for home use in my opinion, but I honestly doubt 2% of the email was really being eaten by the system.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Technician]

Would you want an AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Goecities, Earthlink or other consumer mailbox for business e-mail. They are all targets of Dictionary spam attacks. I prefer something more along the lines of IBM.com GE.com Westinghouse.com Intel.com Catipillar.com etc. I doubt they get the volume of enlarge your (insert body part) now spams of the consumer ISP's.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[ethereal]

I'm going to coin a phrase:

"Standardization is the last refuge of an incompetent CIO"

This is from a company where the ultra-reliable sendmail servers were replaced with Exchange, which has been down corporate wide for up to a week at a time. All so that we could standardize on Microsoft.

Hmmm, maybe it's the "Microsoft" part that really makes the CIO "incompetent"?

I'll grant that there are benefits to standardization, but it seems like large corporate standardization efforts are driven top-down; nobody asks the users what they want or even what they need to get their jobs done. So the results satisfy some sort of CIO goals checklist, but the real result is that lots of time at the ground level is wasted. It's like top executives are allergic to feedback that doesn't come from Wall Street sycophants or something.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Octagon Most]

"Well, I would say that the logic is that any company that could use it's own products and doesn't opens itself up to criticism concerning the quality of said products [...] If AOL/TW doesn't use the email system that AOL/TW sells, then what does it say about that email system?"

It says that their products are appropriate for their intended consumer audience and not necessarily for everyone. AOL markets to the low end, the new user, and their product is perfectly appropriate to that user. It is not nearly appropriate for business use.

I used to work at Kraft Foods, and I assure you that at company headquarters the cafeteria does not serve Minute Rice, Stove Top stuffing, or Oscar Mayer wieners.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Winged Cat]

Perhaps now they'll come out with products that are usable by businesses, then find out it's not that much effort to let home users use the same quality as well? One can wish...

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[stevey]

TW's previous system seemed to handle their needs, and after the merger, they switched to AOL?

Its a PR thing - exactly the same as Microsoft wanting to switch hotmail from running BSD to Windows.

Regardless of the fact that the previous installation worked its a PR nightmare waiting to happen:

"So AOL, maker of a fine corporate email system, you run Exchange? Why is that? Doesn't your software work?", etc.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[doorbot.com]

~my $.02

Unfortunately, your $0.02 is easily outweighed by AOL's $109,100,000.00 market capitalization.

And you obviously didn't read the article, because AOL wanted to switch TW over to prove how good the AOL system was (I assume AOL uses it for itself...?). And TW didn't use the AOL client... they just used the (crappy) AOL servers.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[plague3106]

"So AOL, maker of a fine corporate email system, you run Exchange? Why is that? Doesn't your software work?"

That can be answered by a) 'Our mail system is intended for home, not business use' or b) 'We have full confidence in it, but there's a system workign in place already, and there are no benefits to be gained by spending the money to switch.'

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[monkeydo]

This is from a company where the ultra-reliable sendmail servers were replaced with Exchange, which has been down corporate wide for up to a week at a time

You make me laugh. You work at a company where the sysadmins cant' get email working and you blame the CIO? Maybe it is his fault for not firing the "incompetent" schmoes that can't figure out haw to make Exchange stay up. You know Exchange isn't inherently more or less reliable than Sendmail it's mostly up to the people who run it to make it so. I doubt the CIO was admining your servers.

It seems like large corporate standardization efforts are driven top-down

So? Everything in a corporation is driven top-down. The guys at the top tell you what the goals of the company are and they set the direction and tone. They give you the tools and the resources and it is your job to do it. If you don't understand that you don't have a place in an enterprise environment.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Standardization based on protocols and data formats makes sense. Standardizing on =products= does not. Standardizing on products =looks= cost effective but in the long run means that the company becomes slaves to a vendor through lock-in practices. The customer/vendor relationship becomes reversed and the vendor is able to extort tribute from the customer.

If you standardize on protocols and data formats, you can choose products based on your admin and user skills. When those skills change because of the market, you can change your product and not be forced to support some legacy, proprietary system for which skills are increasingly rare and expensive.

This is especially important as corporations become larger because skills in one locale may not be the same available in another.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Lemmy Caution]

Interestingly enough, I was told by a lead in the IE team that no one in Microsoft ever used MFC. That was strictly for export only.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[_ph1ux_]

because most companies tend to try to "leverage" their own products, thinking that it will be a cheaper solution in the long run. They tend to think that since it is their own product, they have the in-house expertise to handle it and it will provide a lower TOC.

forget the fact that they sometimes tend to forget to try to "leverage" the many many thousands of dolars worth of existing equip they may have already deployed into production.

for some companies this works for them, for others it does not. AOL case in point.

the thing that AOL may have overlooked - to turn this into an opportunity to write some actually good software and try to make a corporate email package. course maybe they know that any slightly tech-savvy person would avoid any AOL corporate email package like the plague. :)

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Computer!]

If those mailboxes are the targets of dictionary spam attacks, and I was the multi-billion dollar company behind those domains, I would make it so that those mailboxes were no longer the target of dictionary spam attacks. In fact, those companies beginning to use those addresses for business may be the first step in destroying spam as an industry.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I know this from second hand knowledge of at least one company.

My mother works for warner brothers down in los angeles. ALL she's been talking about is how they're going from exchange (and she doesn't know this, she says "outlook" and I say "exchange") to this "aol stuff" as she called it. I kept on laughing thinking the same thing. what fud.

They rolled it out about 2-3 weeks ago, and she was making me laugh so hard when I'd talk to her on the phone. Things like "they gave us new machines with everything installed, but it wouldn't work" to "I sent an email and it came back to me, what do you call that?" it's called a bounce mom. You entered the email address incorrectly. *ROFL*

DONT think that the software is TOO far a cry. They gave everyone a choice since both were preinstalled on all the new desktops. Either netscape or aol mail. alot of people chose aol since they've used it at home, thinking it would be a swift transition.

I can't wait to call my mom and say "HEY! YOUVE GOT SLASHDOT!"

ROFL

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

If the CIO's following the rule of "if it ain't broke, fix it until it is", then he's the incompetent. The previous sendmail configuration wasn't broke. The CIO tried to fix it anyway. The CIO, therefore, is the incompetent. And the evidence is that Exchange *is* inherently less reliable than sendmail (which is a pretty sad statement.)

And it may be top driven, but if the people at the top make technical decisions in opposition to the advice of the people who actually have technical knowledge, then they're idiots.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[baptiste]

Considering how stable NS6 is, coupled with the AOL server backend, it's no wonder the system sucked.

Total FUD. I've got many users using NS 6 Mail and they're happy with it. I've used Mozilla mail for almost a year now and I can say right now its the best email client I've used for what I need (an email client - not email, calendar, to do's, etc, etc, etc like Lookout) Now that Enigmail is out for GPG integration - I'm loving it.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Delphis]

Or use QMail and have a nice, peaceful, time of it all.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[ethereal]

Although I somewhat fault our sysadmins (because some of them are Microsoft monkeys and deserve it :) in fact the week-long outage was due to a Global Address List replication bug within Exchange. Perhaps Exchange is as reliable; but the user-perceived reliability of it is that it is a significant downgrade from sendmail (really, I'd like to see a user base which doesn't feel this way after getting stuck with Exchange). It also requires more hardware to service an equivalent user base, leading to higher support costs, etc. and exacerbating the reliability problems.

So? Everything in a corporation is driven top-down. The guys at the top tell you what the goals of the company are and they set the direction and tone. They give you the tools and the resources and it is your job to do it. If you don't understand that you don't have a place in an enterprise environment.

See, that's the problem - the guys at the top shouldn't be specifying tools at all. They should specify what they want and what they're willing to provide in order to get that done, and let the people that know what they're doing pick the tools that work properly. If people who don't know what they're doing pick the tools, then sometimes it becomes impossible for those with the know-how to get the job done with the tools they're given. And unfortunately blame usually rolls downhill, which is another truism of how large corporations work.

Top-down works great for setting goals and expectations. It does not work great for creating excellent technical solutions. Especially if there's a lot of micro-management and politics concerning those technical solutions.

The reality is that employees at a large company are the customers of IT, just the same way that an ISP or a web site might have external customers. But since the inside of the company is a feudal estate, employees get the shaft on the IT front with disturbing regularity. Employees put up with internal IT failures that would drive actual paying customers away in droves. But when you're top-down, you don't have to worry about annoying metrics like "user-perceived reliability", I guess.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Miguelito]

So? Everything in a corporation is driven top-down. The guys at the top tell you what the goals of the company are and they set the direction and tone.

There's a huge difference between setting direction and tone (i.e. "Here are our goals") and telling your IT department "You will use this tool... period!"

We've had that happen too, and it's always a nightmare. When tools are chosen based on the direction and tone, then things go a lot smoother.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually work for one of those business units and our "customised client" is plain Netscape 6.2 with an RSA secure ID

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Grishnakh]

Or they could answer, "Out mail system really sucks, and we're not stupid enough to rely on it. Luckily, our customers are morons, and we're laughing all the way to the bank about it."

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[mateub]

This seems to be a classic example of if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it syndrome. TW's previous system seemed to handle their needs, and after the merger, they switched to AOL? Does anyone see the logic behind this? If you have a system that gets the job done without complaints, don't change it.

Then again, there is a well-known counter-example. Mr. Bill supposedly mandates that everything Microsoft does be done w/ Microsoft tools, when available. (There is of course the well-known exception of the Hotmail servers, but anyway...) It sounds like another bullshit CEO mandate, but what should happen is that your employees use the tools they develop. If the CS's have to use the tools, they get pissed off at the same annoying bugs that piss off end users, and they fix them. You get better products, and your company didn't spend money on something that was nominally the competition. Reasonable, no?

All that said, I tend to agree with you. Just as--last I heard--MS never got Hotmail working on Windows servers, AOL-TW should have pondered whether the needs of their thousands of employees were the same as the needs of people who are swayed by getting a free AOL CD in the mail.

adéu,
Mateu

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL can't even sort the software out that they have as evidenced by multiple issues with AOL 7 and XP AOL 6 and 5 with winsock and other issues. To make the e-mail actually sort and handle large volumes of e-mail the ability just isn't there.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what your expectations or the expectations of your users are, but Netscape 6.2 is certainly not up snuff with 4.7. Even the later Mozilla builds (where tons of effort has been put into mail/news) are questionable. A year ago the thing was completely unusable.

My guess is that your users have either never used the alternatives or that you aren't getting feedback for whatever reason (open source zeal?).

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[AnalogBoy]

Actually.. My uncle, who is a VP For Warner Brothers, says it -is- the same. But he's on the road a lot and works out of a home office when not on the road. So it's likely he doesn't have the most ideal setup.

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[ethereal]

qmail rocks - I use it at home and found it very easy to set up and configure. How well does it do in enterprise situations?

Re:Obviously no one paid attention

[stevey]

Yes, you are right, however thats not something that the marketting people would see....

Sad, but true.

So what's the old system?

[sheldon]

AOL is gonna be really angry if Time Warner switches to using Hotmail.com. :-)

Re:So what's the old system?

[rhost89]

At least then they would be on FreeBSD :)

Re:So what's the old system?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Hotmail was migrated to Windows 2000 a couple years ago.

Re:So what's the old system?

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Warner is gonna be really angry if Time Warner switches to using Hotmail.com. :-)

Why use AOL?

[DrXym]

I don't know if they're using the AOL client or not but there should be no need for them to either. AOL owns Netscape and owns a share in iPlanet so there are plenty of "normal" email options to choose from both on client and server.

Perhaps some overzealous manager issued an edict that everyone *must* use AOL even though it's email software is next to useless in a work environment.

Re:Why use AOL?

[great throwdini]

I don't know if they're using the AOL client or not but...

...I'm going to go ahead and post my speculations anyway? Does that make any sense at all?

[T]here should be no need for them to either. AOL owns Netscape and owns a share in iPlanet so there are plenty of "normal" email options to choose from both on client and server.

A reasonable attempt to apply logic to this topic. Unfortunately:

Perhaps some overzealous manager issued an edict that everyone *must* use AOL even though it's email software is next to useless in a work environment.

Or perhaps not. You take the time to point out that AOL/TW controls a number of possible resources they could leverage, then jump right back to the assumption that the corporation rebadged AOL 7.0 for internal communications. Unbelievable.

At least read this excerpt from the MSNBC article. Or maybe go back and read the article first?

Re:Why use AOL?

[Arimus]

Perhaps some overzealous manager issued an edict that everyone *must* use AOL even though it's email software is next to useless in a work environment.

It's next useless in a non-work environment.

Good point about iPlanet lineup - though the Calander server seems to loving screwing Windows servers up (Yes I know its meant for unix)....

Re:Why use AOL?

[DrXym]

I've read the article before posting, but irrespective I know a lot more about the situation than you do and I stand by my comments.

Stop being hole-picking conspiratorial prick and say something useful or say nothing at all.

Re:Why use AOL?

[Mark Pitman]

AOL owns Netscape and owns a share in iPlanet...

Not anymore!

Sun and AOL will officially conclude their original Alliance agreement on 17 March 2002. iPlanet is now a division of Sun and remains a core component of Sun[tm] Open Net Environment (Sun ONE).

From iPlanet.com

Re:Why use AOL?

[Big Ben August]

This is no longer true. The "alliance" has been functionally dead since AOL decided to lay off its people in the alliance and Sun rehired most of them. AOL was shipping its hardware out of Santa Clara weekly back in November (IIRC, it may have been later).

It's been officially dead since 17-18 March.

--Ben "What, you didn't get the memo?" August

Bad Time Warner.

[Picass0]

Wouldn't Time Warner's critcism of AOL be a violation of the DMCA?

Re:Bad Time Warner.

[Picass0]

"Wouldn't Time Warner's critcism of AOL be a violation of the DMCA?"

Why was I modded down to troll for posting this? There have been examples where the DMCA has been invoked to quash criticism of products by websites. I just thought that AOL could use the DMCA to shut up Time Warner.

Lately I seem to have a moderator with a grudge against me. It would be nice if moderation wasn't anonymous.

Re:Bad Time Warner.

[RazorJ_2000]

And I quote: "Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal (pater@slashdot.org)."

Although personally, I agree with the moderator, it's a troll posting.

Re:Bad Time Warner.

[Chundra]

Well AOL and Time-Warner are part of one big happy family now. So it's not in their best interests to go suing eachother.

If you're a troll, I'm insightful.

Re:Bad Time Warner.

[Stonehand]

1. They're the same company now.

2. The TW part isn't exactly going to fall over due to random *not* credible legal threats.

Criticism, in general, has NOTHING to do with DMCA. Leaking proprietary information that was only obtained through breaking access controls does in order to achieve unauthorized access to copyrighted information, as does leaking information which itself facilitates breaking access controls. So, incidentally, does merely selling a service with the claim that it helps to do so.

But if you believe that the DMCA is an all-purpose anti-criticism law in contravention of the First, then either a) you're an idiot for posting about it without reading it, or b) you're an idiot for posting about it without understanding it.

Re:Bad Time Warner.

[Anonymous Coward]

...if you believe that the DMCA is an all-purpose anti-criticism law in contravention of the First, then either a) you're an idiot for posting about it without reading it

Of course.

Re:Bad Time Warner.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mother has faux balls, and a large, penislike clitoris

Re:Bad Time Warner.

[Teknogeek]

'Yo Mamma' jokes: the last refuge of the incompetent troll.

In other news....

[bigbadwlf]

CNN reports that "Hotmail crashes again - HA HA HA!!!"

duh

[smagoun]

Did someone actually think that this was a GOOD idea in the first place? Further proof that wearing a tie really does cut off circulation to your brain....

Ted Mail

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, Time Magazine actually implemented the Ted Mail strategy that was advertised during the SuperBowl.

"Where's my TedMail?"

"He must be having problems catching a taxi..."

What company was that advertisement for, anyway?

Oh wow... there's a surpise

[gatesh8r]

AOL email services not suitable for a corperation! Who'd of thunk it, really?

"Hi, I'm Joe C. Marketer for AOL-TW, and my email address is joecmarketer41284161826312698162@aol.com I was going to send you my presentation at first by an email attachment, but I can't because it's too big. Then I was going to burn it to a CD, but all the CDs are out so we can bury everyone with free trial CDs. So I had to run all the way to the cab, fetch the cab, and get you this presenation by hand! Man, I tell you -- this old-fashioned way sucks, but I lost 3 ounces getting here!"

Lotus Notes and Domino

[Anonymous Coward]

is the only email system which truly come close to being scaleable, robust and flexible enough to the very large enterprise.

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[bobdole34]

LOL @ Lotus and the guy who decided to remain anonymous when posting this hogwash.

It's truly no surprise that AOL is inadequate for a huge corporation; it's inadequate for home users.

Why does every website have to say "AOL Users click here"? Because they refuse to give up there failed attempt to make the internet a system of "keywords".

GO: _Away AOL_

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[mafryler]

Sendmail...tried and true. Running on Linux -- of course.

'Nuff said.

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot, Sendmail has NOTHING to do with this!

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[mafryler]

"Lotus Notes and Domino is the only email system which truly come close to being scaleable, robust and flexible enough to the very large enterprise." Sendmail, imapd, icalendar..ximian evolution; is that a reply that better suits you, Mr Anonymity? Do you even know what Lotus Notes and Domino are?

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?

The mail command is good enough for anybody.

What's with all this new shit? Sure, use sendmail as your transport agent, but the mail command is the only other thing needed. Screw your GUI programs. Fuck VT-100 and various other escape sequences. If I can't use it on my teletype it's garbage.

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[mafryler]

What you said! =-)

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[metachimp]

I don't know how AOL users fail to be insulted by their cutesy, PlaySkool approach to GUI design, but there you have have it. It's #1 because it's "easy to use". I have a friend who uses AOL because she thinks it's "easier" than clicking the dial-up icon. AOL is not any easier to use than a run-of-the mill dialup connection, but since they say its the easiest, it must be.

When more and more people get broadband connections, the ease-of-use argument will go away, and then AOLs user base will consist mainly of fat-butted housewives who like the bubble buttons.

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[Delphis]

No no no .. QMail .. only use sendmail if you don't mind running around after security alerts.

Yes, QMail is nice .. on Debian Linux, of course.

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[bobdole34]

lol

What an idiot

Re:Lotus Notes and Domino

[Anonymous Coward]

Lotus can point you to several Notes shops with 100K+ users. Ximian's largest install is probably Ximian itself, with what -- 20 people? The only big pure-IMAP implementations I've seen either are Netscape or use an Oracle backend. No comment on icalendar because I've never heard of it. I'll admit that sendmail does a great job all over the world chugging email into Notes and Exchange systems for delivery.

AOL Mail

[Smirks]

My dad works for a division of Time Warner called TDS (Time Distribution Services). Ever since the merger all he does is complain about how everyone has to use AOL for their email. I'm not too sure how good going back to their old email clients will work though... considering their previous software was Lotus cc:Mail 8... :\

No Real Suprise Here

[lysurgon]

I've always been somewhat mystified at the way AOL has been able to sell inferior services (slow service, high downtime, poor chat/email feature) to millions of users. Testiment to the power of marketing I suppose. On the other hand, that "community" stuff is a real thing...

Of course, now that they're in the business arena where a few hours of downtime means more than wating till tomorrow to send that email to grandma, and lo and behold they just can't cut it. MSN has the same problems. No credible business can put up with their downtimes and outages.

Now the executive level is beginning to understand how important these issues are. Someone could make a nice bundle of money by creating a credible business-class isp that doesn't suck (e.g. worldcom... generation d? yeah right).

Re:No Real Suprise Here

[lysurgon]

Actually, I did read the article. And at the time I was composing my post there were no comments at an above 0 value. While it's not surprising that my sentiments were similar to many other early posters, I didn't just read and rephrase them.

I'll be the first to admit that my reaction was less than groundbreaking. If I got mod points, it would be for more clearly and insightfully articulating my sentiments.

Re:No Real Suprise Here

[geekoid]

AOL is crappy, most people who use it know its crappy, but its easy. ou putin the disk, it installs, gets the numbes you need, set everything up. That is why it has had the staying power it has.
The community thing is important now, because there starting to platue, and there are more service that have relized most people want total automation, they don't care how its done, they just want it to be simple. Click mail button, get mail, read mail, go do something else.

Re:No Real Suprise Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Click mail button, get mail, read mail, go do something else.

Yes. That's the secret that very, very few OSS or Linux advocates seem capable of recognizing.

1. Click mail button.
2. Get mail.
3. Read mail.
4. Get back to the revenue-producing work you were hired to do in the first place.

Re:No Real Suprise Here

[maxpublic]

Hey, don't forget: AOL is the home of pedophiles, both online and in management. Yep, who better to promote family values than child molestors?

Max

Re:No Real Suprise Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is it hard to read email in Linux?

Your great "problem" can be solved by putting Evolution on a WindowMaker dock, or a GNOME panel launcher, or something similar. It's not hard. It's actually as easy to do as in Windows. And many many, many users already do this. Many Linux distributions do this by default. So what's the problem?

You're fucking stupid, that's the problem.

Re:You've got mail!

[Codifex Maximus]

Heh...

You've got mail!
You've got...
You've got...
You've...
You've...
You...
This program has performed an Illegal Operation and will be shut down.

Inadequate?

[Indras]

I've known about this for a while. My g/f just moved away from AOL because one e-mail she sent me took over a day to reach my e-mail address at work (which was asking me if I wanted to go out to eat that night, pointless by the time I got it).

Also, from what I remember of my AOL days (back when we used the "mm[1-9]" and "server[1-9]" chat rooms for our warez), the attachment limit is 18Mb. Has this changed? Or am I just remembering wrong?

Re:Inadequate?

[Reziac]

The attachment limit, as I discovered by trial and error (I have the misfortune to know a lot of people using AOL), when in effect, is 20k.

BUT... it depends on which version of AOL's mail server is used by the POP the client dials into. Some do just fine with any size attachment, others can't handle them at all; most typically, any message with an attachment over 20k, or with multiple attachments of any size, is simply lost. My WAG is that the ones that can handle anything are leased, not native AOL POPs.

The AOL client seems to be where multiple attachments get mishandled, if they make it that far in the first place.

In newer deficiencies, AOL6 apparently only knows how to send HTMLized mail. The owner of a mailing list that I'm on tried to switch the list to AOL6 (which he uses for personal mail), and after some thrashing around, we learned there was absolutely NO way to send plaintext! It goes out as HTML even if it LOOKS like plaintext in the mail window. So he had to switch the list back to his old software, thank ghod.

AOL clients still can't handle multiple REPLYTO's, and only see/use the first one. (I have two in my Netscape mail setup, since I have two main addresses that I use every day.) I suppose this is progress over when they only knew FROM :)

My guess is that the switch was mandated by someone who doesn't actually USE email for anything more than what AOL is designed to handle, ie. letters from grandpa to the kids. Because anyone who really USES email for business would already know all the ways AOL falls down in a business environment, if only from dealing with the everyday problems they get with mail sent to someone who uses AOL.

Re:Inadequate?

[Indras]

The attachment limit, as I discovered by trial and error (I have the misfortune to know a lot of people using AOL), when in effect, is 20k.

20k? Now you're blowing hot air. I don't know of any mail service that won't accept at least a megabyte. And I know I've sent 12Mb+ attachments via AOL. That's over 600 times the limit you've specified.

Re:Inadequate?

[taustin]

So far as I can tell, AOL's size limit on incoming attachments has a random number generator in it. I sell electronic books, and have sent files to customers at AOL on a regular basis. Sometimes, a 1 meg file will bounce to one address, but a 5 meg file will go through to another file minutes later. I have had far less than 1 meg attachments bounce.

Re:Inadequate?

[Reziac]

Um.. read ALL of my post. Yeah, if you're dialing into *some* AOL POPs, you'll have no problem with attachments of ANY size. Dial into a different POP in a different city, and suddenly any message with an attachment over 20k simply vanishes. When we looked into this a few years ago, we learned that it happens because *some* AOL POPs are running an antiquated system (don't know if it's software or firmware or both). To my certain knowledge, as of less than 6 months ago (when I last had to fix a client's troubles with AOL) it was still happening with some POPs in Los Angeles.

SENDING a large attachment via AOL isn't usually a problem. RECEIVING a large attachment via AOL can be a problem -- depending primarily on the POP you use as noted above, and somewhat on the version of the AOL client you use (there are lots of subversions of each major version, which can only be identified by the date and size of the installer -- some different ones have the same filedate).

Re:Inadequate?

[Reziac]

I've heard of people running into this too, where it works one time, not the next. Think that might be a matter of someone using a "good" POP, but with the "random" factor coming from however it gets routed inside the AOL mail system, and how busy it is at the moment.

One of my clients who is a former AOLer (having suffered from a Last Straw a while back) ran into the same problem as you, when trying to send manuscripts to his publisher (also an AOLer). Attachment worked one time, vanished the next.

A classic "suit" decision

[jht]

Bob Pittman may be the darling of Wall Street, but their decision to dogfood themselves was the kind of shortsighted, Dilbert-esque decision that only a suit with no connection with technical reality could make. I suspect nobody ever bothered to talk to the people who admin the various systems that were replaced - heck, it wouldn't surprise me if the CTO (whoever that is) wasn't even involved.

Even if they had switched in the long term, they tackled this project way too quickly (it's been just over a year since the merger went through) and it's glaringly obvious that they didn't think things through very well. Messaging on that kind of scale (multiple operating companies with differing hardware/OS standards, tens of thousands of employees) is not trivial to implement or manage and the suits upstairs should have either known better or had advisors to listen to who could have told them it was a bad idea.

This'll probably wind up in a business textbook someday in the "how not to integrate merged companies" chapter.

Re:A classic "suit" decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Another classic decision was Compaq's purchase of DEC and Tandem... To this day, there are large pockets of Compaq that do not have Wintel desktops, let alone laptops. Yet, many of the internal corporate web pages, such as vacation time cards, can ONLY be done on systems running Internet Exploiter. God forbid you try to access them using another browser on another architecture, because it flat-out won't work. All you hear from the support folks, of course, is the usual "Industry Standard" mantra that you'd expect out of the Wintel Weenies who've never logged into a UNIX or OVMS system in their lives.

Of course, when their Expunge servers hang, or go into loops, or gets bogged down by trojans, virii, and other fun stuff, the "Digital Classic" and "Tandem Classic" employees who still use SMTP just sit back and laugh.

Don't be jealous, folks - don't YOU want to work in a large computer company run by someone who majored in Medieval History, with a CTO who hates UNIX?

Re:A classic "suit" decision

[jmcnamera]

Even better than Pittman making what you call, "a typical suit decision" is that they suffered under it for over a year.

That is pathetic.

Re:A classic "suit" decision

[bpechter]

Wouldn't have expected too much more from Pitman who was an ass when he was Program Director of WNBC and put Ellie Dylan in to replace Don Imus.

A suit with a great ad sales background...

Another non-computer guy in a high tech company.

Bill

:D That's funny

[The Great Wakka]

All these years I've said "the problem isn't on my end, it's on YOURS!". Now I have proof.

MSnbc huh?

[isa-kuruption]

DragonMagic writes "MSNBC.com carries this article describing the woes at many of Time Warner's companies after AOL's merger, where the internet giant tried to migrate them all to AOL's email services.

Later in the article....

A better solution for your e-mail needs is Microsoft service called Hotmail available at http://www.hotmail.com, and it's FREE!

Re:MSnbc huh?

[Cheeko]

Its the the Wall Street Journal actually. MSNBC, just posted it off the news wire.

Re:MSnbc huh?

[Maserati]

And Microsoft is picthing MSN as an 'alternative" to AOL. That's gotta be the funniest ad campaign I've seen in a loong time.

Re:MSnbc huh?

[Ilgaz]

Yea, how interesting a MSNBC partner "breaks" those news...

The troll must be misguided but I really saw a MSN popup while reading the article...

Sometimes things are real simple, especially those dotcom crash whatever... Don't forget it.

AOL Email? Inadequate?!

[NowIveSeenItAllGuy]

Now I've seen it all!

Re:Look who is talking...

[TheTomcat]

Uh.. it's a WSJ article.
It says so right at the top.
MSNBC generally carries Wire stories.

good kneejerking, though.

Classic Problem

[4of12]

Funny. With tens of millions of consumers having to relay upon AOL email that their internal business units find it "inadequate".

It reminds of the dichotomy you find between "consumer" grade and "commercial" grade items, whether it be email systems or computer hardware or even construction.

Consumer grade has always been so price conscious that quality suffers, where commercial grade is always more expensive.

Software shouldn't have to be subject to the rule of this dichotomy, though.

AOL should clean up their act and put some efforts into adapting some open source email solutions to make them scalable to 1e7 users and to put on the shiny EZ front end that their consumers have come to expect.

Re:Classic Problem

[revscat]

Software shouldn't have to be subject to the rule of this dichotomy, though.

Why not? There is plenty of room in the marketplace, and the demand to support it, for a wide range of software from the same category. Consider databases: You have your cheap-o MS Access, suitable for a few users. Then you have Oracle, suitable for enterprise applications. One is a consumer grade product, the other professional.

Re:Classic Problem

[4of12]

Why not?

Well, once Oracle has been written, why not sell an Oracle-Lite to the SOHO market. Would it really cost all that much to do so compared to gaining a foothold in the low level marketplace?

Maybe I'm overlooking the costs associated with bringing out such a broad product line, or intangible costs such as a perception of Oracle being a lighter weight product if a cheap version is sold. Some products seem to possess a certain cachet that is related to the fact that you must pay a threshhold price to get them, but I would figure that IT buyers would not confuse an Oracle database with a Rolex watch.

Re:Classic Problem

[Dudio]

Well, once Oracle has been written, why not sell an Oracle-Lite to the SOHO market. Would it really cost all that much to do so compared to gaining a foothold in the low level marketplace?

Microsoft is doing this with Access now. The Jet engine is deprecated in favor of the Microsoft Data Engine, which is nothing more than a scaled-down SQL Server engine.

However, Microsoft has always counted the consumer market as the foundation of their customer base, so they already had consumer product groups in place, and have spent two decades building a brand in the consumer marketplace. Oracle OTOH, has always been focused on the enterprise market, so producing a Lite version would require them to form a new development group, add tech support staff, and build a brand in the consumer market. And they'd probably have to bundle it with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics program in order to have any hope of achieving significant market penetration. Altogether, this is a pretty expensive and risky proposition.

Re:Classic Problem

[pmz]

It reminds of the dichotomy you find between "consumer" grade and "commercial" grade items.... Consumer grade has always been so price conscious that quality suffers....

And there we have it: The Early Years of Microsoft Windows.

This is one reason Microsoft's "enterprise" operating systems are such kludges. They tried to take what people liked in Win 3.1, Win 95, etc. and shoehorn it into Win NT/2000.

Different markets + different requirements + one approach = something that satisfies neither market's requirements and is a bear to work with.

This, apparently, is the boat AOL/TW got into with their infrastructure. They aren't alone, either...I've seen more than one big corporation make similar bone-headed decisions from e-mail systems to payroll. It really is sad.

Re:Classic Problem

[DrXym]

I don't see what the problem is in saying their business shouldn't use the AOL client.

AOL Mail is designed to be a *simple* consumer email program. AOL cut the options and kept the thing as straightforward and easy to use as possible. Most consumers are quite happy with this arrangement since it meets their needs. AOL is happy because less options means less support calls when a user screws up.

I don't see any shame in Time Warner using another solution. AOL has iPlanet and Netscape software which is more than adequate for business. The challenge is getting the topography and uptime, which is more of a tech support issue.

Re:Classic Problem

[Junior J. Junior III]

Why not?

Because creating a cheapo lite version of an existing product costs MORE money in development costs. Once you've got your App developed, just sell it to as many people as you can. If you're only selling a "commercial grade" product, charge a high price to recoup your costs. If you're selling to consumers, greater economies of scale set in, and you can lower your price for EVERYONE while still providing the original, full-strength product.

It's not like making cars, where, if you're building 20 a year they can be of the quality of a lamborghini, but if you have to build 2,000,000 a year you have to make some concessions to quality and you end up with something like a Ford Taurus.

Sanity Check

[agrounds]

Not to undermind the braintrust of IT professionals at the Time Warner offices or anything.. but how could anyone firing on more than three synapses honestly find the AOL GUI-From-Hell to be a professional grade internet and mail delivery system? I can almost picture the hilarity that would ensue if I was to walk into any of my department or regional managers office and installed a mail application that featured more than four 'smiley faces buttons' and clicking on 'hearts' to access the company address book. By hilarity I mean: Termination Notice. It would only truly be classic, is when one of those poor helldesk drones plugged in the CAT5 to the wall plate, and the computer erupted into a frenzy of busy-signals and asking (politely, to be sure) to try a different wall plate.

Tragic!

Re:Sanity Check

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm doing freelance for the Time Inc. division of AOLTW and I've had the pleasure(?) of seeing the mail system set in place. Having worked for AOL in the past (can one person be this evil?!), I can say that the newer system is much better than what they had 2+ years ago.

The setup I see now is IMAP with Netscape 6's mail client. I have heard there are major problems with disappearing emails, looong delays and countless other problems with the system.

Good for Time for deciding not to use AOL mail. It's vastly improved in the past few years, but it still sucks bollocks.

Re:Sanity Check

[tswinzig]

Tragic!

Much more tragic is not being able to read and comprehend the part of the article that stated these people WERE NOT USING THE NORMAL AOL EMAIL CLIENT.

Re:Sanity Check

[Anonymous Coward]

we had to use the standard aol client and netscape 6.2 albeit with an RSA security fob

I thought that AOL was...

[cnelzie]

...designed for the consumer market, not the corporate market. So, it really is no wonder that it was simply found to be inadequete for the needs of the corporate users.

Of course, it probably didn't help that the reputation of people with the following addresses. (You know there is that stigma about people that use AOL.) :

Editor_in_Chief_Time@aol.com

Technology_Correspondent_Time@aol.com

Enough of the fun though. This problem is not an isolated incident with AOL. This type of thing is how most large businesses are run. Someone high-up gets this hairbrained idea and then pushes it through. Regardless of how inadequete the technology is and how difficult the transition can be.

I work in a situation similar to that right now. It used to be that the outlying vendors, of this major corporation, used to interact with ordering replacement units, checking on warranty status and recieving corporate memos through a satellite connection on dumb terminals.

Now, someone has gotten the bright idea that they need to change from dumb terminals, to having full blown MS Windows machines running a web browser to perform those same tasks. These days, the time to perform the simplest task takes nearly three times what it used to (For both relearning and simply downloading nearly one hundred times the old amount of data.)

The other major problem is, instead of dumb terminals that the end-users are unable to fiddle with. They now have MS Windows machines that they are responsible to maintain, which is the farthest thing from their mind.

To them, the new stuff is hard, slow and a royal pain in the rear.

Unfortunately, someone got a bug in their rear to push forward this great new technology. So, that is what is happening. I can see them going back to the way it used to be in about 5 to 10 years, after they "recoup" the losses in development and find out how much money it is going to cost them to have phone support staff handle the call volume.

--
.sig seperator
--

Re:I thought that AOL was...

[JordanH]

Heh, instead of:

• Editor_in_Chief_Time@aol.com

  Technology_Correspondent_Time@aol.com

They probably made them take things like:

• editbob391@aol.com

  techcjoe93@aol.com

Re:I thought that AOL was...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always enjoyed: ScottAdams@aol.com

What a fucking tool.

Re:I thought that AOL was...

[Delphis]

Noone at your company thought of using something like Citrix terminal server? if you NEED windows that is.. A nice Linux desktop 'terminal server' type approach would be even easier to maintain.

Re:Look who is talking...

[antibryce]

`re up and down when MSNBC was announced that they would skew news in Microsoft's favor. But over the past few years most people have been shocked at how honestly they report on MS and MS competitors.

I also find it disturbing that one of the rank 'n file "M$" kiddies could be rated at +3. Especially when she admits not even reading the article.

yay slashdot.

Re:Look who is talking...

[tswinzig]

I looked who was talking, and it was THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Check the byline of the authors.

Dogfood

[jjjpinkojjj]

I work for AOL Time Warner, and it was indeed, a directive that came from the top. We *had* to use Netscape 6.2 for all corporate email. Truth be told, the Netscape client is buggy enough, but the real kicker was the AOL email servers that we have to connect to... Unreachable perhaps 25% of the time, and totally unfit for professional use.

Funny thing is, this Slashdot article is the first I've heard about switching back! Mega-corporation which will be crushed under its own weight? Naaa.

I was getting sick of eating my own dogfood, anyway.

Re:Dogfood

[Trekologer]

You mean that they never gave you that "secret" dialup number that we all know exists that will get you right in all the time? Man, sucks to be working for AOL-Time Warner...

Re:Dogfood

[Anonymous Coward]

Just out of morbid curosity, would mozilla count? That's a lot more stable.

Re:Dogfood

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Netscape email is mostly equal to Mozilla email, perhaps you can back up the "buggy enough" swipe by referring to actual bugs you personally encountered and logged in bugzilla.mozilla.org?

Those such as myself who use Mozilla email every day under extremely heavy load with now great performance and no crashes for many months may otherwise not believe you gave it a real try. Mega corporation will certainly not be crushed by those reluctant to use their own products.

Re:Dogfood

[rbeattie]

The sad part, and I know nothing for sure, is that probably "switching back" means using Microsoft Exchange and Outlook again. Maybe Lotus, but I doubt it...

Everyone's bashing, but I think it was a great idea for AOL to switch to using Netscape stuff. If only AOL had TRULY eaten their own dogfood and gotten their Netscape Communicator stuff working well, this would have been a great way to cut off some Microsoft revenue and develop a better product for corporate email or at least a true competitor.

As it is, it's a major step backwards and more money in Microsoft's bank account...

IMHO it's too bad the open source community doesn't realize that Exchange is a vital link in corporate systems and that most corporations won't switch to Linux or whatever other OS on the desktop until there's a real competitor with it.

-Russ

Re:Dogfood

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps you can back up the "buggy enough" swipe by referring to actual bugs you personally ... logged in bugzilla.mozilla.org? Those such as myself who use Mozilla email every day under extremely heavy load with now great performance and no crashes for many months may otherwise not believe you gave it a real try.

First of all, the Netscape mail client is compatible with AOL mail servers, and after reading the Mozilla mail spec I have no idea whether this is part of the Mozilla mail client as well or particular to Nestcape, so I have no idea whether to even report a bug. Further, when you work for AOL, I think complaining to IT is pretty much as far as you're required to go. AOL knew about these issues and funds the vast majority of Mozilla programmers.

Also, you might use Mozilla every day under extremely heavy load, but are you doing so connecting to AOL servers? Have you ever clicked Reply only to end up staring at a blank new message? Have you ever had your keyboard shortcuts mysteriously stop working? Do you know that when you have a POP account alongside an AOL account the POP account ignores the 'automatically check every X minutes' setting? Have you ever tried selecting "Netscape Mail" or "Netscape Navigator" from the Apple menu when one of those programs was already open and seen the laughable result? Do you know how incredibly SLOW Netscape mail feels (over POP or IMAP or AOL) next to outlook express?

Do you use Mozilla on a Mac, which (go figure) is a very popular platform within Time Warner? Have you ever had Netscape mail decide it didn't like your configuration and crash every single time you tried to open it, requiring a total reinstall before it would even allow you back at the config panel?

You are so totally clueless. Ya, blame the users for this cruddy software; in the meantime I'll gladly hop back to Outlook Express and curse the day I ever gave Mozilla a try (since you ignored the fact that half of this is a problem with AOL servers, I'll go ahead and ignore that too).

Re:Dogfood

[Anonymous Coward]

I am glad you finally provide some detail. It is a custom mail client, not the well-tested Pop or Imap, running on a Mac, where it takes much longer to get well-behaved apps. People I know who run Mozilla on Mac are not nearly as happy as those using Linux or Windows, but some still like it. But they are not using custom AOL email client functions. You said it was AOL servers, but it was AOL client as well.

The problem is not NEARLY as general as you made it out, and had you gone through the reporting process you might have more accurate information, or perhaps you had and the post was misleading.

When there are perfectly good mechanisms, it is a poor long-term excuse to say you couldn't decide where to log it. If you report the problem to someone else, insist on getting a real bug number back, wherever you log it.
As for reinstalls, I run a real operating system where the application's worst quirks cannot affect the installation, so the very worst, which is even not likely, the most I would ever do is delete the local setting directory and run it again only losing a few personal account settings. I haven't run with a Mac enough to know if this is yet another point of fragility with that platform, and whether you really needed to reinstall. Either Apple or the user has something to learn in this case (Apple about OS design or the user about installing and using software), and I couldn't say which. Perhaps OSX would be better since at least the base FreeBSD OS has concepts of real OS.

You failed to show a likelyhood that half of the problem was Netscape 6.2, but I have no doubt you will follow your heart back to IE, as you say, and never know what you are missing out on. I doubt it will do a better job talking to your AOL email accounts, but then this was never a valid comparison.

Re:Dogfood

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh for shits sake, not everyone who has to run the damn product wants to do this whole "bug reporting" thing. Not everyone is in a holy war to get Mozilla working better than MS or whomever; some folks are just trying to check their email and websites.

Re:Dogfood

[Mr Links]

If you can't reach the servers 25% of the time then maybe the problem is time warners network(or netscape 6). Using netscape 4.x and fetchmail I have never had
any problems apart from the 300+ ping we used to get.

Then again I don't send mails with multiple multi meg attachments.

Re:Dogfood

[Anonymous Coward]

-if it's a custom client why the hell should i have reported to mozilla??

-how do i have time or sanction at work to report this to anyone but IT? especially when IT is AOL??

-who the hell cares how it runs on windows or linux? everyone in my office uses a mac. amazing that microsoft actually does a better job of supporting this platform than mozilla.

-i am not making excuses because i in no way feel i need an excuse. i have simply learned a lesson about mozilla, and was aghast that someone would assert that all of Time Warner is simply making this problem up out of thin air.

-your operating system is 'real?' you win! i am not l33t enough to run mozilla. i'll spread the word to other mac users and we will leave it alone.

-i am not competent to install software? no. i am not competent enough to install *mozilla*. i am fine with my microsoft toys. never mind that i am more computer literate than 99% of the other people in Time Warner. again, we're not l33t!

-are you arguing that less than half the problem is mozilla? i'd gladly agree. if that's the case, maybe you should rescind your earlier, ill-informed claim that TW folks likely did not give it "a good try". maybe they did and had problems with AOL servers that you have never encountered.

jerk.

AOL/Time Warner swears they'll eat own dog food

[Ukab the Great]

To deal with this mail problem and not look like hypocrites, AOL will create a new proprietary mail protocol called ALPO (AOL + POP).

What I'd like to know is...

[tswinzig]

What exactly constitutes "AOL email services," and where was the problem exactly?

Mail being lost, large attachments not allowed, being classified as a 'spammer' if you BCC to too many people... that sounds like a problem with AOL's mail servers. But the article seems focused on AOL's use of their new Netscape products (presumably NS 6.x), which doesn't really jive with the complaints in the article...

Re:What I'd like to know is...

[Jay L]

What exactly constitutes "AOL email services," and where was the problem exactly?

I left AOL before most of this actually hit production. But when I was there, the problem was basically this:

- Wrong tool for the job. AOL mail, as many have said, was not originally designed to be a corporate server. AOL itself, minus the Unix geeks, has used AOL e-mail via the AOL client since about 1989. But TW was using a big groupware server (Exchange or Lotus or the like), with forms, workflows, the whole bit. To change over to a text-and-attachment-based system was foolish; to do it in a few months was absurd. Many of us fought the idea vigorously, but in the end, the merger logistics team won the battle in the name of dogfood.

- Worse, what TW was using *wasn't* our dog food - that was the AOL client and servers, which is incredibly reliable and instantaneous for internal mail, and pretty darn good for Internet mail in the past few years - average delivery time in the seconds. But what TW needed to use was the IMAP gateway. The developers on that are excellent, but have never been given the time to really mature the product. Some major architecture changes kept getting pushed back for more urgent matters, both real and perceived. And while the IMAP server speaks nearly perfect IMAP, no client does; we didn't have the time or cooperation to figure out how to work around bugs in OE or Outlook.

- It sounds like they were trying to use the Netscape client. As we all know, that's a couple revs behind Mozilla, and even Mozilla mail doesn't feel quite ready for prime time yet to me.

- Obviously, Gerald Levin didn't want to be GeraldL982341@aol.com, so we tried to graft an aliasing system on top. Sounds from the "misdirected mail" like it either didn't work out or (more likely) was prone to user error.

- tswinzig mentions the spam filters; that's a good point. I can see how they might have caused trouble, and by commingling internal and customer mail, you lose the ability to have the best configuration for each task.

- However, the message limits and attachment-size limits would NOT be a problem. Those haven't been actual physical limits in years; they they are business rules and can be configured as needed. (Can you imagine how many copies of Windows XP would sit in people's mailboxes if every AOL member could send arbitrarily-sized attachments?)

It's a shame. The AOL core mail system is actually much faster, more reliable, and cheaper to run than sendmail (if I do say so myself). But by putting TW on before it was ready, and before the resources could be committed to make it a first-class IMAP server, they screwed both TW and any chance of getting respectability as a business e-mail solution.

Jay, the ex-AOL Mail Guy

Re:What I'd like to know is...

[gotan]

- Obviously, Gerald Levin didn't want to be GeraldL982341@aol.com, so we tried to graft an aliasing system on top. Sounds from the "misdirected mail" like it either didn't work out or (more likely) was prone to user error.

I don't know how the aliasing worked, but according to a friend of mine who "experienced" that switch some (old) addresses became long garbled strings after the switch. So probab

Heh

[TheGreenLantern]

Ahh, just when I think Life is one big problem after another, something like this comes along and makes me laugh. The thought of those "genius" AOL executives who pushed this email switch down Time Warner's throat, sitting in a board room across a table from some very pissed off Time Warner executives, makes me smile. Thanks Slashdot.

The problem with eating your own dogfood...

[John Macdonald]

... is that some of your employees may have a taste for steak.

Re:The problem with eating your own dogfood...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think that the problem all the leet-boys here on Slashdot would have with 'eating your own dogfood' is that it's a phrase that came out of the developers jargon at Microsoft.

Ooops, I didn't spell Micro$oft correctly.

Whats next?

[jhines0042]

The e-mail problems have led many staffers to resume pre-Internet habits. Employees say they are faxing and using Federal Express more than before. They also are picking up the phone or wandering down the corridors in search of human contact. "If all goes well, we'll never have to use e-mail and we'll have to start talking to each other again," says one magazine writer.

Some of the employees have even decided to spend time with their children reading books printed on actual paper. One employee has decided to start up a band with some of his cube mates. "Jim here and I have been neighbors for over 3 years and we used to e-mail all the time, but now that e-mail has become unreliable I've had to actually get to know him. He's pretty groovy."

Re:Whats next?

[lysurgon]

Some of the employees have even decided to spend time with their children reading books printed on actual paper.

Yes yes yes! This is offtopic, but very important: the way tech is currently being implemented is highly anti-experiential. If the trend continues, we'll all be in little boxes watching video on demand, secreting bodily fluids for the purpose of reproduction when necessary to refresh the stock.

It doesn't need to be this way. Community online can become community offline. Information can activate (agit-prop) as well as pacify (television). Rock out IRL.

Re:Whats next?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you!

You sit in your cubicle secreting bodily fluids like crazy watching video on demand from the likes of sexy_teen_chick6543@aol.com.

Fine but...

[Fnkmaster]

This article is rather schizophrenic. It first claims that the TW staff were forced to use products originally made for consumers. Then it states that they WEREN'T using the AOL email system used in the home version of AOL. Instead they were using "other products" from divisions like Netscape.

So actually they weren't forced to use AOL email. Perhaps they were forced to switch from Outlook to Netscape email or some such thing. But this isn't as moronic as they make it sound - it's not that they switched their entire business over to AOL email. They just switched mail client programs forcefully from one that works to one that didn't work well. To be perfectly honest, Netscape email has never been too great, and it doesn't have the features for the office environment that Outlook or other "groupware" email clients have (scheduling, calendaring, task management).

Clearly if they were using a recent version of Mozilla, they'd probably be using a good web browser with decent email facilities. But god knows, I wouldn't force the use of Netscape anything for email in a corporate environment.

So fine, they made a mistake, clearly they weren't paying attention to the needs of email systems in a corporate environment, but they weren't making people use AOL mail, for god's sake.

Re:Fine but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly if they were using a recent version of Mozilla, they'd probably be using a good web browser with decent email facilities.

You were doing so well in your comment. You'd even acknowledged that Outlook and various other corporate products have valuable scheduling, etc. functions.

Then you pooped out a zinger like the above.

How sad.

Re:Fine but...

[Anonymous Coward]

you forgot Outhouse's main feature: virus breeding ground.

Who gives a shit about integrated functionality when you can bring a company to its knees with a single mail attachment?

Re:Fine but...

[Fnkmaster]

I am not defending Outlook's virus propagation - it's a generally decent product with one really stupid feature - namely that it integrates scripting into email received from unknown sources. If you want to make an argument that this feature has legitimate uses, you can, but it's quite clearly so dangerous and likely to be exploited for massive societal harm, that I would never ship a product with such a feature enabled by default.

Nevertheless, very few other mail client products out there offer such nice integrated functionality. Even if you don't use Exchange Server (Exchange Server is a pain in the ass sometimes - it makes it too easy for underskilled sysadmins to shoot themselves and everybody else in the foot) the calendar/tasklist stuff is still nice.

Re:Fine but...

[Mr Links]

Not that I use it that much but there is a netscape calender product,having never used outlook I can't really compare the feature set.

I could have told them that.

[Jin Wicked]

When I got my first computer, I signed up for AOL because one of my friends had it and it was the only ISP I had heard of. (This was about five years ago, I was 17, so cut me some slack.:)

I can honestly say that of all the things that eventually irritated me about AOL, the mail has to be the absolute worst. I don't know if they'll allow you to download it with a seperate program now, but when I had it you had to get the mail in the provided portion of the AOL...um... desktop? I'm not sure what to call it, since it took up most of my screen all the time.

Anyway, I'm not surprised about misdirected and deleted mail. AOL would delete old mail at its own discretion after a certain length of time, and anything I wanted to save I had to manually cut and paste as a text file because there was no good, clean way of backing anything up. The fact that AOL mail reads HTML by default is terrible; the fact that it doesn't educate the users or explain to them the concept of HTML mail is even worse -- half the things you get from other AOL members are yellow text on a hot pink background just as bad as any poorly made Geocities page (they even let you use images as backgrounds for mail). The fonts and colours may or may not show up when sending the mail to addresses outside AOL. The "unsend" feature is just a bad idea all around. I remember being frustrated with the attachment limits when trying to send ZIP files of artwork to my friends. One of the most irritating things at the time was that AOL refused to open/read many MIME types of attachments, so when someone not on AOL sent me a file, nine times out of ten I couldn't open it.

I fail to see how AOL mail could be useful to anyone except the most basic internet users. I also fail to see how anyone with any amount of intelligence could think it capable of being used for anything more. I, by no means, use e-mail at any kind of a "corporate" level (I get maybe two dozen messages a day at the most), and it wasn't even adequate for my purposes.

As an AOL/TW Employee

[qurob]

We have actually been setting up some Sun Enterprise 280R's this week to solve this problem...

The thing is, EVERYONE here knew this was going to happen, but office politics are to blame.

Re:As an AOL/TW Employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohh, then be prepaerd...

Most of your mail servers are going to be Red Hat Linux based mail servers.. check the new AOL/RH deal..

Re:As an AOL/TW Employee

[AntiTuX]

As another AOL/TW Employee, I suggest you go get ahold of a copy of messaging...
Eat your own dogfood, but on an enterprise level.

MSnbc

[Beckman]

Anyone suprised this is on MSnbc.com?

Re:MSnbc

[wholesomegrits]

News is news. Anyone surprised some slashbot felt compelled to Yet Again Bitch about Microsoft?

Re:MSnbc

[UncleAwesome]

If you look at the byline it was a WSJ article.

Re:MSnbc

[Beckman]

It's not aimed specifically at Microsoft, but at corporate media bias.

Is it really news that AOL mail is insufficient? No, and this is why nobody but MSNBC and Slashdot covered this topic.

For the same reason I consider news of the Microsoft trial covered by CNN and Time to be worthless at the best.

Perhaps you need to be less sensitive.

Re:MSnbc

[Beckman]

Ah! you're right. It's not on the front page like at MSNBC, but if you search for WSJ for AOL it's there.

Re:MSnbc

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucka! NPR had the story. Maybe you need to get off the fucking internet and look at some *real* news.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[JoeShmoe]

From the article "The reversal is particularly awkward for Robert Pittman, AOL Time Warner's co-chief operating officer, who had pushed through the move to use AOL's e-mail."

How many people here thing that Mr. Pittman ever had a problem with his AOL mail? I'd bet dollars to pesos that anyone at AOL with a capital "C" in their title has their e-mail running off their own custom-built server.

This was literally the case for one fortune 500 company I contracted for. The CEO/CIO/CFO had their own Compaq Proliant server fully loaded (for the time). It was segregated from the other machines and was constantly watched by at least one Network Engineer. The rest of the company was subjected to constant crap in switching from AT&T outsourcing of e-mail service to in-house properly deployed UNIX solution, then someone falling for the Netscape sales pitch and switching to that, then Microsoft saving us from Netscape by bringing in Exchange, then ended up having Exchange do the mail but Netscape do the directory services...etc.

But the top right wing with all the mahogany furniture never once had a problem with their e-mail. Because of the aforementioned dedicated server which, as far as I know, was running the original UNIX solution and never got touched.

The problem is that this solution can't be applied on a large scale. I think the Steve Case and company probably have (knowingly or unknowingly) been the victims of executive shielding. The people whose jobs rely on their satisfaction would be fools not to. But then along comes some Time Warner company. The AOL brass aren't going to recommended Executive Shielding because they probably don't know about it. The AOL techies doing the shielding aren't going to tell their Time Warner opposites because they don't report to Time Warner. And the Time Warner techies are going to walk naively into the situation and get their asses blamed. But after a year of fired techies you eventually figure out that maybe the problem isn't the staff, it's the damn product.

Well that's just my impression anyway. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were true. I wonder how many people at Time Warner lost their job because they couldn't get a square peg through a round hole for Time Warner management. They never knew the answer was to use one of those new round holes with four corners.

- JoeShmoe

.

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[Jay L]

How many people here thing that Mr. Pittman ever had a problem with his AOL mail? I'd bet dollars to pesos that anyone at AOL with a capital "C" in their title has their e-mail running off their own custom-built server.

How much you want to bet? It ain't so. They run the AOL client and read mail off the AOL servers, and have ever since AOL migrated off QuickMail around 1989. The problem is not with the AOL mail system per se, but with a total system that just doesn't fit together. See my post above.

Jay "Chief Architect begins with a capital C too" Levitt

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[JoeShmoe]

They may run "an" AOL client and they may read mail off "an" AOL server but how do you know they are the same client/server as what the rank and file use?

That was my point. Many times executives are not aware they get privaledged treatment. They wonder why people complain about Help Desk response time since everytime they call the Help Desk they get someone there within ten minutes.

It takes a brilliant and humble executive to basically force himself not to take advantage of the special treatment offered him. At the Fortune 500 company I was talking about, the CEO would eat at the cafeteria and would even sit down and have lunch with people from the mailroom. Just a regular ol' guy.

But then all it took was for his laptop to freeze up once during a presentation and all hell broke loose in the IT department. Less than a week later, we had a new Director with a sudden focus on deploying Windows NT right now even on laptops which everyone knew basically weren't built for NT (power saving, USB, port replicators, all of them threw NT for a loop).

So, I don't know. I still believe that at any major corporation the executives have no idea what technology is really like in the trenches, hence Executive Shielding.

- JoeShmoe

.

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[Our Man In Redmond]

But after a year of fired techies you eventually figure out that maybe the problem isn't the staff, it's the damn product.

Don't bet on it. Techies are easily replacable, they react in satisfying ways when you do nasty things to them (like fire them or yell at them), and they have a tendancy to say "Yes boss" when they figure out that saying "Yes boss" is a better survival skill than telling the boss exactly why his stupid idea is, well, stupid. And that's not to mention how technologically clueless many higher-ups are. (Think of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss and remember, Dilbert isn't a comic strip, it's a documentary.)

Contrast that with computers that sit there and just silently, unblinkingly do what you tell them to, whether or not that was what you actually wanted them to do. They don't react at all to tantrums or threats, and besides, it has to do what the boss thinks it should be doing -- the salesman said so!

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[Black Parrot]

> That was my point. Many times executives are not aware they get privaledged treatment. They wonder why people complain about Help Desk response time since everytime they call the Help Desk they get someone there within ten minutes.

Yeah, at my Uni there were always complaints about the campus shuttle bus service, and the clamor finally got so loud that the top adiministrators decided to "see for themselves" and arranged a date when they would all go down to a certain stop and wait for a bus. Can you believe it? A bus showed up almost instantly, and they therefore declared that there wasn't any problem.

My own experience was an expected 45 minute wait for a bus scheduled to come every 7 minutes.

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[Jay L]

They may run "an" AOL client and they may read mail off "an" AOL server but how do you know they are the same client/server as what the rank and file use?

Because I wrote the mail system.

Jay

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[Betelgeuse]

Wow! That's a spectacularly good answer!

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[JoeShmoe]

Touche.

- JoeShmoe

.

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be embarrassed to even admit to such a thing.

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[maxpublic]

You have enormous balls, to actually admit to having anything to do with that system.

Max

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[Jay L]

You have enormous balls, to actually admit to having anything to do with that system.

Are we both talking about the world's largest mail system, the one that handles over 3,000 pieces per SECOND in a single namespace, that blocks a hundred million pieces of spam a day coming FROM the net, that hardly lets any spam out TO the net, that sends intra-AOL mail, with zero loss, live bad-address feedback, and two-phase commit in under a second, that scales better and cheaper than sendmail and qmail and zmail and imapd and Critical Path and PostOffice and every other COTS server, that can route itself around nearly any kind of hardware or network or even site outage without even queueing transactions, that can manage each mailbox redundantly across multiple sites, that has been the single biggest hardware installation of any fault-tolerant platform it's run on, that allows every piece of hardware and software to be replaced with the system up, that is more tunable than a Steinway and more monitorable than a T22, that is the ONLY large mail system that's been running outage-free since 1998?

The only balls it took were for me to appear to take full credit for something that I only rewrote, not wrote, that was later rewritten again by the highly talented development team I hired, and that was maintained and improved throughout by an equally talented sysadmin team reporting to my counterpart in operations.

I'm sorry if it's not skinnable or buzzword-compliant or 1337 or free (as in bird). There are lots of end-user features that I wish it had, that might have made it more suitable for TW, but that the business folks prioritized below other features. And keeping a high-effectiveness, low-collateral-loss spam filter working when you're the spammers' biggest target is a 24x7 battle of impossibilities. But from an engineering perspective? Every vendor, every contractor, every partner who has seen the design of this system knows there's no other mail server that even comes close. HP once told us: "You don't push the envelope. You perforate it."

You should do so well.

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[schroet]

You are my god.

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy hell, take off the kneepads and wipe your mouth.

You'll probably want a bottle or two of mouthwash to chase that with, too...

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[maxpublic]

And let's not forget an email system which, until recently, which was famous for mail delays, not delivering the mail at all, not forwarding the mail according to the standard practices of the net (and thus earning it the famous 'AOL ban' amongst ISPs far and wide), the inability to properly deal with attachments - just a few of the many headaches that AOL users have had to put up with over the years.

Sure, you scaled it to unprecedented scales. But a turd is still a turd no matter how large it gets.

Max

Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding

[lunartik]

that blocks a hundred million pieces of spam a day coming FROM the net

As far as I can tell from my moms account it is much much worse than hotmail when it comes to spam detection.

Call me stupid but......

[ThaReetLad]

If you owned a company and rolled out one of your own products company wide, and then had to withdraw it because it was useless, wouldn't you kick software guys ass and make him do it right while begging your user base for forgiveness?

OK maybe you wouldn't pick on the poor code monkey but I think I'd fire someone.

Because AOL mandates it

[topher71]

In order to access any sort of internal AOL functionality, you have to use the AOL client and login as a 'special' employee accout.

I worked at Netscape and when AOL took over, they forced everyone, including Unix developers, to use the AOL client to get to HR forms, 401K info, corporate email, etc.

Netscape had spent 5 years getting every sort of internal functionality on the Net. All HR, 401K, Medical stuff, email, directory, whatever, was _all_ on the Net. Then AOL came in and mandated it all go away to be replaced by the fucking pathetic AOL client.

Now I'm pissed just thinking about it.

(BTW, I worked for AOL for 2 weeks.)

Re:Because AOL mandates it

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for Netscape right now, and the only time I had to use the AOL client was to fill in an employee survey. The rest of the time I happily use Netscape 6.2. Sometimes I an internal site asks for my AOL screen name but I can do this from any browser. Pretty much everthing is available via regular HTTP.

Re:Because AOL mandates it

[Anonymous Coward]

You were just pissed because you had to switch to an @aol.com email address after thinking of yourself as a fucking elite Netscaper for so long.

Here's news: Netscape is in the scrapyard, and AOL owns the scrapyard.

Re:Because AOL mandates it

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with elitist pride vs. a sharp poke in the IEEEE

Mmm patch of the week -- security's hard...

Re:Because AOL mandates it

[DrXym]

The thing is (and this is obvious if you hang out in the Mozilla groups) that Netscape employees DON'T use AOL and DON'T use their @aol.com addresses.

So this is all bullshit.

Re:Because AOL mandates it

[topher71]

That's good to hear!

Like I said, I left 2 weeks after the AOL deal closed. At that point my friends in IS had been working with the AOL IS people to get everyone running the AOL client to access the AOL HR stuff.

And when I had to do some final HR stuff I had to either call the AOL HR group or use the AOL client and special login.

I guess that changed, sorry for the mis-information...

Re:Because AOL mandates it

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use my @earthlink.net email address, either.

I use my Freenet email address. Do you have one?

( @freenet.msp.mn.us )

Re:Because AOL mandates it

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had any pride, you'd use mozilla.

Re:Because AOL mandates it

[sclatter]

Hey Topher! What's up? ;-)

Yeah, when AOL gobbled up Netscape I got to make a couple of trips out to Dulles for a project I was working on. I think I was the second or third Netscape employee to sport an AOL badge. It was interesting. I spent the whole time either really impressed or really appalled.

Impressed at the data centers. They have the biggest, nicest, most thoughtfully designed datacenters I've ever seen. For example, their "raised floors" are actually not raised, the subfloor is sunken relative to the rest of the building so there's no ramp to push big machines up. And there's two feet of subfloor! Ah, they certainly know how to build datacenters. *sigh*

Appalled at the philosophy behind the network. There was no separation between AOL the company and AOL the service as far as the network went. Employee accounts were just regular AOL accounts that were flagged with special privileges. That meant if one of those accounts got cracked, and you bet they did, the cracker had access to all the family jewels.

This was a Big Problem for them, obviously. Instead of creating some separation between the service and the corporate net they had just converted all the employees to SecurID logins. It really lowered the incidence of cracked employee accounts but was a pain for the users. I noted that in the article part of the complaints about the service seemed be centered around the use of the SecurID tokens.

Sarah

Re:Because AOL mandates it

[Ciannait]

I used to work for Netscape, in Netcenter. AOL forced AOL accounts on us, and forced us to use said AOL accounts for all kinds of things, up to and including change control for new system installs, and the stuff that was previously mentioned that you declared was "bullshit".

Just because we hated to use it, doesn't mean we weren't forced to for some aspects of the business that you might never see. Did I publish my AOL address? Hell no. Did I have one? Yes - and I had to log in to it with a SecurID token and everything.

They used AOL's *public* mail servers?

[jackDuhRipper]

Eating your own dog food is definitely a Good Idea.

Someone mentioned that they could use iPlanet and still be eating their own; this is good, but not what they're breading their butter with...

Why wouldn't they appropriate some mail servers - running the same code & on the same platforms as their public servers - but keep them for IUO?

This way, they're finding - and, with hope, trouncing - any bugs or general nonsense and instability, while at the same time, not subjecting their business to all the Herbal Viagra and natural breast augmentation adverts we've come to expect in userx093jr7@aol.com inboxen.

S

Re:They used AOL's *public* mail servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

'Eating your own dogfood' is good to a point.

But if you're a company selling a consumer grade product, you shouldn't assume it will meet your commercial needs.

I doubt if Fisher-Price uses their own toy computers throughout the company, as an extreme example.

They probably don't have the grounds crew using their lawn mowers, either.

Spammers = Corporate Executives?????

[RobertAG]

From the article: "and if they [senior and junior executives] tried to send messages to large groups of users they were labeled as spammers and locked out of the system.

This is BAD THING??????? This "feature" should be used as a management training tool.

Re:Spammers = Corporate Executives?????

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you talking about? So if a district manager wants to send an email to all 100 employees under her then that SHOULD be labelled as spam?

Or is it as soon as you see "executive" or "management" your Userfriendly or Dilbery hormones go into overdrive and you begin shouting "THEY ARE TEH DUMB!!! I AM TEH SMART WITH THE BEARD!@"

Re:Spammers = Corporate Executives?????

[ethereal]

Actually, the quality of the information does seem inversely proportional to the cross-section of the corporation that it's distributed to. This was a big problem where I work too. Eventually we switched to a system where a weekly mail is sent out that summarizes all the various memos, with links to the full story for each, so we can avoid reading about reorganizations that we don't care about. It's not perfect, since some brass still abuse the system, but it's better than it was. Efforts to get management to understand that announcements work best via internal newsgroups rather than by email have so far been unsuccessful.

Remember: "...They've struggled long and hard to be able to turn on and turn off Windows and MacOS machines."

Re:Spammers = Corporate Executives?????

[allrong]

Same thing happened to the Chief of our major research organisation. He used too many repeated exclamation marks and zeros after his monetary figures. A number of the mail servers blocked his message as spam.

Roadrunner

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean news server bandwidth wont be limited to 30kbps anymore? This happened after the merger. 2mbit cable connection and a limit of 30kbps from a _local_ server. Now that's just sad.

Re:Roadrunner

[Anonymous Coward]

I am hoping that before long either:

1. Binary attachments will be banned from Usenet.

or

2. The Binary newsgroups will be separated from the actual news groups.

Usenet is being used for things that it just was never, ever intended for. So we have all these pornhounds and software pirates out there fucking up our ability to communicate on newsgroups like comp.os.netbsd.news and the like.

That's why ISPs throttle their news servers. And it's sad, because some of us who like archiving newgroups for future grepping abilities (Google.groups could die any day, I like having a local archive) find it takes forever to capture the daily stream.

Thye did it to Compuserve

[geckofiend]

When I worked at Compuserve they forced us to switch after the buyout. The rational was that by all of using it the AOL mail system would improve.

Problem was that it never got better. Basic features of mail clients were discarded as not nessesary for the typical AOL user.

And then of course they created the "IMAP" interface to their mail system. Except it was IMAP without any of the features of IMAP. Their implementation was essentialy a POP3 interface running on the IMAP ports.

Re:Thye did it to Compuserve

[Jay L]

Their implementation was essentialy a POP3 interface running on the IMAP ports.

Actually, no. The core design of the AOL mail system is, coincidentally, a near-perfect fit to the IMAP disconnected model, with unique message IDs, per-part fetching (text vs. attachment), efficient indexes to read less-efficient messages, host-based storage, etc. It is NOTHING like POP3. In fact, as I recall, CS begged us to develop a POP3 server instead of IMAP, since CompuServe Classic had one, and we declined.

The main problems were that (a) some aspects of MIME were never fully integrated into AOL mail, and (b) *every single* IMAP client is buggier (wrt protocol implementation) than you can possibly imagine, and we never had time or cooperation to work around all the bugs.

I'd be curious to know which features you felt were 'discarded'. Aside from POP3, I don't remember declining any strong requests from CS while I was running the mail team.

/Indras Send List

[Linuxthess]

u remember the FateX4 software by Magus and Fungi (or something like that?)
Those were definetly the days, when people had those mm's "Type "<`-=-\xXxsNaKeRuLeZxXx/-=-`>" to get onto the MM"
/indras Send 1
/indras Send 2
/indras Send 3
etc....

Re:Look who is talking...

[Pfhreakaz0id]

whoever the F&*(! modded this up needs their privs revoked.

1. They not only didn't read the article (it says Wall Street Journal), the ADMITTED it in the post.

2. It's really clever to use an "$" instead of S in MS right? Huh? Get it?

3. Everyone knows MSNBC has been lauded for being a surprisingly unbiased source for news about Microsoft anyway. Much better than, say, ZDnet.

Get a clue.

Why not use Netscape Messaging Server?

[colaboy]

AOL owns Netscape, whose messaging server has been used by several fortune 500 companies and very large ISPs. I'd be surprised if AOL had the kind of troubles being reported if it were to use the technology available right under its own nose.

Re:Why not use Netscape Messaging Server?

[blang]

Cause the netscape messaging server is of poor quality, too. I should know, as my company used it for a while, and had to ditch it.

Netscape did OK in the very beginning, but as the company grew, and the number of employees grew, quality went down the drain. Imagine being outcompeted by MS on quality, lame indeed.

Not sure if the messaging server belongs to Sun or AOL though. As far as I remember, AOL took over teh web presence, and the browser tech, but Sun took over the server side stuff, which now sells under the name iPlanet.

It's all that one dumb girl's fault...

[Anonymous Coward]

...you know, the one in the AOL ad? Whose friend says, "for her, it should be, 'you've got LOTS of mail!'"? She's overloading AOL!!!!

As an AOL/TWC employee

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had my AOL mail account for months and never use it. No one in NOC does. Its an bother. And it crashes some other applications we have under development. How is that for humor? Turns out that the JVM AOL Mail uses is incompatible with just about every other JVM.

And the other giggle. When a corporate announcement is sent out to the AOL Mail, one of the admin assistant's cut-and-pastes it into an email and sends it out to our everyday email account.

If it wasnt for the free cable and RR acccounts....

Re:As an AOL/TWC employee

[Jay L]

I have had my AOL mail account for months and never use it. No one in NOC does.

Hey, just like the on-call instructions.

Re:As an AOL/TWC employee

[Winged Cat]

So? The AOL mail server and client is your software. Why not just upgrade it to meet your needs (while still serving the existing customers)? Or, say, develop an alternate, employee-only mail client that can later be rolled out to the customers (Mail v.next)?

Re:As an AOL/TWC employee

[Anonymous Coward]

What free cable? No one I know who works at AOL gets free cable.

Re:As an AOL/TWC employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Winged Cat, (not for moderating)

I was just cleaning out some old AC posts I had bookmarked for checking in case anyone replied, and I just noticed this reply by you: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=27225&cid=2953 065

I appreciate it. This is a very good analysis. The one thing I want to know is why you say "you might well be able to score 1 GHz processors for $500 each". Obviously, you're talking about Macs, but we know that Mac hardware is less cost-effective than, say, AMD (who I should have said instead of Intel in my original post). Do you know how your Memory prices might change if you go with a i386 architecture?
I do appreciate your post though. It's very thorough.

As for getting "university grants", I don't think it would be a problem, IF we ever developed a process for imaging a brain. The development of that process would itself involve building up to the requirements for a human brain...I really have no idea how you could do it non-invasively though.
Maybe there's an invasive way, something like first severing brain from nervous system, while continuing to feed it "fresh" blood, then very quickly operating it out of the skull and dipping it in this Magic Liquid that makes neurons fall asleep and stop firing, while continuing to keep their connections to wone another. Any "pain" involved in this would only last however long it takes to quickly operate the brain out of the skull after quickly severing it from the nervous system... (and the pain would all be phantom-pain). Then, when the neurons are asleep, you can invasively peel them off one at a time like an onion. Heck, for all we know we might be fully able to prepare artificial blood that supplies more or less all the needs of the sleeping neurons. The scanning process this way might take several weeks, maybe even months, but who cares? Obviously you'd only do it when your "legacy hardware" (biological body) just isn't fit any longer to continue to support your software (the INFORMATION in your grey matter). Hopefully, people won't have a fit and there won't be any legal impediments created to doing this early enough in your life (as opposed to right before you die, when for all we know you might have SOFTWARE bugs like alzheimers and so forth) that your software is still pretty much intact. Heck, I can imagine doing this scanning when you reach 30, when your brain is the freshest it's ever going to be, while having enough of a chance to build up almost all of the neural structure necessary for any kind of future learning. If by 30 you haven't been /exposed/ to the idea of certain /kinds/ of logic, you won't be able to develop it afterward. But if by then you've developed the mind of a scholar, you can learn, heck, even weird quantum mechanical things, for quite some time...viz. people working on string theory today.
Do reply, I'll be checking this.

Re:As an AOL/TWC employee

[Winged Cat]

The one thing I want to know is why you say "you might well be able to score 1 GHz processors for $500 each".

Note that I also said "with bulk discounts on that scale". This would presumably be a custom order straight from the chip manufacturer, not over the counter as most individuals buy.

Do you know how your Memory prices might change if you go with a i386 architecture?

I did a quick price check, and Mac memory was what I found prices for first. Just shop around online and check the prices. Given the amount of memory involved relative to what's available over the counter, OTC prices probably are more accurate here...but the points is that memory costs << CPU costs here, therefore memory costs practically don't matter for pricing out the whole computer.

As for getting "university grants", I don't think it would be a problem, IF we ever developed a process for imaging a brain.

Which is part of the reason I suggested doing lower animals first. There are products on the market now that do a reasonable simulation of an insect's nervous system - not just in input and output, but in what goes on inside. Of course, given as they are insect equivalents, they're good for little more than toys, and are marketed as such.

I can think of an invasive way to map brains that's less drastic than what you described. It requires some extremely small robot that can walk along neurons without damaging them, and knows where it is within the brain (possibly with the aid of a helmet worn while the robot traverses the brain). As it goes along, it notes which neurons are connected to which, by how many synapses, and counting the receptors inside the synapses to determine the "weight" each synapse places on its' neighbors' firings. With the weight function mapped, the synapse can be modelled as a variable in a neural network, and the robot goes on to the next. The neural network storing this information spawns off new neurons as they are discovered by the robots. The feedback function for human neurons is already partially known (it's mostly association: a synapse that fires gets strengthened regardless of whether the firing was "good" or "bad" with respect to the desired results - the "desired" connections get strengthened or weakened by deliberate firing or avoidance, i.e. thinking about a topic to remember it or not thinking about it to forget it, once it is known whether the association is desired - with some random noise thrown in to allow truly new synapses). This feedback would have to be included to allow to modelled human to learn and remember: any living animal (especially a human) is a dynamic system, therefore attempts to recreate one with a completely static, unchanging system can, IMO, at best create statues of the animal - but we want the animal itself.

This would be a slow process, of course, so you'd need a lot of robots to get it done in any reasonable amount of time. Say, 10^14 synapses divided by 10^10 robots...if it takes a minute to measure a synapse and move on to the next, that's 10^4 minutes, or just under a week. That's assuming the robots work nonstop, don't break down, and have enough power so they don't need to recharge.

Do reply, I'll be checking this.

Just out of curiosity, how are you finding this thread? Bookmarked, or some other means? Also, would it be preferable to move the discussion to email? (My email address is spam-blocked on this forum, but Slashdot's blocking is usually easy for a person to figure out.)

Re:As an AOL/TWC employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, would it be preferable to move the discussion to email?
Yes. I'll be emailing you shortly. (if anyone else is reading this and interested in the discussion, just reply here and I'll let you in.)

May I just take this opportunity to say....

[ari{Dal}]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Everyone on the planet who has an IOTA of common computer sense knows that AOL's consumer services are below average. How did they think they could handle corporate email services?

Even software like Outlook, which is specifically designed for this type of big-business structure, has trouble handling huge amounts of email (its not so much the amount of email thats the problem as much as the lack of security in the product. Oh wait, AOL doesn't do security well either.).

Why on earth did AOL think it could scale up to fit business needs? The requirements of John Q. Local User are far less than those of Mr. Corporate. They should have seen it coming.

Just like Micro$oft!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, hi they are like M$ - desperately trying use their own product with no success. And M$ is still using Apache!

Re:Just like Micro$oft!

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt if Apple develops their own hardware on Apple computers.

There is a pathetic little trickle of EDA applications for the Mac.

There's really no reason to assume companies have to use their own products (products targeted at a whole different market segment) in only margianlly related areas.

Re:Just like Micro$oft!

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD FUD FUD. MS uses a large array of hardware and software. But the large majority of their servers that are NOT "farmed out" are all using IIS. However (mostly in other countries) when MS needs more server space they frequently hire it from established ISPs, several of whom of course use Apache.

Stop being so god damned pendantic! You look like an utter fool. (as if I care what you look like) But someone might actually think you were not talking out of your ass, and that would be a shame.

Simpsons Moment!

[Xentax]

I think Nelson nicely summarizes my reaction to this news: Haha!

Xentax

E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[willith]

I'm not sure which is worse--that the employees were forced to use AOL e-mail at work, or that top level people at Time were using e-mail to send final page proofs that were apparently of a massive size.

Do these people not have FTP? Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[Maledictus]

"Do these people not have FTP? Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?"

Don't blame the IT people for this. An FTP site that is easily accessible by internal prepress production and the outside designer isn't a guarantee that anyone will have a clue how to use it.

I'm the "IT guy" (heh...) at a mid-sized commercial printing company. We have an easy-cheesy FTP set up that drops the files right on our proxy server. We have a link to the FTP site from the home page of our web site. (Plus our domain name is...oddly enough...the one-word name of the company.) Even the most file transfer impaired have all sorts of options to get large files to us. We're even going to go to some sort of on-line proofing system. Bet that'll be a can of worms

Can people get us large file? Hell yeah! Do they? Huh? Hell no! "What's FTP?!"

The problem is usually on the designer/ad agency end. I say "usually" because the folks here are *paid* to be technically savvy. If they can't retrieve a file off of our FTP site or any other, they probably should look for another job.

The outside customers get scared if you tell them they have to type in a user name and password. Or if you tell them that apparently *their* firewall isn't letting them out, they drop back to a safe position like...

...email.

And even that can be problematic. Things that we think are simple - compressing files, especially fonts; naming conventions that make sense; resolution issues - become a Big Deal. On the other hand, that's what we're paid to do, troubleshoot, help, smile, be happy, offer fries with that...

I for one am glad AOL-Time Warner is eating their own pooch chow. Now I'll have even more ammo for my whining AOL customers. "I'm trying to send this, but YOUR email server says it's too big." MY email server can take it, baby!

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[Anonymous Coward]

convincing "top level people" to use FTP is not possible. they try to use IE's FTP, and when that doesn't work, they get confused.

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[flatrock]

Ok, I'll ask the stupid question. Why should they even bother to try and train the users on both ends to use ftp? Why not just let those users that have a need to send large files to each other do it with email. I email large files to our customers all the time. If I want to put it on the ftp server, I have to get the customer access to the server with a directory that they have access to, which means dealing with our very busy IS staff. I then end up emailing the customer a link to the file they need so thy can ftp it using IE. This all has to be cleaned up after the fact, wasting several man hours by the time it's done. Email is easier for both the customer and me.
When Time sends out page proofs, they can't just put them in pub/outgoing. They need to go to the correct people, and only the correct people. Maintaining seperate accounts on the ftp server for their customers is possible, but really not that practical. Email is a better solution.

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[Winged Cat]

If FTP is too complex for your clients, why not set up an easier interface - say, a CGI script to upload files. It can also enforce naming conventions (say, "enter your name w/out spaces", "enter the job number" (if you have job numbers), "enter one word to uniquely describe this file", "select the file format" (with "Word", not ".doc", as what they see even though ".doc" is the actual value)...concatenate those to make the filename, and there you go. Most browsers in use today can support this...

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[flatrock]

Instead of developing a CGI script that will only work between the users and customers you set up to use it, why let them attach the files in email and have a more universal solution.

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[cymen]

Or how about not spending the time on the CGI to make it "only work between the users and customers you set up" and use it? A PHP script for this would take all of 10 minutes. Of course if that is all the time you spent on it in a couple months they'd be calling you back bitching about a server out of disk space. So budget two days of development work and you got yourself a system humming away with minimal administration costs.

File transfer by email doesn't make sense when the files start to get bigger than a couple megs...

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[DarkEdgeX]

Heh, then your IS people aren't doing their jobs-- this task could EASILY be automated from an internal corporate intranet; logon to intranet site, go to "FTP Access" page, click on "Add new user", answer handful of simple questions, click on "Create account" (making sure to have checked the box that allowed you to e-mail the details to an e-mail address of your choice), then at the Finished page, optionally upload files immediatly without switching programs at all.

And the e-mail your client receives? Embedded ftp:// URL with username and password already in it (ftp://user:pass@ftp.yourftp.com). Of course it also lists the details in case the URL won't suffice for the user (or the user has a clue and has their own preferred FTP client).

It's utterly retarded to make this sound difficult when it's not-- your IS department made it difficult, the type of psuedo-application I detailed above is something that could be hobbled together in a few *days* (probably in a few hours if the person knew what they were doing). Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if such an administration system already existed.

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[Maledictus]

"Why not just let those users that have a need to send large files to each other do it with email."

Actually, that's what I do. We have a prepress-specific email address set up that our customers use for emailing files to us. WE have no attachment restrictions or limits. It's the limitations that customers may have that give us fits.

Well, I do have storage limits for individual users' email accounts, here. But not for the prepress account in particular.

If I were to be totally honest, the email solution works well. What I don't "get" is why FTP is seemingly so difficult for our customers to grasp. I read the posts about scripting the FTP uploads, etc. But I don't think it should be necessary to further simplify something that is already very simple. I've used command-line, CuteFTP and Fetch and they're just not that difficult to use. And I ain't all that bright.

"Maintaining seperate accounts on the ftp server for their customers is possible, but really not that practical. Email is a better solution."

Now here's a situation that I thankfully don't have to deal with. So far, we haven't had customers request any more privacy than our one general non-anonymous user logon (all of our customers use the same username and pass.) They can see each other's files when they're using our FTP site. (We get more sensitive jobs on CD or other media.)

But I can see where this could be an issue in the future for us and how a magazine would definitely want separate user accounts. We're also going to a "soft" on-line proofing system that will require individual user logons.

One company that has a printing-specific solution for this is Xinet with their WebNative application (or suite of applications.) It's literally been years since I read/heard/had a clue about Xinet's offerings, but I will probably have to get up to speed here very soon.

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[flatrock]

Yes it could be done with an internet page and an ftp site, and of course you'd still have to email the person the password and account name.

I think your missing the point. Why go to the expense of developing and maintaining that solution. Why reduce yourself to a system with 3 points of failure (intranet, ftp, email). An attachment in email does the job just as well, and it's simpler and less time consuming for everyone. An ftp server is a good way to distribute the same file to many people. If you're going to send different large files to different individuals, it's not the right solution.

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[flatrock]

File transfer by email doesn't make sense when the files start to get bigger than a couple megs...

Why? As long as people clean out their outbaskets, why is email not appropriate. I've sent many 5 to 10 meg emails. As long as the receiver's mail system allows attachments that large, it works very well. What's the compelling reason not to do this other than IS people trying to manage space on the mail server. Managing space on the mail server is a serious issue, but a uneversal ban on large attachments may not be the best approach is some situations, such as Time's.

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[swb]

If FTP is too complex for your clients, why not set up an easier interface - say, a CGI script to upload files.

You've now just defined a web site, not an FTP site. Enough suits know WTF a web site is and will make the project into a huge extranet, full of Flash, animated GIFs, javascript and weeks of approval processes for the tiniest change.

It will also be hosted off-site at some hosting place the CIO gets free golf and booze from, requiring everyone to FTP their files off of it...

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and there are enough examples of that, that a "FOR FILE TRANSFER ONLY!!!" Web site can be defined, with the extranet happening on a different server. ("You want an extranet? Ok, sure. But, in addition, we'll have this file transfer server that we're setting off to the side. We can link it into the main extranet once it's ready.")

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about time for users, especially ones on dialup modems, to download said attachments? "You're not getting your mail until you download this 5 MB file" == "Your email is hosed", for most such people. Even if you've got a T1 to the server, it can still introduce lag to what's supposed to be a fast-responding (not quite real time, but close) system.

Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files?

[flatrock]

You do have a point. It would be nice to be able to set up my mail reader to not download large attachments when I'm accessing my mail from a laptop in a hotel room. However, most business people who you would want to send a 5 MB file to aren't going to be accessing their email over a modem. I wouldn't send out an email with a huge attachment to my friends at their home account, or someone who I know is traveling, but I still think that sending a proof to a printer is a reasonable application for email.

Microsoft Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

Versions 5.5 and 2000

No joke.

Re:Look who is talking...

[TheConfusedOne]

by Lazy Reporter @ NY Times

MSNBC report system not up to grade.

After several complaints to the lack of news being generated using the internal MSNBC Reporter (tm) application top executives decided to look at alternative systems for getting their news.

"We've had great luck with the AP System and the WSJ System for delivering timely and interesting articles. If this trial is successful, we'll phase out the entire internal staff and use these TPNA's (Third Party News Applications) to provide all of our reporting content," quoted one anonymous executive.

But seriously, using AOL mail for corporate business would be like using Hotmail for running a company. They just weren't designed for the task. Somewhere deserves a giant "what were you thinking" slap upside the head for the original decree.

maybe they'll finally fix their email client

[Hadlock]

i don't know how much mail gets lost in transit. my mom, who used to use aol all the time, has finally given up on it, as 10% of the mail she sends never gets there, and the rest takes up to 15 minutes to get to it's destination, which by anymeans, is FAR too long. She uses our @ home email accounts to send and recieve email, and finds outlook about 100 times as appealing as the non-sortable, feature-lacking aol mail.

The real problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the fact that the only emails received from the AOL accounts had text that read, "ME TOO!"

Other AOL/TW 'employees'

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know who you are, but I work for a division who has never been told to move to AOL mail OR Netscape. Some of us use AOL mail but we are by no means required to do so. Additionally I've never had an issue with AOL mail the few times I've used it so I'm really unsure where this FUD is coming from.

Re:Look who is talking...

[blibbleblobble]

Actually, the comment at the end was that they should replace email with real conversations.

Mind you, that was the author/publisher/artists' division, so I guess they've got different views on email to the AOL guys.

Re:Look who is talking...

[linuxpng]

Except the big problem is that MSNBC is running the article now. How did this get modded up?

Slashdot auto-rejects submissions?

[Marx_Mrvelous]

I do beleive that slashdot is setup to automatically reject posted stories from particular users, or maybe with certain things in the subject line. I guess it's how they handle the volume. So much for a personal touch.

Re:Look who is talking...

[dhamsaic]

Have you clicked the link? It is a Wall Street Journal article. Yes, MSNBC has a copy on their website. That doesn't matter. It is a Wall Street Journal article. It got modded up because he is right.

such b.s.

[mshurpik]

I recently lost my email account of two years because my cable provider was bought-up by another cable company. They gave me two weeks notice and then shut off the old email address. I wasn't able to get straight answers about forwarding, machine names, etc. - they just kept spamming me with the same dumb FAQ about re-configuring Outlook (who the f* uses outlook anyway? ;)

If I had a choice, I would drop them on the spot. Long-term reliability is the GREATEST feature of any computer system, and they WILLINGLY screwed it up. Not for technical reasons, either - just to get their damn corporate name into my email address. And their bounce message doesn't even include the name of the new domain.

How do you notify two years' worth of aquaintances that your email has changed, fix every mailing list, every web site account, etc? You can't. It's impossible.

Oh well, someday people will learn to make more noise when this kind of b.s. happens. Making noise works. Try it.

Re:such b.s.

[ethereal]

Same thing happened to me. I don't know why they can't just keep the old domain name too, point it at their new mail server, and avoid screwing over customers, but what do I know.

I agree with the other poster - get your own domain and mail.

Never would have thought....

[Anonymous Coward]

that a Microsoft news reporting agency would have discovered the story :)

I wonder if they have people on payroll whose job it is to find negative press about AOL/Time Warner?

AOL vs Microsoft Mail

[Anonymous Coward]

So AOL couldn't get Netscape Mail to work with AOL mail servers? They should continue to eat their own dog food until they get this right. The AOL client isn't suitable for corporate use, but AOL's Netscape mail client should be.

Hmmm, there's a rumor that AOL is testing a new version of its software with the Netscape client for possible future release to customers. If this includes the mail client, maybe AOL should rethink these plans.

Microsoft mail client/server software may not be perfect, but at least Microsoft eats its own email dog food. This puts a minimum limit on the quality of their software.

Microsoft's competitors like AOL aren't going to make much headway in the market as long as their products are even worse than Microsoft's, no matter how the court case comes out!

Warning to Compaq: Look out for "Best Practice"

[netringer]

The company I worked for was merged (read: acquired) and afterwards they sent out teams to research our company procedures and systems to determine the "Best Practice" for the merged company. They pretend that best practice is really that, but it means, "what we in the acquiring company were doing before we bought your sorry outfit."

Unless it's "take us over" like it was when AT&T bought NCR, I hope Compaq employees will learn to like what's left of HP OpenMail over Exchange.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Let them use Pine

[Anonymous Coward]

Let them use fucking Pine.

Then they'll be desperately trying to get back the AOL email client.

2nd hand story

[gotan]

A friend of mine told me about their woes with the new client. Aparently their tech staff couldn't even set their netscape client up so that it would poll for mail regularly which means important messages get delayed? Seems to indicate that the tech staff wasn't too happy with that switch ordered from the top and now make it look extra bad, so they soon can switch back. One department even dug out their old fax machine to get in touch with customers again.

I don't understand why AOL/TW didn't plan a little ahead, made a case study and allowed for some time to do a smooth migration. This way it had to blow up in their face and make their own service look bad. But maybe this has the positive side effect that AOL works at the quality of their service. The bad thing about this is, that in the process netscape/mozilla also looks bad, when it's really not the software at fault.

Re:2nd hand story

[Anonymous Coward]

> Aparently their tech staff couldn't even set their netscape client up so that it would poll for mail regularly which means important messages get delayed?

Edit -> Preferences -> Mail and Newsgroups -> Server Settings.

It's been that way for YEARS.

Sounds like inadequate tech staff to me.

Re:2nd hand story

[withinavoid]

The problem is not the mail client itself. The problem is the secure ID. You have to enter a NEW code along with your password each time you check your email. Therefore the program can check, but a password prompt appears each time.

Re:2nd hand story

[gotan]

I know it is that easy (i only wasn't sure if AOL put the option in some other menu in their netscape) so yes this is solely the tech staffs fault. But as i said, maybe the tech staff didn't want it to work at least half decent.

Re:2nd hand story

[Mr Links]

If that is happening then you are connecting to the wrong mail server. Connect to the correct server and it doesn't happen that way at all.

Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux?

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux? You know if Linux were to provide a solution it would be a marketing coup. As much as we Open Source folks like to preach to the choir we really do need to make some high profile scores if the public is ever to "get it". Love 'em or hate 'em, AOL is about as high profile as you get regarding John Q Public's awareness of the "Internet".

Re:Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

They had a reasonable client, what they didn't have was reasonable servers - and as long as The Brass were insisting on using the consumer-grade AOL mail servers, they were hosed.

Linux has had reasonable client and server email solutions for years.

Re:Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux?

[Jay L]

Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux?

Sorry, Linux has what to do with mail server and client software?

Re:Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux?

[nabnerd]

As much as is saddens me to say it, you have the right idea. When the general-windows-using-public think of the internet they think of AOL and their teli-tuby wannabe figure head. The open source community need to help a company like AOL to create something that works and that the public will recognize as being open source.

...well that's what I think anyway.

Re:Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux?

[maxpublic]

Um, perhaps the fact that Linux actually has some working mail server and client software?

Max

Re:Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux?

[Jay L]

Um, perhaps the fact that Linux actually has some working mail server and client software?

For corporate use? Right. "OK, Mr. Turner, first you type e-l-m. No, it isn't in color. No, I'm afraid you can't colorize it."

Re: "Even software like Outlook ..."

[jackDuhRipper]

Even software like Outlook, which is specifically designed for this type of big-business structure, has trouble handling huge amounts of email (its not so much the amount of email thats the problem as much as the lack of security in the product. ...

Outlook has significant problems scaling to the degree a behemoth like AOL-TW demands. It's beyond the almost complete absence of security that makes Outlook a really poor choice in large corporate envornments - Outlook basically falls prey to the same ills as AOL's client software: It's intended originally for ease-of-use over security and scalability.

I have definite biases here (as I prefer corporate mail solutions that run on a variety of platforms, scale out the wazoo, and Just Work), but they're rooted firmly in practical experience (first-hand and otherwise) of replacing 10's of Exchange boxes with several different solutions that actually SOLVED user requirements.

"Inadequate..."

[LiENUS]

If its so inadequate why dont they just give it some of that herbal viagra I keep getting advertisements from them about?

Lost passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

The system probably got overloaded from all those "This is AOL tech support; our servers crashed, so we need everyone to send us their usernames & passwords ASAP. Just go to www.geocities.com/..."

+1 Intresting but Wrong

[Emugamer]

well, not wrong ( I don't deem myself the ultimate authority)but I have to disagree. People want choices. They don't want to always throw the money at the 9.95/lb Filet Mignon. They like to save money. Same reason is why not everyone buys a DSL installs sendmail or exchange to have their own server themselves. People need options, without options peopel not only get restless, it starts to look almost Microsoftonian (see OEM market) or like the utility market.

attachment size

[Flossymike]

Not that I would ever want to defend AOL in anyway, but I belive that all ISPs have a mail size limit, over here in NTL land our mail boxes are 10M, and of course you have to be careful about how big you can really recieve.

VMS mail also is rock solid

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, when Digital switched from VMS Mail (and all-in-1 mail) to Microsoft Exchange, they had massive problems with lost, undelivered, and very late mail. The initial VMS Mail and all-in-1 mail solution had been rock solid. It still is rock solid for those who use it. Scales to millions of users trivially and works well. Also it never had the MS virus-Petri-dish phenomenon.

No! The iPlanet partnership ended four days ago!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Several people have asked, "Why don't they use iPlanet? It's their product." The iPlanet partnership ended on Monday, March 18, 2002; iPlanet is now a division of Sun:

Sun, AOL Time Warner end iPlanet pact

What really happened...

[xtheunknown]

Actually, the Time Warner users complained most about the ubiquitous "You've Got Mail" voice that had been changed by AOL programmers to say "You've Got Mail, You Lazy, Good for Nothing, Old Economy Loser." And the fact that they now get AOL CDs via interoffice mail every two weeks.

Another merger story

[mfos.org]

I used to work tech support for a telecom that merged shortly after I joined. We had been using Lotus Notes without problem to do e-mail scheduling and the smaller database stuff. One of the things to be considered during the merger was a move over to Outlook. I'm not sure what finally happened (I left before that decision was made) but the Outlook people had to explain why it was a good idea in the face of the LOVEBUG and other vbscript ilk (It managed to crash several of the other companies servers)

aol is easy as in beer.

[rnd()]

AOL is crappy, most people who use it know its crappy, but its easy. ou putin the disk, it installs, gets the numbes you need, set everything up.

This is a very insightful comment. I wonder when someone will put together a scaled-down linux distro that competes with AOL. You'd have to have the free dial-up numbers, but maybe netzero would be willing to make a deal in exchange for some ads or something.

Imagine putting in the disk, answering a few simple questions, and getting AOL level functionality (chat would be over IRC, AIM, etc.) You might even throw in a simple word processor, spreadsheet, media player, etc.

I know that $20 a month isn't much money, but I would guess that a lot of people would rather not pay it to AOL every month.

Then again, who knows if NetZero is still in business.. :)

Re:aol is easy as in beer.

[LinuxHam]

I wonder when someone will put together a scaled-down linux distro that competes with AOL

If you've read the AOL/RedHat stories lately, you'll see that a number of us think AOL should put out their own distro, targetted at the older PCs families are now replacing. Something to turn them into an AOL kiosk, if you will, without all the hassles of putting out your own device a la the Gateway thing. Imagine the reduction in support costs when AOL owns the OS *and* the client? Done well, I'd give it to my grandmother. Anything to stop having to explain Application Execution Errors.

Also, AFAICT, all the AOL dialup numbers are now PPP. Or so Windows reports a new PPP adapter with more recent versions. They've already leaked a Linux client for internal use only, so you know they've got some skunkworks going on.

Re:aol is easy as in beer.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. "This will break everything on your PC, but you can still run AOL" -- who would want it?

2. Winmodems.

Re:aol is easy as in beer.

[PurpleBob]

Then again, who knows if NetZero is still in business.. :)

They're not.

And an advertising-supported Linux distro would suck just as much as advertising-supported anything. However you set it up, you'd have to face the fact that being on the Internet costs money.

Are Sun's lawyers drooling over this one?

[dave-fu]

> Turns out that the JVM AOL Mail uses is incompatible with just about every other JVM.

Sounds like a monopolistic, anti-competitive practice to me if I've ever heard of one.

So, any details on the server roll-out?

[llin]

So, I'm unclear if they were trying to use the iPlanet Messaging Server (which seems like a good idea?), but which wouldn't require everyone to be using the crappy NS6.2 Mail Client (recent builds of Mozilla are very much improved, although since the iMS supports standard IMAP/POP3/LDAP, there shouldn't be problems with using other clients except by company policy) or if they were trying to use the older Netscape Messenging Server or a custom AOLmail solution?

We're doing a rollout of iMS now, and the only problems we're running across are primary policy related (the stupid desire to phase out 20yo email addresses in 6 months when they can be kept indefinitely as aliases in the LDAP system), although I must say that losing procmail (and all server-side execution on mail) really smarts.

They weren't eating their own dogfood...

[Anonymous Coward]

they were eating their own shit.

They just thought it was dogfood.

Re:Unspoken factor

[Technician]

An unspoken factor is having a AOL account is the same as a Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink or other major consumer ISP account. They are all the targets of spammers dictonary attacks. How much junk did they start getting that diluted the content of their mailboxes. At work we have a business E-mail server. It takes no consumer subscriptions. This alone reduces the spam content. The corporate wrath and mail admin make spamming corporations a waste of time and a legal risk with few rewards.

email attachment limit

[Linuxthess]

Originally it was close to 15mb, but after shutting down rooms such as "server", "mm", "cerver" (sic) and a few others which I cant remember now, they made the attachment limit 6mb. At the same time they changed the email time limit to 30 days for unopened messages, and 7 days for read emails.

The famous warez groups such as Arise Warez, Legion, Razor 1911, etc then started releasing their warez in the 6mb size. Then you couldn't get those massmails because you had a message cap on message count. I think thats when I ditched AOL for my pirating needs.

Re:Unspoken factor

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume the switched to user@aol.com type addresses. I highly doubt this is the case. I'm sure tturner@timewarner.com (or whatever) would not have changed to tturner@aol.com

Embarassing for AOL, but...

[strombrg]

...but every time someone slams AOL, they're essentially saying "Go MSN!".

AOL has been pretty benevolent so far - vastly more so than microsoft. They deserve to be treated well until they let us down in a big way. Because AOL is our greatest hope in the battle against microsoft. They can single-handedly win the browser war against microsoft, among other things.

Sendmail

[Corporate Troll]

uvotoo

AOL mail??

[bteeter]

I'm shocked and horrified to read this. AOL's mail client having problems? I've never had a problem with it...

... but then again, I'm smart enough not to use it either! :-)

Brian
--
100% Linux Web Hosting for Geeks, by Geeks
--

Say what you will about Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

They always dogfood their own software. As painful as it is, they run latest builds of all their stuff. From secretaries to developers, they feel the pain, to try to avoid anyone else from feeling it on release.

Re:Say what you will about Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong

Re:Say what you will about Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to elaborate? Sure people can find small instances of them not using MS for every single thing. But largely the previous posters comments were correct. MS use 2k and XP internally on hundreds of machines for day to day work for months before they were released to the public.

had similar problems w exchange

[nikkatsu]

our company had switched from sendmail freeBSD to ms exchange and we had similarly nightmarish problems...

Re:had similar problems w exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this parent up! Clearly the otherworldly parallel between nikkatsu's painful experience and the alternately on-topic AOL problem shows this post to be both insightful and underrated at only score 2.

Re:had similar problems w exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet! My company switched from Sprint to MCI and we saved a buck-or-two!! You should look into it.

Repost: Sendmail

[Corporate Troll]

I'm sorry but slashcode seems to have mangled my post.

It's a bit offtopic anyway what I want to ask. You know I have my OpenBSD server (firewall) that I'd love to run sendmail on. For the moment sendmail only serves mail to the machine itself. I'd really love to configure it as a complete MTA in such a way that I am less dependent on my ISP's mailserver. Unfortunately I don't know how, and the HOW-TO's found by google confuse me even more. Besides I did RTFM (man sendmail). So if anyone has a good primer, tutorial, or howto to configure sendmail, you would make a happy slashdot user out of me.
Thanks in advance, and sorry again for the gibberish in the previous post.

Re:Repost: Sendmail

[mafryler]

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sendmail2/

Re:Repost: Sendmail

[Corporate Troll]

Yes, I found that book...unfortunately shipping costs from the US to Europe are quite high. Didn't find it on amazon.de (I don't live in germany but it's the closest one). Do you have this book? Is it really a good recommendation? I'm not too cheap to invest a bit (heck I bought the OpenBSD CD's), but I really should watch a bit better over my VISA-card (already overdue this month! Urks!)

Re:Repost: Sendmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw Sendmail and use Qmail. Tons of great info at www.lifewithqmail.org.

Re:Repost: Sendmail

[mafryler]

Do you have this book? Is it really a good recommendation?

I have the book in .chm format. Requires Winblows to view it. Post a garbage e-mail address (or create one on hotmail); then post the address here. I will forward you the book .chm file as a loaner. Please do O'Reilly the favor and buy the book, when you get the chance.

Re:Repost: Sendmail

[Corporate Troll]

1v6vpt001@sneakemail.com but they restrict attachments...So you could try jawtheshark@crosswinds.net which is my spam account since crosswinds went the bad way.

I'll buy the book, don't worry! I never ever had a problem buying books about open source software...It's just that this month is tight...(and amazon.de doens't carry it)

Re:Repost: Sendmail

[Corporate Troll]

Dear anonymous friend...I thought about that...since I heard it's easier to configure.

But was it audited by the OpenBSD team? That is where my trust lies....so I stay minimalist on my server

Re:Repost: Sendmail

[mafryler]

Sent. Let me know if you get it...

aol mail is nearly bullet-proof..

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why MSNbc is spreading FUD about a competitor?

Re:aol mail is nearly bullet-proof..

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why your spreading FUD about MSNBC?

A conflict of interest?

[acoustix]

Is it just me or is this situation a bit strange?

AOL is #1 in number of customers. They have the largest email system in the world.

Time and AOL merge. No problem.

AOL says: "Time, you gotta use our email system because we're the best. It will look good too!"

Time: "Sounds great!"

AOL: "We'll just take our existing consumer client and tweak it for business use. See, it is so easy, no wonder we're #1!"

Time: "Uh, we can't send our large attachments which are vital to our company."

AOL: "Oh, well that's because..."

Time: "Our "tweaked" clients keep crashing too!"

AOL: "Well, it wasn't..."

Time: "2% of our emails aren't getting through"

AOL: "Well, our system wasn't designed for this"

Time: "How did you become #1 again?"

I am pretty sure that this is going to tarnish AOL's image for being reliable. Especially since they've just gotten over the "busy-signal fiasco" of a couple years ago.

If Time can't trust AOL with important emails, then how can AOL expect consumers to trust them with important emails as well?

I like to think that my local ISP (or any local ISP) has better service than AOL any day.

Hard copies

[ehiris]

Time Magazine had to go so far as to have hard copies rushed before deadlines by cab

That's because Time magazine failed to realize there's more to the internet then e-mail and web.
FTP and other types of file transfers are big monsters that are eating people. Don't use them.

You shouldn't use e-mail to send huge files anyway.

lurn to spel, dumie!

[Anonymous Coward]

r u stewpyd?

MSNBC

[phyxeld]

Another fine example of unbiased reporting from MicroSoftNBC.

top down decision making - "going to Tahiti"

[fetta]

My favorite expression for these kind of top-down decisions, that essentially come down to "because I said so!", is:
"are we discussing this, or are we going to Tahiti."

I picked up the expression from this John Soat column where he told a story about the GAP and their decision to replace Lotus Notes with Exchange.

Gap is migrating its messaging infrastructure from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange , a decision implemented by CIO Ken Harris shortly after he arrived at the company several months ago, according to a source close to the situation. Changing messaging infrastructure isn't easy, and the IT people at the Gap were hoping for some kind of explanation or justification. Instead, according to the source, Harris told the staff that when the captain of a ship tells the crew that they're going to Tahiti, the crew doesn't question the order-they simply steer the ship to Tahiti. "Going to Tahiti" has apparently become an oft-used phrase in Gap IT circles-i.e., when talking over strategy, people now ask, "Are we discussing this, or are we going to Tahiti?"

Re:top down decision making - "going to Tahiti"

[Anonymous Coward]

Some other background -- Gap used to be a Big Blue shop, down to the OS/2 desktops. For some reason there was a high-level falling out with IBM that lead them running into Microsoft's arms.

Also their Notes environment was a complete disconnected mess, set up with Domains on the department level, so nothing interoperated properly. As of a couple years ago, they were still running lots of Notes R3. They practically would have had to rebuild the thing from scratch to get it to work right. But there's still 10 years of super-proprietary Notes apps to migrate...

A strategic shift such as a wholesale change of vendors might seem like insanity down in the ranks, particular to the fatbutted types that were complete invested in the wrong technology. But often it's for good reasons (not that I can say in particular why Gap doesn't like IBM).

Note entirely AOL Email...

[nochops]

This wasn't the same AOL Email that consumers use.

According to the article:"The various types of e-mail software used by employees aren't the same as those used by America Online subscribers at home. Instead, the divisions customized AOL products, such as those from its Netscape unit".

So, while this really sucks for AOL, it's not as bad as some people think. On the other hand, I work L3 tech for a web host, and we hear almost daily from AOL (l)users about messages being forwarded to AOL accounts and being lost forever, or showing up weeks later.

Re:Note entirely AOL Email...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it amazing. Our high intellect ubergeeks can invest a couple of hundred person hours whining about AOL consumer software without even bothering to READ THE FRIGGING ARTICLE. It's people like these that make me glad to be in marketing where the opportunities are boundless and the audience lazy.

PLEASE MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

PLEASE!

surprised?

[RageEar]

Is anyone surprised by this story?

Having been a former AOL user (way back when :) I know the pains of their email system.

Like someone said earlier, it was designed for personal email use, not business. I don't know too many home Internet users (besides dumb executinves) who are trying to transfer large files via email.

Anyone who has used the Internet for more than a few months should have the sense to use a better protocol than SMTP to exchange files. Like FTP, hmmmm? Or go the next step and use SCP.

I can only imagine the tech support hell that the sysadmins over at AOL Time Warner went through during that phase.

Inadequate! (off topic Geek thread)

[Anonymous Coward]

I always like that word. Inadequate!

It goes back to how that term is used in the 'group support meeting' in the 'The Prisoner' episode A Change Of Mind. The one where #6 is accused of being 'UnMutual.'

'I am inadequate! I must change!'

'You're trying to undermine my rehabilitation!'

Bzzzt - Wrong!

[Mr 44]

The article is just being reprinted from the Wall Street Journal.

bull...

[Anonymous Coward]

and it's a load of bull- i was working at a big 5 consulting company at WMG when they switched- the official email client was the netscape 4.72 client- i know cause we installed it for them. they also had the option of using aol webmail.
the only "customization" was that they had to use a secure id card.

aliases

[Anonymous Coward]

they use aliases

Some axioms /,ers don't get

[Lovejoy]

There's some kind of weird rock/paper/scissorian order to these that I can't quite figure out, but here they are:

1. Easy beats hard
2. Cheap beats expensive
3. Open beats closed

Macinauts don't understand "cheap beats expensive" and Linuxheads don't understand "easy beats hard" and we both scream about the POOR QUALITY of AOL/MS software. Guess what - users don't give a crap about quality. That's the fourth axiom. :-)

Re:Some axioms /,ers don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

2. Cheap beats expensive
3. Open beats closed

AOL is more expensive. AOL uses closed protocalls. If you ask me, AOL is not easy.

Sorry, but....

[LinuxHam]

Because I wrote the mail system

DAMN!!!!!!!!!

FUNNY!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

(maniacal laugh)HaHaHaHaHaHaHa

Re:Unspoken factor

[Anonymous Coward]

Employees were give regular email addresses with a flname####@aol.com. They then used aliases when communicating outside of the company. This is actually where a lot of the problems were.

Re:Notice and Takedown, not Anti-Circumvention

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the "notice and takedown" part of the DMCA that is anti-critisism, not the circumvention part. Perhaps if you had read the entire DMCA, and not just the anti-circumvention provisions, you would have known that.

How do we do it? Volume!

[jpellino]

Look, if you put AOL CDs in every supermarket, every magazine, every CompUSA, WalMart, Walgreens, CVS, and half the cereal boxes in Target, Stop&Shop and PigglyWiggly, a whole lotta people will pick them up. Many will use them. A bird in the hand...

Where's the surprise? Hell, people passing thru DFW airport pick up old cow turds AND PAY FOR IT! Hmmmm... maybe that was Steve's inspiration.

That's alright

[evilpaul13]

That's alright, so did I! I ditched them back in '98, cheap poor service providing bastards. I never spent more time dialing up than I did connected before I used AOL.

Internet Explorers idea of ftp

[Anonymous Coward]

is to try to download part of the file, and if it can't download the whole file claim that it was successful anyway. So only files with integrity checking (e.g. zip files) are safe to download anyway.

Shocking!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying AOL email is only good if you don't intend to use it for more than porn and spam?

Shocking!

You have to laugh...

[Andy_R]

when after 184 comments, and no-one has even considered the possiblity that getting AOL to fix the problems for TW and everyone else's benefit might have been a better solution.

Uh, it's not just software

[Razzak]

See, e-mail and attachments and all that good junk require stuff like bandwidth and storage space and servers and junk like that.

Ever think some of AOL's slowness comes from their huge number of users and not just the fact not-open-source=thedevil aol=thedevil die die die.

Oh my lord I just defended AOL. Somebody shoot me.

Re:Look who is talking...

[Anonymous Coward]

whoever the F&*(! modded this up needs their privs revoked.

Whoa. good thing you don't control $rtbl.

Re:Look who is talking...

[Anonymous Coward]

slash == crap

AHAHAHA

[ceethree]

all i have to say is they asked for it cause AOL totally sucks!!!!!!!!! hahahahahah good bye so long my friend ..

Oh, my!

[little_fluffy_clouds]

...companies such as Time Magazine had to go so far as to have hard copies rushed before deadlines by cab!

How else would you rush a hard copy in a city ? Ok, maybe courier.

If AOL email isn't working, learn ftp/scp/use some other web email service. Duh. I could rant about how people depend on email way to much. Usually these are the people sitting behind the Exchange server clicking away on their Outlook. You want reliability with that ? Ah ha.

Ad people *are* dumb as rocks

[swb]

I work at a top 10 US agency and ad people are about as technically incompetant as you can get and still be employed as more than frycook at McDonalads.

To their credit, our prepress people have figured out FTP with the aid of Fetch and other GUI tools. But there are a number of people who still don't get it.

why not mozilla/netscape mail with gecko upgrade

[ckolar]

I have tested the AOL 7 + Gecko and it is pretty nice, my sites get a lot of traffic from AOL users and I am glad (politically) that they will be onboard with Mozilla code.

I am really wondering why AOL doesn't go all of the way and junk their curddy mail (and for that matter usenet) clients and just integrate Mozilla mail/news. I have tested mail using NS 6.2.1 to read AOL through their goofy IMAP service but it is orders of magantude better.

Just wondering why this is not part of the discussion, it seems like it would have been a bit less painful that what is dscribed in this story.

--c

Their IT people tried to stop this

[Anonymous Coward]

Friend of mine is a Director-level IT person at Warner Bros. She was bitching about this decision when it first came out, complaining that AOL/TW HQ mandated it against the direct advice of their IT execs. She predicted disaster from day one. Pathetic that it took year+ of daily screwups for the top brass to get a clue. Does not bode well for the success of the conglomerate -- the top execs are so far removed from the real business that they might as well be on another planet. Idiots.

Or else the smartass...

[OSgod]

responding is wrong.

Actually -- they used the same AOL client for e-mail.

It was a bad, bad, bad technology move. Unfortunately they responded the wrong way to the problem from a technology perspective. The better companies use their own product (eat their own dog food) and when it does not meet their need retrench and make it meet their need.

For better or worse -- MS does it, so does IBM and most Linux companies to a large extent. If you can learn from your own errors your that much better off.

1st Hand

[esemplastic]

My wife works at a particular magazine (let's call it "Sunrise") that's an AOL-Time-Warner-owned company. Up until recently, they had been using Netscape Communicator (I think?) as an email client. Recently, this decree came down from on high, and EVERYONE in the office who had ever used AOL knew right away what a bad decision it was. AOL mail simply is not a world class corporate mail system, and everybody knows it. There's a severe degree of head-up-assness going on here; somebody's manager said "Why aren't our own companies using our own AOL mail system!? Do something!", and everyone jumped to do it because they didn't want to lose their jobs in a recession.

Damn the man!

Really?

[cnelzie]

Knowing that something works and being the one to make the decision means nothing when you are but one member of a nearly 900+ person IT division that is built in some strange highschool/machiavelian heirarchy that shuns the ability to critically think and only accepts "yes-men" for the positions between you and the decision makers.

In this IT "wonderland", the people at the top have no idea what is like to attempt to support someone that has no computer experience or desire to use a computer through the process of an application installation. Even with perfect instructions that HAND-HOLD them through every single CLICK of the mouse! The end-users still have trouble with this.

This is a project built without focus groups by people that have no desire to interact with the end-users. They talk up new technology and sell it like it will fix everything. All it has done so far is chew up more bandwidth, cost money and require radical changes midstream (Several Times). These are things that you just do not do with a production system that supports thousands of users.

When a problem is found, there is not a single person to take responsibility for that mistake. The mistake floats around for a few weeks/months (YES MONTHS) before someone or group does something about it. This is typically done without letting anyone know that it has been fixed, because if anyone knew, then responsibility could be put upon someone.

This is the most bizarre companies that I have ever worked for. They are a popular company as well. Most people see their product every single day. (If they go outside and drive a car that is...) That is all of the hints that I feel safe coughing up.

--
.sig seperator
--

Hotmail was still on *nix as of 12/2001

[Anonymous Coward]

Migrated a couple of years ago????
And you believe Microsoft is dedicated to security, after all, they said they were in a press release.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/23348.ht ml

as of 12/12/2001 they were still on Unix.
Unless they have been very busy in the past 3 months, it is prolly still *nix. I know which side I'd place my bet on.

Re:Another merger story - The cure for Outlook

[netringer]

...a move over to Outlook. I'm not sure what finally happened (I left before that decision was made) but the Outlook people had to explain why it was a good idea in the face of the LOVEBUG and other vbscript ilk (It managed to crash several of the other companies servers)

Didn't ya hear? The Exchange server gurus fixed that problem. When the virus scanners on the servers couldn't keep up, they BANNED ATTACHMENTS entirely. Well, not entirely, but only .xls and .doc files are allowed as attachments. Not even .zip files get through.

Where do you want to go today????

..Somewhere where things work!