Outlook strikes again

I’m on an email archive-and-purge mission in Outlook right now, and I found a few foibles that shouldn’t be there.  Bad user interface and data destruction waiting to happen… it must be Outlook!

I first tried to move folders with drag-and-drop into my Archive Folders that AutoArchive had created, and it kind of worked.  The folders moved but when I went to look for them, there were two!  FolderName and FolderName1 – all of a sudden I thought I was in a Dr. Seuss book.  No warning popup about a name conflict, no automatic merge, no query as to how I wanted it handled, no alert that tells me the folder has to be renamed to be moved… just a rename-and-don’t-warn-the-user evil change.  How to remediate?  Pick any of the options – but do not ever change things without alerting the user!

Second mistake, with far more critical ramifications.  Since I couldn’t move folders painlessly, I emptied their contents into the existing folders in the archive.  Then, I deleted the folders. One harmless workaround later, I was in business… until the next day.

Like any good power user, I’ve created email rules to sort incoming reports. Some went to folders I wasn’t going to use any more and had deleted, so when I adjusted my rules the affected rules were highlighted in red for me to fix.  Great!  It’s not as nice as Eudora asking how to fix the rule automatically but it is a fine way to deal with the issue. So I thought all the rules were fixed – but I was wrong.

Unbeknownst to me, the only rules highlighted were folders I had moved… the deleted folders were still considered valid targets for rules.  The next morning, reports started coming in and were distributed to the appropriate folders… already in the trash.  With no warning. One “Empty Deleted Items” from catastrophe.  However, I’m paranoid, so I went looking in the folders before permanently deleting them today – and I found emails!

Microsoft, that’s sloppy.  You want to leave folders within Deleted Items as valid rule targets, fine… I understand that some people might want that.  However, rules that point to non-deleted folders should never be automatically converted to rules pointing to something ready to be deleted. Moving a folder with rules on it into Deleted Items should be fundamentally different than moving it into a different folder.  Some options to fix:

  1. Alert the user the rules now point into the trash.
  2. Prompt the user to change the rule, even if it is to point to the folder in the trash.
  3. Automatically break the rule as if the folder had been permanently deleted.
  4. Prevent the folder move until all rules are cleared.

I personally prefer #2, but anything is preferable to the current behavior.

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