Do you agree that products always have room for improvement?
"Every day there are little things in software that we find annoying. Some write books about it, like Annoyances.org, but I thought this site would be more constructive.
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- Adam Cogan 
Yes, it would be nice not to have to switch to Outlook Express to use newsgroups. And although I would like to see the functionality in Outlook, I am of the belief that there are so many other things that the Outlook team needs to do, that it just cant be justified.
Newsgroups are not used by average Jo. The Outlook team should stick to core issues.
When I am in Sydney and want to make a 9AM appointment (New York time) it should be as simple as choosing [9am] [New York] Currently I have to work it backwards and enter it in Sydney time. All I need is a “Time Zone” combo. The crazy thing is if you cycle through the properties of a calendar item the “Time Zone” value is there – it is just not exposed on the UI. Even when I reply to an appointment I can see both time zones! As an example I get:
Webinar: .NET Enterprise Services Essentials Time: Thursday, April 17, 2003, 11:00 a.m. PDT (2:00 p.m. EST) Duration: One hour, including a Q&A
Figure: Add a “Time Zone” combo box here
Our observations suggest that all calendar entries created with Microsoft Outlook are in Rich Text format. Seeing this has a message size overhead and is less supported by all mail clients, we’d like to see an option for HTML formatting. From what we can tell, the iCalendar format that Outlook makes use of does not have any requirements for rich text.
Figure: An option for calendar formatting could be found around the iCalendar-relevant data on this screen
Users should be able to access the HTML like in Internet Explorer with View > Source. This could be implemented like Frontpage with a HTML tab at the bottom of the window.
Figure: FrontPage provides an HTML view of the content
Depending on the editor used to create an email (eg Word vs. Outlook), size can vary dramatically. Unfortunately, which editor the sender uses cannot always be controlled. There should be a ‘Compress Email’ option to optimize emails using the default editor.
Figure: Put ‘Compress Email’ option here
The context menus for the grids in Outlook should have all of the filtering features found in Access.
Figure: Context menu in Outlook
Figure: Context menu in Access
Often I want to search emails for certain words. It would be nice to have the functionality of the Google toolbar available when writing emails.
I would like to have this functionality in other office applications also. View details.
Figure: It would be nice to have the google toolbar in emails
This error occurs when you send an email and it bounces, then you hit send again. For some reason it sends a whole lot of rubbish.
Figure: An email has bounced for some reason
Figure: Sending the email again…
Figure: For some reason the email body becomes corrupted
We believe that email is at it’s most effective when you’re using your inbox as a task list. If you need to ask someone a question it’s usually a better option to use the phone. If you are asking someone to do something however, email works really well, because you then have a record of the task – with the date and time as well. Outlook should encourage you using your email as a task tracking system, and provide a way you can see the status of emails.
When you send an email there should be a field ‘Action’ with these choices:
Please add a status combo field to emails (should appear by default in sent items):
There should be some way that it is not needed to create plugins for Outlook.