I'm talking about IncrediMail. My mum's favourite mail client, and my absolute least favourite piece of software in the universe. I would link to the home page here, but clicking round their site has already crashed Mozilla twice, and this is the THIRD time I've had to retype this rather long post. Still, at least it gives me the chance to revise the post before I submit it. For example, in the second sentence of this paragraph, what was "on the planet" in the first write became "ever written" in the second attempt, and "in the universe" in this third attempt.
Why do I hate it? Well, for a start, we just reformatted the computer my parents use. When we re-installed IncrediMail (despite my recommendation to use a proper mail client) or at least tried to, we found it wouldn't let us download IncrediMail unless we had Internet Explorer 5 or later. Now, why a mail client should care what browser is being used is beyond me. But anyway, we installed IE6 and IncrediMail.
To get an idea of why I hate this program, just have a look at their home page. Now, I'm going to use Konqueror to get the exact quote here, as I'm not letting the site near Mozilla again. So, here goes - "IncrediMail lets you take full control over what your emails look like. Select from hundreds of email backgrounds that fit any mood or occasion. The people you send IncrediMail emails to don't need to download anything in order to see these backgrounds!" the website blithers excitedly. No, dear IncrediMail marketer, they don't need to download anything. Except your e-mail, which due to the pretty backgrounds and emoticons and whatever else, is now an order of magnitude larger than it should be. Incidentally, this is why my mum likes IncrediMail so much - all the pretty backgrounds and such.
To her credit, mum knows I don't like such wastes of bandwidth, and so sends me e-mails in plain text. At least IncrediMail has that option. No, wait, back up a bit. I said that IncrediMail has that option. You can select "Plain Text", but it doesn't mean it'll send it in plain text, which it doesn't. Sure, it's mostly there, but it still clings to quoted-printable in places - little "=0D"s at the end of every line. Ah well. They tried.
So, after having sent me a test e-mail, mum decided to send another e-mail to one of her friends. She found she can't switch plain text back off. The menu item was helpfully greyed out.
"It seems to be stuck on plain text, and won't let me send in anything else," said mum.
"Good," I replied.
"No, no," she said, predictably. "I don't want it like that."
"Thought not."
Try as I might, I couldn't find out how to switch off plain text. Granted, I've hardly ever used the program before, but with the menu option greyed out, I couldn't figure out how to do it. So, I gave up and clicked the Help menu, then the menu item which looked most like it passed for IncrediMail's help system, which was "Help Center." Rather than bring up a help box, it... wait for it... opens IE and points it to the help page on IncrediMail's website. *sigh* whatever happened to that Windows help dialog that comes up, with the little purple-book-question-mark icon in the corner? Still, at least we know why it wanted IE5 - other browsers crash when exposed to their site.
And don't even get me started on the Voice Message Recorder thing. Actively encouraging users that sending e-mails with pretty backgrounds, pictures and voice files is accepted practice can't be a good idea.
Incidentally, I made a slightly smaller rant than this on IRC, and I've just received1 a message from someone who says he's submitted it to $NON_FYOS_IRC_QUOTES_SITE, so expect to see a similar rant there in the next few ice ages...
So, if any of you ever come across IncrediMail, or any of the developers thereof, please have your barge poles at the ready, to measure the distance from it or bludgeon them to death respectively. That latter bit can also be applied to their web designers.
1. by "I've just received," I mean I received it an hour ago, but didn't notice because I've been writing and rewriting this post. |
