Last year I was forced to migrate my 90 year old neighbour to webmail. We initially chose Gmail but ended up with outlook.office.com due to horrible IT policies at the University where she is emeritus.
Walk through a computer interface with a 90 year old sometime. It is eye opening. Both webmail systems were utter design hell.
The list of stuff that tripped my friend up is long. Two examples: Gmail has pencils everywhere and at least two different styles to compose a message (chat style, big screen compose, reply style too I think.) Microsoft’s product has a typeahead for the To: field that ignores your contacts list and instead uses the institutional one,
so typing “Anne” pulls up every Anne you’ve never heard of @youruni.com and not your friend Anne @gmail.com.
Gmail is also punitively fussy about receiving IPv6 mail but only on of its mail exchangers, so one in N mails get rejected. Great. Microsoft outlook requires you to scroll down each thread when opening it to see if “new message” meant the one at the top, or “new messages” plural further down.
You and I have become inured to this crap because we are comfortable solving problems with computers. For others, these products are very hard to use.
The one consistently brilliant client I use is the iOS mail app, via imap, to my personal mail host.
Walk through a computer interface with a 90 year old sometime. It is eye opening. Both webmail systems were utter design hell.
The list of stuff that tripped my friend up is long. Two examples: Gmail has pencils everywhere and at least two different styles to compose a message (chat style, big screen compose, reply style too I think.) Microsoft’s product has a typeahead for the To: field that ignores your contacts list and instead uses the institutional one, so typing “Anne” pulls up every Anne you’ve never heard of @youruni.com and not your friend Anne @gmail.com.
Gmail is also punitively fussy about receiving IPv6 mail but only on of its mail exchangers, so one in N mails get rejected. Great. Microsoft outlook requires you to scroll down each thread when opening it to see if “new message” meant the one at the top, or “new messages” plural further down.
You and I have become inured to this crap because we are comfortable solving problems with computers. For others, these products are very hard to use.
The one consistently brilliant client I use is the iOS mail app, via imap, to my personal mail host.