Another fucking twat asking for a responsive html email when they are targeting outlook. IT USES THAT HEAP IF SHIT WORD AS A RENDERING ENGINE WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THAT! It's bad enough having to code them up using fucking tables and spacer gifs. Why do IT people stick religiously to Microsoft heap of shit applications... Oh I know it's because they are so fucking shit that it needs a full time twat just to get them through the fucking day. Fuck Microsoft. I guess you can sense I'm having a bad day, especially when my broadband decides to pack in, on and off all fucking day and the support twat puts me on hold then fucks off. FML

Because of the pandemic and how most of the people in my institution's I.T department are working from home we were asked to route calls from our work extension to our home phones. I did it to my cellphone and some of the calls that I get are hilarious, yet annoying. Annoying because we have a bunch of boomer ass people making the most ridiculous calls.
Being that the calls are not registered into our phones they just show the random number from which x person is calling.

Just right now my phone rings aaaand:
Me: "Hello?"
Boomer: "YES <tech support technician's name which is obviously not mine> I NEED YOU TO FIX MY EMAIL IT IS NOT WORKING AND MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING"

Me: "I am sorry, I don't know how did you get this number, but what we can..."

BOOMER: WELL CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO THE TECHNICIAN? I NEED THIS TO GET FIXED RIGHT NOW

Me: As I was saying, we can attempt to send an email through your phone's outlook app if you have it installed or I can send an email asking them to contact you since you are reaching an entirely different dep..."

Boomer: "DID YOU NOT HEAR ME! MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING AND I CAN'T SEND EMAILS AND I DON'T WANT TO USE MY PHONE, I WANT TO USE MY LAPTOP"

Me: Did YOU not hear me? I just said that I can send an email for you since my computer is working properly, at the same time, not wanting to use your phone to send an email when you have no other option available is more of a YOU problem, it is not mine

Boomer: EXCUSE ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? i AM THE MANAGER OF <X> DEPARTMENT

Me: nice to meet you I guess, I am the MANAGER of X department as well, i have been told that for issues with my attitude I can just toss you over to <Director of IT> if you wish.

Boomer: Oh....no...thank you, I will send an email through my phone and see if that works.

Some background: The Head of my department is a hardass that is not scared to tell people to fuck off when they are messing shit up and he is very protective of all of us. I love this man and have personally followed the dude through hell when no one else came through. If they think I am bitchy that dude would throw down an entire house over people being dense, and even though he is a boomer himself (age terms) he despises the general attitude of entitled people from his generation.

10/10 I love my boss and hope to heaven that all of you find similar leaders.

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

Microsoft admits they were hacked. Explains how it worked and what happened. No big deal. companies get hacked. That's life.

Indirectly admits that all of their customer support agents have access to your inbox.

Cool. Deleting my Outlook email. Thanks guys.

I study software engineering, so that obviously means I'm also free family tech support right?

Apparently some lady that lives nearby believes this, but she replaced family with vague acquaintance.

This lady is very computer illiterate, so much that I have to describe the wifi icon as a dot with two waves above it.

So one day, she calls me because her Outlook isn't receiving mail. I ask her if she has any internet and she confirms she does because she can visit Google. After trying a bunch of possible solutions in Outlook, I ask her to download a remote access program so I can look at what's wrong.

She didn't have internet. Visiting Google means seeing the Chrome logo apparently.

As IT, I hate being too accessible to users (I'm a software dev, not help desk support). One particular user...let's call him Fred (even though his real name is Joe)...sits close to me.

---

Fred: Bobby, fix my Outlook (he says it jokingly but serious). It keeps saying it needs to be repaired.

Me: Yeah had the same issue last week. I just reinstalled it.

Fred: So...you can't fix it?

---

Fred: Bobby, I need access to X.

Me: Ok go to this link to request access and a manager will approve it.

Fred: Whaaat? That's too much work. You are IT and should just give me access.

---

Fred: Youtube isn't working.

Me: Ok...and?

Fred: It means my internet isn't working!

Me: *sigh*

Got a ticket today to redo the companies html e-mail signature.
Requirements: Support for Outlook 2007-2016.

Me never done one before, thinking: "Regular Html and a bit of CSS, no biggie, can't be that hard"
Also me: "Okay let's see which CSS features are supported in Outlook 2007"

Quick google search to find out that there is nearly no support for anything and that Outlook uses Word as render engine.
Someone seriously thought using motherfucking Word to render Html & CSS is a good idea? FML

What the fuck Microsoft !! Your android apps are total piece of shit! Fucking outlook Android app don't have support to view doc file which is created using your shitty Microsoft teams portal.

If I click on that doc file link through my outlook app, you redirect me to chrome.
Ok that's still acceptable. But the real shit starts now. You tell me that your browser isn't supported! Is this fucking joke?? Who in the world develops a website which can't support latest version of Android chrome?
Now that I have installed your shitty Microsoft teams app, it doesn't show up in "open with" options. Clicking on that link is still redirecting to the chrome saying that browser is unsupported.

Also, your shitty Microsoft teams app can't edit fucking doc file. When I click on your Microsoft word icon, You again ask me to install Android app for Microsoft word.
Seriously fuck you Microsoft and your shitty apps!

INTERVIEWER: Let’s say client wants a gif in the EDM design but older outlooks don’t support it. How do you solve it?
ME: Maybe we can try using iframes if outlook supports them and host gif somewhere and use iframes to show it.
INTERVIEWER: Any other solution?
ME: We can probably also detect the email client and just show gif for all other email clients but a picture for outlook.
INTERVIEWER: No but the client wants the gif to show on all email clients
ME: But outlook doesn’t support gifs!!!
INTERVIEWER: yeah
ME: …..
INTERVIEWER: …..

I thought maybe I missed something having been a junior dev and never developing edms. So jumped on the internet after the interview and my second answer is literally how everyone does it. What even was the point of that question? At no point she said yeah that’s a good solution and that’s how we do it in the industry. If outlook doesn’t fucking support gifs then what the fuck kind of solution am I supposed to bring to the fucking table in 5 fucking minutes.

The most annoying hack I've had to deal with was back when I did IT support, actually. Level 1 call center tech at the time. Apparently someone fell for a phishing email and gave out his outlook credentials. The phisher used that email account to send out another phishing email to roughly 1800 employees.

Security Operations noticed, because this guy's job didn't generally involve sending out mass-communication emails. They investigated, figured out what had happened, and opted for the nuclear option: they reset the password for EVERY SINGLE ACCOUNT that received the email. All 1800 of them. Over the weekend.

I walked into the call center Monday morning and checked the call stats, then did a double-take. There were over 300 people waiting in the queue. I almost left and called in sick. Turns out it wasn't that bad though. Annoying to reset so many passwords and having no downtime due to the full queue, but on the other hand my stats were better that day than any other, since every call was a 5-minute password reset.

Going back home for the holidays means becoming tech support for pretty much the whole family, unluckly.

As soon as I enter my grandparent's home, my grandpa says "Could you print some emails?". I open his laptop, and I start sweating as soon as I see the Windows XP logo popping up. He (obviously) doesn't remember his password, and the only way to access his (mostly defunct) web mail service is Outlook 2003. For some reason, the web mail provider's POP3 server dies, and i spend half an hour trying to explain it. I ended up leaving with him saying "Why are you even going to a computer engineering university."

Ah, family.

With a recent HAProxy update on our reverse proxy VM I decided to enable http/2, disable TLS 1.0 and drop support for non forward-secrecy ciphers.

Tested our sites in Chrome and Firefox, all was well, went to bed.

Next morning a medium-critical havock went loose. Our ERP system couldn't create tickets in our ticket system anymore, the ticket systems Outlook AddIn refused to connect, the mobile app we use to access our anti-spam appliance wouldn't connect although our internal blackboard app still connected over the same load balancer without any issues.

So i declared a 10min maintenance window and disabled HTTP/2, thinking that this was the culprit.

Nope. No dice.
Okay, i thought, enable TLS 1.0 again.

Suddenly the ticket system related stuff starts to work again.

So since both the ERP system and the AddIn run on .NET i dug through the .NET documentation and found out that for some fucking reason even in the newest .NET framework version (4.7.2) you have to explicitly enable TLS 1.1 and 1.2 or else you just get a 'socket reset' error. Why the fuck?!

Okay, now that i had the ticket system out of the way i enabled HTTP/2 and verified that everything still works.

It did, nice.

The anti-spam appliance app still did not work however, so i enabled one non-pfs cipher in the OpenSSL config and tested the app.

Behold, it worked.

I'm currently creating a ticket with them asking politely why the fuck their app has pfs-ciphers disabled.

And I thought disabling DEPRECEATED tech wouldn't be an issue... Wrong...

!rant from a support guy

I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know

My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.

So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!

Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.

* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.

After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)

And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!

I wish Outlook had autocomplete...

Isn't it time even Word and other apps support basic autocomplete..?

I should create a contact form for support requests.

Me: I can't connect to the mail server with the settings you've send me.

Employer: It works. I can send and receive mails with Outlook.

Me: Ok, I will check my code.

Employer: It has to work. I even checked the informations I send you about the mail server settings and they are the correct ones.

I've tried every configuration which could be possible and rewrote my code. It wont work, so I tried to use my own mail server and it worked immediately.

Me: I've tried everything but I can't connect to your mail server. After a while I've tried to connect to my own and it works just fine.

Employer: oh...

Fantasizing about stabbing SharePoint in the throat, I'm being forced to contact Microsoft tech support, so I need to obtain our software assurance account info.
Our company's rep sends me our SA account numbers (assuming that was all I needed) and the link to create an incident.

Step through Microsoft support ticket 'wizard' which ends with requiring a login with a Microsoft account.

Me: "What login account should I be using?"
Rep: "You shouldn't need one. Just use the SA account number and access ID I sent you."
Me: "There is no entry for those values. I step through a support 'wizard' and the final page redirects me to the Microsoft login page."
Rep: "Use your work email address."
Me: "I can, but I shouldn't have to use my personal outlook email address. Can I just send you the issue and you submit the ticket? After the ticket is created, all the correspondence will be through email anyway."
<30 min. later>
Rep: "I just linked your work email address to your company's account. You should be able to login now."
Me: "Same error. I think you're messing with me."
<30 min. later>
Rep: "Select the option to create an account with your own email."
Me: "Now I know you're messing with me. Already tried that and received the error 'You cant sign up here with a work or school email address'."
Rep: "Weird...I guess Microsoft changed their policy."
Me: "So now what?"
<1 hour later>
Rep: "You might have to send me your SharePoint issue and I'll get a ticket created. After the ticket is created, I'll change the contact email address to you."

WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THAT TWO HOURS AGO!

Whew! Thanks devRant...that's better. I put the knife down and now only want to punch SharePoint in the face.

I feel like such an idiot every time I use windows just slightly beyond clicking buttons. I'm trying to write a very simple macro to simply send an email out when I receive an email with a particular header. and no, outlook doesnt support that with rules. so now I have to use this garbage IDE, writing a script in a 25 year old language, with every bell and whistle button you could possibly think of and no way of figuring out how to do anything without being balls deep in a decade old forum post. I hate microsoft more and more every time I use it. I thought maybe if I got good and started "dev"ing with it more, I'd hate it less, but no... its always some super clunky application with shit tons of buttons and you dont know what they do, and when the app breaks, it gives you some hex number and nothing else, and sends all the good stuff to microsoft so they can fix it in the next "big update" thatll fuck up youre entire days worth of work and kill an hour of your precious time. Ugh.

I find still very funny that Desktop outlook (So Microsoft) doesn't support MFA from Office 365.

I'm kind of tired to tell user go and geerate "app specific" pass which bypasses MFA.

Specially when even default Windows 10/11 mail client supports MFA just fine and fucking faster than outlook.

This is the part of my job I hate : Administrating users, search how to make thier PC/MAC work (Btw Mac client does suppoort MFA ironicly).

Can I just get back to Infrastructure, redis caches, step in Q# ? .

Not sure if I could care any less about the choices being made anymore.

But the best choice I made was actually quitting the working from home job I had right when they were starting to use WordPress and outsourcing it to whatever Indian developer they found to do that for them (pun intended, though no hard feelings and understanding of the situation) for their general projects. I just wasn't open to it anymore.

I was setting up websites for almost zero to no money, a website in 4 hours upto 2 days, whilst doing internal support to save their frigging mailboxes from the Outlook Demon all the time. (Exaggerated in some sense, but I abide by the thought)

Best decision would be to start working full-time in an E-commerce fulfillment company, learning the good stuff, both structural and management wise. Working on one entity, but still doing it whilst using 100's of technologies, connecting to a ton of platforms and projects and most of all being able to aid in lessening the work-load for both my co-workers and customers as much as is deemed possible.

I'm fine.

Today marks the second day of me having to build an email template and I never hated anything more in my life than that. WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE SO COMPLICATED? WHY CAN'T THEY UPGRADE THEIR STUPID RENDERING ENGINES SO WE CAN USE MORE MODERN METHODS?!? Sorry but I don't want to create an E-Mail and having to pretend its 1995. The table view is so outdated and I'm aware of the fact that some clients support divs but not Outlook (Outlook itself sucks pretty hard but thats another story). I just wanna be able to use grid, flex, etc. to build my template.
I HATE MY LIFE

Outlook irritates the heck out of me with its distracting notification bar that's recently begun popping up almost every time I start the god damn shitty application. What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this annoying crap. Our support technicians are unable to solve it, so I wrote feedback to Microsoft. I don't think they are ever going to answer, though. They haven't even responded to another problem with Outlook that I reported nine months ago! Microsoft are reallly inconsistent, to say the least. Some of their products, like Visual Studio, VS Code and Microsoft Flight Simulator, are excellent! But, more mainstream software, like MS Office and Outlook, suck. Windows (I'm using Windows 10) is so so. It works alright if you know your ways with the registry editor. The same goes for the support. If you're lucky, you can get hold of a real, flesh-and-blood person who patiently guides you through the cumbersome process of, for example purchasing and installing Minecraft (believe me, it isn't easy, took almost an hour for the support person to solve. Creds to him). Sometimes, like when activating an old Windows license, you get to talk to a bot and that, surprisingly, works very well too. However, if you report any bug or feedback to Microsoft through an application's help section, you 'll never hear from them. They just ignore it.

Hey, anyone have experience with email with encryption?

I need to setup TLS for emails for all devices on premises. The printer and other devices does not support TLS.

I'm thinking i could use local exchange server that forwards to our office 365, as we use outlook for the domain. But i would rather use some linux solution.

We have multiple ip's we might send from.