During college I started working at a local record store here in Rochester. Since I graduated and started this business, I've cut down my hours to less than 5 hours a week and helping them put out their weekly online newsletter. Truthfully, I really only still work there because I have an addiction to music and the employee discount helps to lessen the financial blow from all the music that I purchase.

Anyways, this past week something happened which I had been asking/praying for for a long time. The company that hosted our email finally updated the web based email client. The old client (which we've had since I started working there 3 years ago) was slow and dull (all dark greys). It was table based and extremely annoying to use. At least I thought.

Then this week, they "upgraded" to a new, I believe it to be, proprietary based web email client that while looking a lot nicer (very web 2.0 with its icons and gradients), is 10x worst than the old version when it comes to usability.

Here's a screen shot of the new client (click for larger view):
os-cubed screenshot

As you can see, the new client is frames based. This is suppose to speed things up, but it still needs to reload all the pages every time I do anything, and actually slows down the whole process considerably (especially deleting). There is also no way to select and manage multiple messages. This means that you must click (thus opening) every single message that you want to move or delete. Granted, this way looks more like Outlook Express, but it falls short being that it is web-based. At least with OE, you can select multiple messages to delete them all at once. This web-based client could have implemented a lot more desktop-like functionality (like drag and drop) with Javascript and AJAX, but doesn't. It does use a lot of Javascript, but not for anything to improve usability.

Another thing that bugs me is the lack of settings. I have no control over whether or not I get text or HTML emails. I'm stuck with all HTML emails and am forced to open them in order to delete them. That can't be safe, can it? Especially being that I get TONS of spam.

Sadly, I actually really really miss the old crappy web 1.0 email client we used to have. While it wasn't as pretty, it was simpler and allowed me to do everything I needed to do. This new version is trying way too hard to mimic the desktop mail client, but doesn't have any of the functionality of one. Hopefully, enough users will comment to them about the new system and they'll make some necessary updates.