Using Outlook From Orbit

Pigskin-Referee writes with this excerpt from Office Watch: "On the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station they use Microsoft Outlook 2003, but not quite in the same way that us earthbound Earthlings do. The space shuttle Atlantis is orbiting the earth right now and the crew exchange emails with the ground a few times each day. Bandwidth is a constraint and you don't want the busy crewmembers bothered with spam or unnecessary messages so NASA has a special system in place. The crew use fairly standard laptops running Microsoft Outlook (currently Outlook 2003) with Exchange Server as the email host, but they don't link to the server using any of the standard methods."

Re:Bandwidth constraint?

[skirtsteak_asshat]

In space, no one can hear you throw a chair.

Re:The lengths they go to...

[JoshuaZ]

Except that the realtime voice connection is an old-fashioned radio. The bandwith needed for a staticky radio connection is effectively low.

Re:mail

[nmb3000]

You may jest, but you can do a lot more, more easily, from a command line than a GUI on any platform. Even Windows. Try to

ren antique???.jpg desk???.jpg

in File Manager

In Windows: CTRL+A, F2, "desk", ENTER.

Admittedly that gives you names like "desk (01).jpg" and not "desk01.jpg" but it's close enough. If you want a significantly higher level of control, try something like Flexible Renamer [vector.co.jp] (somewhat prone to crashing, but the most versatile and powerful I've found).

Re:mail

[goodwid]

You, sir, have obviously never heard of nmh, or its predecessor MH. It's a suite of command line tools for email, and in 20 years of reading email, I've found nothing that yet comes close to the power and capabilities of reading and processing email with nmh. Being able to search for email from multiple folders using regexp and shell scripting just isn't as easy as on any GUI MUA I've ever seen, and because it is just a bunch of single-task binaries, it's very easy to build a GUI or even web-based front-end for it. The only thing that got me to switch from using it as my primary email was the gmail interface, and labels vs. folders. If not for that, i'd still be using it daily, and not cuz of the cool/smug factor, but simply because it works, and works well.

Re:mail

[SCPRedMage]

You got that backwards, actually - Outlook isn't tied to Exchange, Exchange is tied to Outlook.

Re:mail

[Nutria]

It's called a TUI.