Live Mail Fail (still)

Okay…a few more weeks have passed, and surely my Live Mail Woes issues that I blogged about in June are resolved, right?  WRONG!  Oh I keep hoping…today’s the day…today’s the day that I’m going to click on "Download" and my folders will sync up and all will be right in the world.

So I click onward and nothing happens.  Perhaps I didn’t click hard enough – CLICK – maybe with my left hand, yeah, that’s the ticket – CLICK – arrrggggh!  No joy.  Maybe it’s a problem with Vista x64 – I’ll install Live Mail on Vista 32-bit edition – that’ll solve the problem – CLICK (on Vista 32) – nothing…  Maybe Live Mail doesn’t like Vista, I’ll install Live Mail on XP Pro – good ol’ XP Pro – never lets me down – okey dokey, XP install’s done, Live Mail’s installed and – CLICK – STILL nothing! 

Excuse me if I’m a tad dubious about signing up for the Microsoft Online Services new offerings of Exchange Hosted Services.

Granted, the Live Mail offering is "free" – as in it isn’t costing me up-front money to have the mail account – (I’m guessing the payback is the important demographic and contextual info they’re gathering from my emailings and the like).   That said, I have an expectation of some semblance of service and support for the account.  Simple expectations along the lines of if I inform Microsoft of a problem with their service, then perhaps they’ll actually fix said problem and maybe even restore my accounts folder integrity within say…..two months????  Is that too much to ask? 

As it is now, if somebody were to ask about my opinion of the Live Edu mail hosting offerings from Microsoft I’d have to say "No Thank You" in light of what I’m seeing now.  And if businesses were to ask about the Exchange Hosting Services?  Same thing…I can only recommend what I’ve had good success with, and so far, my Live Mail hosting story is nothing to email home about…oh yeah, I couldn’t if I wanted to ’cause my folders won’t download!

Maybe they’d better slap a "Beta" tag on their header like GMail does.  That way they’d at least have the excuse that "it’s still in beta – whataya expect?".

Doug White

Live Mail Woes Continue…

On May 6th I was doing a re-install of the OS on my laptop and I installed Live Mail – which had previously been working fine.  That was up until the "unable to synchronize folders" issue reared its ugly head.  This time, when I was setting up my Live Mail account under Windows Live Mail, it wasn’t able to synchronize the Inbox, Junk, Drafts, Sent and Deleted folders.  No error pop-ups as to what happened, just the ever-present "Download" button at the top of the screen – which, when clicked, does absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Eager to get things fixed, I emailed Live Mail support.  As expected, they needed log files, screen shots, uninstalls, reinstalls, delete sections from the registry, etc.  The usual cadre of troubleshooting steps that we’ve all come to know and love.  I was even running into intermittent "unable to sync" issues with my Mobile 6.1 device, so it was pretty obvious that the issue wasn’t with the client – it was with the server.  Their response to that last piece of info?  I’d need to take that one up with the Mobile guys as a separate trouble ticket ;?)

Finally, after a couple of weeks of this, I was told that the problem had been escalated and that they were very sorry for the hassles I was encountering.  That means that my problems are over…escalation means I’m getting the top-of-the-line support guys…the ones that can get things fixed, right?  Wrong!  A couple of more weeks passed and still no word.  I replied to the support email again and asked for a status update…pleading for them to check the folder structure on the mail server…better yet…move my account over to a different server…at least do SOMETHING.  Again, the "we’re sorry for your problems and we’re looking into it" response from yet another tech.  And oh, by the way, we won’t be moving your account to another server and that "this is being dealt with utmost priority and that the product group is working diligently to have this problem fixed as soon as possible". 

Okay, now we’re going on week 6 and still no joy.  The screen shot above is from yet another system that I have Vista on…and I get the same results on an XP box as well.  Come on guys – you can do it – just get’r fixed.  Or at least give me my money back for the Live account ;?)

Doug White

Windows XP SP3

Nothing too ground-breaking here, just some info on XP Service Pack 3 that I wanted to post.  It should be available for pretty much everybody to install now via Windows Update.  If you haven’t taken the time, read the fine print when you fire off Windows Update.  There should be a link to "Microsoft Update", which allows you to also pull down updates for other Microsoft products other than just Windows.  Examples include Office updates, SQL Server updates, etc.  You’ll need to pay attention to the top of the screen if pop-ups are blocked and allow the Microsoft Update components to install.

Network Installation of XP Service Pack 3

For those who are responsible for installing SP3 in multiple machines, it’s much more efficient to just skip the Windows/Microsoft updater route and just pull down all the bits and either mount them on the network, put ’em on a thumb drive or even burn them to a CD and sneaker-net them around and install the service pack.  You can download all of SP3 for such installation here.

Preventing Installation of XP Service Pack 3

In some cases, it might be prudent to delay the installation of SP3.  In our case, we have a piece of lab equipment that may or may not like the SP3 bits.  It’s working fine now and we’re not looking to muck up the works.  Another case is when OEM’s like HP mistakenly loaded Intel-specific services on some of their AMD-based boxes and installing the service pack resulted in endless reboots as Mary Jo Foley points out.  HP has a work-around on their site.

In these scenarios, you can pull down and implement the Windows Service Pack Blocker Toolkit.  This will temporarily prevent Windows Update from sneaking SP3 on your system for up to a year.  As SP3 is mostly a roll-up of previous hot-fixes and patches, it should be relatively safe to block SP3 if need be.

Slipstreaming Service Pack 3

Finally, nobody wants to pave their system and have to install XP SP2 and THEN install XP SP3.  We’d much rather have the SP3 goodness baked into the install CD to start with.  Paul Thurrott has a write-up on slipstreaming SP3 into your installation CD on his SuperSite for Windows.

Doug White