The Software User Interface: Simple Tweaks Can Avoid Disgrace

Yesterday afternoon, I endured a half hour of pure frustration. The day before, I’d started getting grumble-email messages from my company’s IT department, with the subject line ‘Your mailbox is over its size limit’, and containing the following content:

Your mailbox has exceeded one or more size limits set by your administrator.
Your mailbox size is 2xxxxx KB.
Mailbox size limits:
        You will receive a warning when your mailbox reaches 200000 KB.You may not be able to send or receive new mail until you reduce your mailbox size.
To make more space available, delete any items that you are no longer using or move them to your personal folder file (.pst).
Items in all of your mailbox folders including the Deleted Items and Sent Items folders count against your size limit. 
You must empty the Deleted Items folder after deleting items or the space will not be freed.
See client Help for more information.

The fact that these repeated auto-messages were incrementally further causing me to exceed my size limit did not escape my attention. Ahem. Anyhoo…

Normally, I could just grab my corporate laptop, connect to the corporate LAN via VPN, fire up Outlook and, with a few mouse clicks, empty the Deleted Items and Sent Items folders (the predominant offenders in this particular case) stored on the Exchange server. But since the end of August, the last time I did a manual purge (now you know how much work cyber-correspondence I get to my EDN addresses each month, not to mention the stuff that goes to my personal addresses!), I’ve been exclusively relying on a combination of my BlackBerry and Outlook Web Access for corporate email access. I don’t have my corporate laptop with me now. And I won’t have access to it again for more than a week.

So I fired up Outlook Web Access:

Right now you see that the Deleted Items folder is empty. Well, it wasn’t before. Specifically it was made up of 20 pages’ worth of lists of emails, each one of them 100 entries in length. Were there a simple ’select all’ capability, I could have purged the Deleted Items inventory with 40 mouse-clicks…one each per page to a) select all 100 entries and then to b) activate the delete ‘X’.

But there isn’t a ’select all’ button or any other capability like it that I can find. So instead, to purge the Deleted Items folder, I clicked on the mouse button 1,987 times to select all of the entries, 100 per page, plus an additional 20 times to do a per-page deletion. Thanks, Microsoft. Paraphrasing Ringo Starr, "I’ve got blisters on my mouse-click finger".

Followup: And now I’m going to cry. As you might be able to tell from the above screenshot, my default browser is Firefox for OS X. However, since I’m running Windows XP virtualized on this machine via VMware Fusion, I have access to Internet Explorer 8 that way. And on a hunch, after writing the above paragraphs, I decided to fire up Outlook Web Access that way. Here’s what I found:

Using the OWA interface provided through IE, it’s possible to select a block of messages using only a few mouse-clicks and then delete them en masse. And right-clicking the Deleted Items folder to empty it at one fell swoop even works. Just like in regular Outlook.

Live and learn. Sigh.