The new single-serving site Fix Outlook attempts to manufacture out of whole cloth a claimed consensus that Microsoft Outlook, a so-called E-mail program, needs to update its CSS renderer. (Ironically, the site’s misrendered JavaScript pollutes its CSS, and the site only really works with JavaScript turned on. Standards? What standards?)
The only approved way to join this masterful sockpuppetry project is via Twit. Here I withhold consensus two ways: Of course I’m not using the most convenient medium for cyberbullying invented by humankind, and of course I disagree with the cause. I have reason, and it comes from having been online longer than you.
Outlook is to be shunned (ideally scrapped), not “improved.” Its default settings – use HTML mail; top-post – single-handedly destroyed electronic mail. Someone who mails you via Outlook is presumptively a top-posting asshole who doesn’t know how E-mail works.
Here is one other thing that person doesn’t know, and it is a fact that Fix Outlook refuses to acknowledge. If HTML E-mail did not exist, phishing would not exist. In other words, what Fix Outlook seeks is an even better, more standards-compliant, more accurate and faithful method of committing electronic fraud.
The Fix Outlook campaign manages the impossible by aiding and abetting more than one enemy – Microsoft Outlook, in the first instance, and in the second instance an army of phishing criminals who seek to cheat users of HTML mail. These people, while ignorant and lamentable, are also vulnerable; they need to be protected from themselves, from each other, and from the criminals.
Anyone who uses Outlook is not my kind of people. Neither is anyone who wants Outlook “fixed” in this way. I would prefer a different sense of that term, as in neuter or castrate. So should you.