Everyone likes to point and laugh, sure, I'm getting a chuckle as well.
However, on more practical level, what are other options? Outlook, the desktop application works really well with local copies, is pretty low bandwidth and very familiar to end users.
IMAP with Thunderbird is probably only other option that would satisfy the requirements.
EDIT: Yes they need to get email in space. It's easy way to send documents back and forth.
Email is a pretty good way to send short text messages, but it's not great at sending files. The basic protocols are pretty simple and we've got a lot of experience using them. I can see the appeal of email.
There's no way that outlook is the best tool for the job though, and it's no surprise at all that they're having problems with it. It's a complete mess with insane amounts of overhead and bloat if all you want to do is send text. Even the message headers it sends/mangles are trash. It's a pain to work with on the end user side too. I can't imagine that they couldn't have written a basic email client that would do the job better with far fewer problems/resources or used/built off of any number of decades old open source projects.
This comment is downvoted, but it is correct. Emailing a file takes roughly 30% more bandwidth than a file transfer protocol (any such protocol, not necessarily FTP) due to mime encoding.
Discussion of the MIME part’s encoding as being an inefficient size is missing the forest for the trees.
The entire message is (or can be) compressed before transmission (eg. When IMAP has DEFLATE enabled).
Just because an intermediate encoding step expands binary to make it text safe doesn’t mean it has to stay uncompressed during the entire existence of that MIMe message.
If all you need is file transfer even the message header is a lot of overhead (how much overhead depends on the client and how many devices handle the message). Mail servers don't always handle large files very well either. Even if they upload correctly downloading can be difficult. It's not uncommon for a single message with a large attachment to clog a mailbox and prevent other messages from being sent/received. That said, I'm not even saying it can't/wont work, just that there's better options for sending files and there are certainly better MUAs than outlook.
I’m not arguing for Outlook. I wouldn’t touch that POS unless I was forced to.
But maybe it’s just easier to not have to teach an astronaut to use another app. If they are using Outlook in space, it’s probably the same app and server they use on the ground.
Of course FTP or RSYNC or whatever would be slightly more efficient for the transfer or more capable or retrying / resuming. I’m not arguing that either.
Sometimes it’s more important that the astronaut doesn’t have to learn another app instead/ system.
Sometimes it’s better to choose a less efficient system that is less prone to accidental destructive. It’s not like anybody ever screwed up a sync command and accidentally wiped a directory or anything.[1]
Great, one more thing that can fail. Does anyone remember, that some time ago lots of people were in panic, because Exchange servers had a vulnerability on "high severity" level, and people everywhere had to patch their Exchange servers, if they didn't rent them from a service provider? Can't wait to see that happening again, this time affecting an Exchange server used by astronauts in space!
And if you are going with some local server, the Exchange/Outlook family is just the worst possible option. Those people already have enough stuff to maintain up there, they don't need something that require in-house expert admins.
> Yes they need to get email in space. It's easy way to send documents back and forth.
To me that's probably much more interesting. We assume they have all this fancy NASA tech, probably some special communication protocols, but nope, email is fine. Still not sure why they'd use Outlook, but I guess it's easier than retraining astronauts on Alpine or Mutt.
How long did the US military rely on mIRC... decades, maybe they still do?
If they have stock outlook they are doing normal networking and are connected to the normal internet over some deep-space antenna setup. So why not just use Debian and gmail in the browser if you want easy? The ISS uses Debian. I can't believe it's too hard to get astronauts to open Firefox
Gmail is not an Outlook replacement. Gsuite as a whole has more or less the required pieces, but there is no single google product that covers the feature set of Outlook + Exchange.
> The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed.
This quote is completely and totally irrelevant. Nobody is saying they should code a new Outlook. If they did code something, it would be significantly smaller in scope and rigorously tested like spacebound programs in the past were. "New space-engineering-grade code created with actual engineering practices" is absolutely going to be more reliable than "old bloated commercial shitware". But I guess software engineering is a lost art, so it can't be helped.
It's also going to take a hell of a lot longer and cost more than buying an Outlook license. If I was lead on that project, you'd have an uphill battle trying to convince me that spending $100k+ on an email solution unless you can point to specific, serious deficiencies in the existing off the shelf solutions.
Software Engineering is far from a lost art: part of the practice is intelligently making cost-benefit decisions.
The current solution is literally causing problems in space. Space-grade engineering is expensive, but having things go wrong on your already very expensive mission is even more expensive.
Sure, but people who didn't know better until this particular incident do not deserve the title "engineer". Being able to classify and manage risks before they happen is engineering 101.
Engineering requires working around constraints as well - and a major constraint of any project I've worked on was budget. If they wrote a new email client and it had some bug, we'd be laughing about why they didn't use one of the COTS email clients.
That problem would be much less likely with a minimalist battle tested OSS solution whose maintainers and users have decidedly different priorities than those governing something like outlook or even thunderbird.
The higher the stakes the more valuable minimalism becomes.
I don't know why people are surprised by this. Using suitable off-the-shelf solutions for non-mission-critical purposes seems like a very reasonable thing to do.
I'm recalling this from my memory of "The Space Above Us" podcast: There were various bespoke teleprinters sent up on early shuttle flights that had exciting failure modes (if I remember correctly one of them started smoking) and in at least a couple of cases they had to stow the new hardware and pull out the old backup hardware because the new stuff didn't work.
I quit Outlook and went to Thunderbird when I upgraded my CPU and Microsoft told me I had to re-purchase Outlook when I had paid for a "lifetime license". That was the last straw for me. I installed Linux and Thunderbird and have not looked back at Windows.
I was on Windows for 30 years. I advocated for it and even got a few CTOs to switch from MacOS to Windows because they saw Windows was actually more capable than Apple propaganda would have you believe.
I'm not really sure how you figure that my comment makes Linux hard to like.
I simply don't like the direction Microsoft is headed in, and haven't for some time. Many people don't like it. Microsoft recently may have had a realization as a company and they might change their current direction, but I still doubt I'll go back. They expected me to pay twice for software that I paid a "lifetime license" for, only because I upgraded the CPU in my computer. If you think that somehow makes Linux look bad, then I don't know man...
I run my email inside a virtual machine, so it was easy for me to switch over from Windows/Outlook to Linux/Thunderbird. I certainly don't expect everyone to switch.
Email(smtp) is not a bad choice for messaging in space(or anywhere really) it is a well understood robust protocol designed in a time when all networks were slow and intermittent. Exactly what you need in space.
IMAP probably not so much, It depends too much on having a good network. unless the imap server is on the spaceship(heh, spaceSHIP, that is an optimistic term, but it is all we have, so going with it), I would not expect it to work all that well.
I am not very familiar with outlooks game, Historically my beef with with it and thunderbird was their local data store, I mean it was not strictly speaking bad, but I was like "we have this great Maildir spec, why are you using this propriety database that is prone to corruption, even if you don't like Maildir million files approach at least use sqlite"
Outlook when connected with exchange (which is probably the case, with corporate network email accounts connected) does not use SMTP nor IMAP, but Exchange RPC protocol, with underlying data model based on X.400 not SMTP. Can actually work pretty well but the implementation had been successfully eroded over last decade or more.
P.S. SMTP isn't well designed for slow and intermittent network protocols, it's designed so that you can bang it out on teletype by paying a grad student a twinkie and coffee and that should hopefully translate into simple implementation across different systems (only to relearn all the lessons of more complex ones, badly)
>Email(smtp) is not a bad choice for messaging in space
Email (Taylor UUCP g protocol) is a better choice for messaging in space. Resuming partial transmission is great! I used it up until ~2010 and it worked really great on some very, very crappy connections (modems, obviously, CDPD, phone tethering in spotty locations, bad WiFi setups)...
> However, on more practical level, what are other options? Outlook, the desktop application works really well with local copies, is pretty low bandwidth and very familiar to end users.
Claws-mail (https://claws-mail.org) has a good working Windows version. Native desktop app, lightweight, extremely fast, able to handle multigigabyte inboxes for breakfast. The only drawback for some would be that it does not compose (although it can display them just fine) HTML mail, only text-only mail. This is an architectural decision.
I used this for a while. It doesn't display HTML emails just fine. It only supports a subset of stuff which -- as a geek is awesome because it protects me -- but would be hideous to give to a normal user. Literally less than half of my emails were readable.
As someone with deep experience in MIME encoding/parts, HTML for emails, and email client support for different HTML/CSS/image content, this is a sinkhole.
The world will be better off when we fork HTML so there is one standard email-safe version that all modern email clients support natively. There’s entirely too much security surface area to put arbitrary HTML into emails and expect any 2 email clients to render it correctly / the same.
> There’s entirely too much security surface area to put arbitrary HTML into emails ...
We manage it with browsers though.
Don't get me wrong, I've never liked html in emails to begin with. It's the same issue that markdown and every other rich text system has regarding where to draw the line. HN even strips most emojis (and I think that's a good thing).
When emojis are stripped on one website, users of that website understand it’s a product limitation.
When links work on one email client but not another, that’s a huge issue for the email sender and a lot of headache to learn/study the differences between email clients and the stack they are built on.
The difference between HTML and CSS properties supported on different email clients is WILD.[1] the rendering differences are significant, as are the man hours required to get emails to mostly look predictable on the breadth of email clients in use today.
And remember that every time there is a browser engine (or even just a fork) people have to maintain it. They need to develop features, squash bugs, patch security issues, pull from upstream, coordinate with downstream forks, etc. webmail providers are SaaS but have to have intricate and accurate understanding of every browser parse / rendering bug/permutation and a deep understanding of all of the legit HTML/CSS/JavaScript/DOM/XML/images/URLs (including weird ones like data: blobs) supported by every browser.
“we manage it” is doing an insane amount of hiding the complexity there.
I never claimed email clients were uniform (that would obviously be incorrect). I responded to "too much security surface area" with "browsers seem to manage it". The security is clearly a solvable problem because we all use the solution every day.
In your analogy, different email clients equate to different products (ie websites). I agree that it's a headache for users. My point was that it's not an unsolvable security issue but rather an unsolvable lack of agreement about what should and shouldn't be included in a rich text representation, or if email should even use rich text at all for that matter.
Are you sure? You used the the Fancy HTML Viewer plugin, which uses WebkitGTK2? I never had any problems with HTML Mail rendering in Claws. Your experience must be clearly peculiar to yourself.
What are they emailing? I'd guess that all of the telemetry data, visual data,etc is getting sent to mission control via radio link. What's the outlook email even for?
> Outlook, the desktop application works really well with local copies
With local cache for an Exchange server, or with purely local mail (i.e., using .pst files). The latter is mediocre IME. Outlook is an Exchange client; other uses are not in its wheelhouse.
How is this a factor for the very few users going you use it? (besides, for the primitive needs familiarity is of questionable use to begin with, almost any gui email client would do)
mu4e in Emacs works well, or Notmuch, or even Gnus with a local Maildir. Or Mutt if you're more into that. None of these applications can be that much harder than flying the capsule can they?
Yeah, the only other option I’d consider for this would be Apple Mail on an iPad for the same reason that it works well offline or with low bandwidth networks. There’s a QA issue here but the logic is quite reasonable.
Apple Mail does not play nicely with Outlook/Exchange/M365 accounts. Everywhere I've worked had said "You can use Apple Mail if you want, but IT won't be supporting it. Outlook app only." Always issues with syncing mail or contacts.
Outlook is notoriously difficult to interface with. The only real success story I'd ever seen was some Thunderbird extension. I think it was called Owl. I had the company pay for it, but I think that it wasn't very expensive. It synced contacts and calendar too.
> Apple Mail does not play nicely with Outlook/Exchange/M365 accounts. Everywhere I've worked had said "You can use Apple Mail if you want, but IT won't be supporting it. Outlook app only." Always issues with syncing mail or contacts.
using apple mail app with exactly literally that. not a problem in 4-5 years. switched phones/computers recently and set up process was no glitch. just awful MS login with a bunch of login redirects and then it's fine.
if IT told me to use outlook app Id be gone the next day probably
Last company I had to deal with this was about 1500 users and we got 2-3 tickets a week on Apple Mail sync issues. "Switch to the outlook app, ticket closed"
I'd have just set up a backup mail client if someone insisted on Outlook. These sorts of issues are very common, and having a backup is the textbook solution if something might go wrong.
Yeah that is the sad thing. Fewer desktop options these days. And CLI client is OK. Actually for an astronaut probably OK as they are used to learning systems. They'd appreciate reliability.
However, on more practical level, what are other options? Outlook, the desktop application works really well with local copies, is pretty low bandwidth and very familiar to end users.
IMAP with Thunderbird is probably only other option that would satisfy the requirements.
EDIT: Yes they need to get email in space. It's easy way to send documents back and forth.