Software Undevelopment

The transition to the new att.net Mail (which is apparently "powered by Yahoo!) did not go smoothly. There are an inordinate number of electronic mail messages saying the same things, which is that it was coming. Since those messages were not particularly specific about when it would come, I decided to use some of my free [sic] time over the weekend to see if it was there.

This turned out to be a colossal mistake. It turned out that there was a hyperlink to the new mail system. Figuring that exploration never hurts, I clicked on it. I was not particularly happy with what I found. Among other things it did not play very nicely with Safari, but I had been waiting for an excuse to switch back to Firefox for some time. Things were clunky but manageable … until I had to send mail with an attachment. At that point everything fell apart (or, more accurately, nothing was working as it claimed it would). Ultimately, the only way I could send the attachment was through the Gmail account that is my receiving site for my Examiner.com mail.

I knew that I could not live with this as a mail system. Unfortunately, there was no way to reverse the effect of the hyperlink. Once one crossed this Styx, there was no return. that was enough to convince me to try firing up the OX X Mail program, figuring that it would sync properly to my mail account. That went far more smoothly, once I figured out that it got its addresses from the Contacts application (which I was able to populate with little difficulty).

This afternoon I figured I would check the att.net site again to see if there were any changes. I got the full-screen message that the new system was "ready." Things looked a bit less clunky, and attachments were now working. My mistake was on clicking a hyperlink that, by all rights, should not have been there (and should not have been a one-way street).

Meanwhile, I shall see if Mail takes better care of me. At least I know that I can return to the Web-based system if or when I have to do so. Nevertheless, this seems to have been a classic case of making things worse in the name of trying to make improvements.