When Software Turns Evil
On how my elderly parents were utterly bewildered by some seriously nasty, software updates...
A while back I wrote about the problem of haves and have nots when it comes to our modern digital world. This is a serious problem that particularly affects elderly people. But it’s made worse when software usability starts getting trashed by marketing-driven fuckery.
I recently visited my elderly parents. My mum mentioned that they were having difficulty reading my dad’s email, saying that they weren’t getting any emails but were instead only seeing warnings about terms and conditions or something.
So I took a look.
There setup was, or at least had been, simple. A licensed copy of Windows on a laptop that run Microsoft Outlook as an email client to enable them to access my dad’s Gmail account (which he’s had for years). So this isn’t any kind of Outlook as a Software as a Service. It’s an email client. (And yes, I should have installed something like Thunderbird).
It was nice and simple. They’d run Outlook and it would show them an item called “inbox”. Click on that and they’d see the emails in the inbox. Click on an email and the contents of the email would appear in the right-hand panel.
That wasn’t what was happening now.
As far as I can tell, a recent update or updates had made the following changes:
An Outlook.com email account for my dad had been either created or updated. Now maybe I created one for them at some point. Maybe I created a Microsoft account (because that’s how Microsoft licensing works now) and an account was created from that. I don’t know.
The Outlook.com account was added to Outlook (the application) as one of the email accounts it handled, above the Gmail account.
A favourites section was added at the top of the accounts pane.
The Outlook.com account was added to the favourites section.
The Gmail account (the one they actually use) was not.
So the upshot was that when they clicked on “Inbox”, it was the Outlook account that was being displayed, and the only emails in there were ones from Microsoft asking them to accept terms and conditions - and my parents know to be very careful about clicking on strange emails.
What they weren’t spotting was that below this inbox folder, and the junk and deleted mails folders, and below the bit saying [nameofmydad@outlook.com) was another bit saying [nameofmydad@gmail.com], with an arrow just before it. And clicking on that arrow would pop upon a list of folders, including the actual inbox they actually wanted to view.
So I removed the new, unwanted Outlook account from the Favourites, and added the Gmail account to the Favourites. Now, if you clicked on the Inbox at the top, hey presto, all their actual emails were there, unopened - because it had been several days since their email had “disappeared”.
But we weren’t out of the woods yet, because in among the genuine looking emails were some from some animal sanctuary that looked like spam. I clicked on the mail’s summary / title bit to view the email… and the browser opened up and started loading a page. I shut it down, and tried again, making sure this time to just click on the title - and again the browser opened.
This was bizarre and worrying. All I wanted to do was open the email and read the contents, to verify that it was something we could just delete. And I was worried about what the hell was up with my parents’ system.
And then I spotted the little marker at one end of the emails summary/title section. The letters “AD” in a box.
A bit of Googling confirmed my suspicions.
If you’re using Outlook as an email client to read your email (even email that’s on someone else’s server, Google’s, at that), Outlook is inserting fake, pseudo-emails into your inbox that when clicked, display not the text of an email, because they’re not an email, but instead launch your web-browser.
I’m pretty computer savvy, and this confused the hell out of me, and had me quite nervous until I figured out what was going on. To my parents, it would have been utterly bewildering.
This is nasty. It’s a shitty thing to do. People who aren’t digital-savvy have enough trouble getting online as it is, without people pulling crap like this.
Microsoft. Please stop.
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