Good thing you told me...

I ran into one of those issues today that just leave you stunned. Usually I do fairly well with reminding myself that not everyone is as acquainted with computers as I am, or computer savvy, or really computer literate at all. In fact, there are folks out there using computers in their day-to-day that really should not be allowed to touch them. You can't do as much damage to life and limb with a computer as you can with, say, a car, but I sometimes wonder if we should license these people. At the very least they would save the IT departments of the world from the sting of constant facepalms.

Case in point. I received a complaint that the email program on this person's computer was no longer notifying them of email via a sound or a pop-up window. I sent a test and was surprised to find that they were not exaggerating the issue - nothing happened when my email arrived. I made sure the settings were configured correctly, restarted the program and tried again - nothing. 'Odd,' I thought.

I recalled that some email rules can suppress the alerts if the email is moved to another folder, so I checked their email rules...and that is when I found it. The most impressive display of blatant ignorance I've seen in quite some time.

Oh they had rules alright, only about 6 or 8, but it's not the number that stunned me, it was their tasks. Each rule was basically the same: If an email came from a specific email address Outlook was to move that email to...wait for it...the Inbox! And the piece de resistance - a rule that would take any message that came in and move it to the Inbox and then stop processing all other rules!

Lo and behold as soon as I turned off the offending madness the email alerts started working again. Still, I have to wonder why they would set up these rules. Where did they think their email was going before?