Comment by stackskipton

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.

You'd want fetchmail with some local server.

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?

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.

Neither outlook nor thunderbird. Best option would be some web browser based email + local web server (on board)

I did think 'Thunderbird' would be a more appropriate (named) use on a rocket :-)

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"

> 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.

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.

> and very familiar to end users.

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)

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.

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 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.

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.

I hope they don’t need to search an email. Outlook may be familiar but it’s a familiar pain.