Outlook roams well now, with outlook-over-https it can work with mailservers behind the corporate firewall. Except, what happens when the emails are JIRA issues which include URLs to artwork that is behind the firewall, yet on a host whose DNS hostname resolves to the outside world?

In that situation, whenever you open the message there is about 30s of of an email with a blank body and an animated line below the headers as it tries, vainly to connect to the server. It does this for every such JIRA email, desperately hoping that eventually it will get its JPEGS, and therefore rendering it unusable as an email tool.

But wait! There is an obvious solution to those in the know! You open IE, tell it to work offline and then outlook, which uses the same Win32 Inet APIs to fetch content from remote sites will know that it is offline and not try and retrieve the images. This is a trick that I, as a former windows programmer will know, and therefore with my knowledge of the underlying OS I can make outlook usable!

I flip the switch, and sit back, smugly

Except: the outlook team are not so easily defeated. They see what I have tried to do, and tell me off for even attempting it

I love the way that outlook doesn't say what my request was, only that something outlook tried to do didn't work. And that it is up to me to fix the problem by turning IE online again, instead of outlook stopping trying to do whatever it was trying to do.

If you leave Outlook running the entire (VM) screen fills up with a chain of the same patronising message. In Linux you'd see something different, like "recompile with -DEMAIL_OFFLINE" set.

Anyway, a sign that I should turn the corporate email client off for the next ten days. Going offline...