Software Design that is Bad Stupid Bordering on Criminal

OK, my wife has a domain for her special education business, SEDRA, and it comes with email.

Yesterday evening, we started getting timeouts when trying to send mail. Receiving worked just fine.

We finally discovered that the registrar and host, HostMonster, had changed the configuration to prevent virus infected machines from spamming. They changed the port used from 25 to 26.

OK, no big deal, it took me 5 minutes talking with tech support to figure that one out.

Unfortunately, there appeared to be no way to change the port number in Eudora^®.

So I used Microsoft Mail to change the port, and I could post from that, but not from Eudora^®, because it was not available in the options.

Well, I thought that this was stupid, how can you not be able to change the SMTP port in an email program?

Obviously, we could go to a new client, but that would mean hand holding Sharon^* through learning a new email client, something that I view with no small amount of dread. I hate being the family call to Bangalore.

So, I Google, figuring that there is probably a setting in the .ini file that I can tweak

What do I find? I find this:

Eudora for Windows

Eudora has chosen to hide the Port change option in version 6.0 and up, making it more difficult to make this change. If you have purchased Eudora, we would suggest contacting them about making this option available by default again. To enable changing ports:

1. Navigate to your Eudora install directory.
2. Look in the Eudora directory for the directory "extrastuff".
3. In this directory is a file named "esoteric.epi". Drag (copy or move) this file into the main Eudora directory. There will now be options extra listed, including a Ports page.

[they neglect to mention that you have to restart Eudora here if it is already open]

To change the outgoing mail port from 25 to 26:

1. Launch Eudora
2. Drop down the Tools menu, and choose Options
3. Click on Ports
4. Change the port from 25 to 26
5. Click OK
6. Restart Eudora

So, they had scrupulously hidden these options, and required you to manually move a file in order to be able to access these options.

Not only that, this was not an oversight, it was a deliberate decision to change the program so that you had to do this, and they made this decision when ISPs are increasingly moving away from ports 110 (incoming) and 25 (outgoing) so as to deal with botnets.

I can understand putting this under "advanced", and popping up a warning, as Firefox does with "about:config", or perhaps requiring someone to set "advanced menu mode." or somesuch but deliberately burying the features and requiring that someone track down this obscure fix which involves moving an extensions file to the home directory of the account is stupid.

Actually, it's more than stupid, it's stoopid, really, really, really stoopid.

This is a level of deliberately stoopid that makes Sarah Palin look like Albert Einstein.

In any case, I found the fix, and I implemented it, and it works, but it took about 6 hours more than it should have.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.