Here’s one giant Microsoft-ism for you — Outlook’s “Suggest names while typing in To, CC, BCC fields,” also known as Auto-Complete. It’s the feature that gives you a drop-down list of names & emails when setting up recipients. Except, only for some contacts. And, this only happens… most of the time. See, the programmers over in Redmond figured you’d appreciate a good test of your memory from time to time, so they slipped in a secret feature that displays the suggested contacts on all but one randomly chosen day of the month.

Just kidding — but seriously now, do a search for “outlook 2010 suggest contacts problem” and you’ll see what I mean. People seeing only some of their contacts, the feature failing some of the time, and everyone attempting to rebuild the cache of these contacts. What we have here, lads, is one poorly-implemented feature that is still broken to this day. The masses have it figured out for pre-2010 versions. In 2010, Microsoft changed the way it works so that the “NK2″ file, the suggested contacts index in older versions, is no longer relevant. I don’t think this is dumb — the reason they did so was to keep the cache with the user’s account rather than the workstation s/he used. Brilliant! But why is it that in a simple use case where Outlook’s contacts are filled to the brim, does it not immediately start suggesting names from these? If you ask me, there’s absolutely no good reason why at any point should typing in a part of a name or email address fail to turn up results from one’s address book.

Gmail or Thunderbird (hell, even Opera now) have this down, and well. Gmail isn’t even a conventional program, and it functions better than Outlook. But for reasons unknown to me, Microsoft has yet again determined the best way to carry on is to walk to the beat of their own drum. They’re already doing that with Internet Explorer, so why improve Outlook to actually compete with other email clients?