Oh Canada.com, how do I loath you, let me count the ways ... an 'upgrade' they called it, a whole bold new dimension in webmail they said, or somesuch superlatives. And the old email true as sin that interface was clunky, like an old pickup truck, but it got you where you wanted to go. This new one? This new 'webmail' interface is just sad, a national embarrassment that it should be named after our country (in the USA, defacing national honour like this is probably illegal).

"WebMail allows you to read and process your email from a web browser running on any computer (sic) that has access to the Internet or your intranet. It is a full-featured email application that lets you receive email, send and forward email, send and view attachments, use folders to organize your email, etc."
[ WebMail - Inbox ]

Ok, alright, so how bad can it be? I have 750+ spams in there already, and the only way to delete is 30 at a crack, or so the story goes. They do have a javascript Select All now, but this one limits to the current shortlist, and when you click the 'Delete' it says, Error: Over quota, cannot move to trash. Please empty your trashcan or use the button below to delete without using the trashcan which I do, and it then says Error, cannot delete. Trashcan full. so I empty the trash but, you guessed it Error .... Ok, one stroke against it ...

But that is just the start! There's more! Dig this: the new 'advanced option' (sic) Spam Filter consists of just two text boxes, one for email addresses to reject, the second for addresses to whitelist. Email addresses???? Not even email address patterns???? nope. Email addresses, one per line, edited and maintained manually with a text-box. Now how cool and modern is that? Who needs Baysian Madness when you can just compile your own list of every last damn spam target on the planet? Ok, next, inbox filtering rules, there's no 'negation' only positive match of substrings. No booleans, no combination of headers, just a match. So very simple, even a child can do it.

Ever exploring new frontiers of unutility, they have also removed the option to forward hits to some other account, the number one most useful feature of the old clunker because you could use the webmail to manage the spam and forward the rest the heck out of there, out to some useful web-system ... like hotmail.

But wait! There's more! For an unlimited time you ALSO get AMAZING javascript links on EVERY function button! Yes, you heard that right, every function. Not just pop-up help, but even switching tabs, even opening your inbox, even the options page. What does that mean? It means you can no longer view your inbox summary in one tab and open your email message on another, or open two emails so you can cut and paste from one into the reply on another, or cut and paste the address of one into the freaking spam filter list of static addresses in another. Such innovation, everything in one browser window! Brill score, oh, dear Canada.com mega-genius developer gods, just how cool is that? It's cool. So cool it's retro, it's camp, it's right back to browsers from the previous century, should come with a disclaimer Works best in Cello or Mosaic! only, too bad, it's Javascript, so it's not even useful on those.

There is more, too. I've only just scratched the surface. It is so blazingly badly conceived it's hard to know where to begin. It is such a paragon of ill-thought interface you can't fathom the sort who would like, let alone the Internet Expert that approved it. It's vaccuous, sublimely dysfunctional. You could found a whole college course on webdesign just on the great backwards strides they have taken in all directions.

There are even flash ads that render twice in Firefox, once on the right sidebar, and again on the left, overlaying the vital one instance of the navigation menu!

Alas, I really liked having that domain address. So easy to tell people, "Canada dot com" no need to spell it out, no need to repeat, most often they don't even need to write it down.

But it's full of shit now, packed in tight to the ceiling, and I can't get the sluices open to drain it, and really I have better things to do than spend more time fighting the interface than I might actually reading the tiny few emails that were not spam. I put up with the last round of 'upgrades' bad as they were, even consented to spending a few hours each week scraping the untrapped spam out before it went over quota, but not this time. This time it's gone, good-bye, so long, see you on the dead-pools.