Windows Vista ships with an upgraded mail program called Windows Mail, the successor to Outlook Express. The program is sleek and slightly updated with a fast search feature. It's nice that the same shortcut, Ctrl-E, takes you to the search field in the Vista shell, Mail, Internet Explorer, Maxthon and Firefox.

But Windows Mail's new junk mail catcher is a great lesson in how not to design a mail filter.

• It runs before your own mail rules run, so forget about deleting persistent spam from the server -- the junk mail folder makes sure you'll see it now and forever
• It's case-sensitive, so you have to type in not just 'Viagra' but also 'viagra' and 'VIAGRA' for it to work
• There's no way for search terms to work across all fields, so you have to separately type in 'Viagra' for subject, from and body
• It doesn't support regular expressions, and there's no easy hook for an external mail filter, so you can't use more powerful filters to augment its own

The first issue is the key one, and I've had to turn off the built-in filter so my own rules get first look at the mail queue.

At 2 am one recent morning, I uploaded an 8x10 family photo and a few 5x7's to a drugstore chain's web site. At 7 am they emailed to say the photos had come out of the printer at the local store. By 9 am, lo and behold, there they were.

They should take it to the next logical step: just let users print to the big machine as if it were a local photo printer. It should be: File / Print to > My local drugstore.

When you search for someone on the social networking site Friendster, the private-labeled Google page shows results from the entire Web unless you specify that you want to search Friendster. I'm not sure whether Google paid Friendster to do this -- they have a deal -- or Friendster is trying to increase ad revenue independent of Google. But it's extremely annoying.

The same is true on Boston.com: search does not show you Boston Globe articles unless you specify that you want to search the newspaper rather than the entire Web. They use some private-labeled search engine other than Google, and this too is probably an attempt to get ad revenue. But it completely breaks the search feature by focusing on the wrong default case.

In tossing menus and toolbars in favor of a single unified, context-sensitive ribbon, the Office 2007 team voiced its frustration with discoverability. Users were constantly writing in asking for features which already existed or complaining they couldn't find features in the product. The large ribbon was also driven by a shift toward WYSIWYG previews. To be effective, galleries of themes and effects need significant space on screen.

Most people I've heard from who've tried Office 2007 get crabby about having to learn a whole new interface. They can't find features they already know how to use. One friend gave up on finding the print feature because he didn't recognize the big Office icon at top left as a button.

The Office team's argument is that usability tests show higher productivity after a short period of relearning. But keep in mind that Clippy the animated paper clip got through the usability gauntlet too. The ribbon's radically different user interface means lots of users will need to be retrained. And the ribbon's context sensitivity means you have to go hunt through each tab to find the feature you want.

However, the ribbon does some things very well:

• Every button is labeled, because most users don't put in the time to hover over every button and read every tooltip. Internet Explorer 3 popularized this in modern desktop app design.
• The giant previews are both useful and sexy
• Context-sensitive 'tuckaway' tabs don't resize the editing area, which can be jarring

The new ribbon will be made a control in a Visual Studio update. Once users are trained in Office 2007, it will make sense to use the new interface. But at a time when many users see older versions of Office as good enough, the transition could take a long time against significant user resistance.