fine whine

If Microsoft Outlook (the second-newest version) is so advanced, why doesn't it have a simple image viewer built-in for attached photos? It understands images, since it renders them in the messages, but it farms out attachments to whatever the system uses for viewing images.

On other file types (PDFs, ZIP archives, Office files, etc) this makes sense*, but not on images. When I'm reading a message with seven photos attached, I want to be able to toggle back and forth between them without going back to the message window. My image viewer of choice (IrfanView) can only open one at a time, since they are dowloaded to the temporary directory when you load the image, not the message.

I cannot say exactly how much time and productivity I've lost over the years of using Outlook, but I'm certain it can be measured in minutes... sheer tens of minutes.

* Even then, I must but wonder why a program that can embed Microsoft Word as an editor (and probably a viewer) isn't smart enough to take a message that contains no text, only a .DOC attachment (or worse yet, PowerPoint) and save me a click or two by just displaying the attachment.

I mean, if you're gonna make an email program dumb enough to trust every file it gets, why not make it smart enough to make things easier?