Webmail vs Outlook

[technical.angel]

"I can't get into my email! I think a student logged on, and now I can't get mine."
"Are you using webmail or Microsoft Outlook?"
"Outlook. I think there's a student logged in."
And how couldn't you know if you were logged in or not?? "Okay, click on the start button."
"Which start button? Oh, never mind. Okay, now what?"
"What does it say at the top of that window?
"My name."
"Alright, I'm going to remote into your machine."
Silence. "Um, okay, remote away." You could tell she was confused.
"I'm going to remote in so I can see what you see."

I get in, open up Outlook, and sure enough, it connects. So I open it through another icon, connects. Everything looks fine.

"Okay, how do you get into your mail?"
"Oh, through the web."

THEN WHY THE HADES DO YOU THINK IT'S CALLED WEBMAIL???????

In the end, she had tried too many times to log in without the computer knowing she wanted to connect via the domain, it locked her out, and boom, phone call.

[BravoOrig]

To add to my confusion, I get the customers who open Internet Explorer, and then click on the mail icon each time to open Outlook Express. So you have to listen closely and decipher if they are using Outlook Express or the ISP's website. People just don't know what they have, use, or how they get from point A to point B, they just do it.

[Dreamstalker]

My college's webmail appears to be a severely lobotomized version of Outlook *grumblemutternoPOP3access*. It had been designed, either intentionally or accidentally, to look very similar to the Outlook client that a number of students and instructors had on their computers. The old system allowed POP3 connections, this new one does not.

"I can't get my email!"
--traipse over, fire up Outlook, everything's fine "Your mail client seems to be fine. What's the problem?"
"It won't take my password!"
--then it dawns that they're trying to use their webmail password. "The webmail system doesn't let you download mail to your computer."
"Why not?! $othersystem did!"
--"I cannot answer that. All I can tell you is that now nobody is allowed to connect to the email server using a mail client."
"Why?"
--"I don't know. If you would like to talk to the sysadmin about it, he'll be in tomorrow."