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Return Address: Arrogance, MS
Chris writes: " So here's an interesting feature from our friends at MicroSoft. They've decided that Outlook 2000 users by default really don't want to communicate with the rest of the world, preferring to communicate only with other OL2000 users.
Now, while I don't have any problem with people extending the content of an e-mail with attachments, i.e. sending html-ized version and v.cards, it seems downright stupid to make the default behavior of ol2000 to send it's e-mail only in MS's proprietary TNEF format.
Now, It's clear that they've had some support calls on this, as proven by this KB Entry. So that means that they caught some flak for it. But they haven't changed it.
Fun Quotes from the KB entry:
- In addition to the receiving client, it is not uncommon for a mail server to strip out TNEF information from mail messages as it delivers them. If a server option to remove TNEF is turned on, clients will always receive a plain text version of the message. Microsoft Exchange Server is an example of a mail server application that has the option to remove TNEF from messages.
This means in essence that unless you are using a 'TNEF Aware' server -- like, say, hmm, MS Exchange -- you may not be able to read your mail. I may be reading a bit much into this paragraph, but it seems to me that this paragraph says 'if your friends can't get your email, it's their servers fault, not yours.'
And to take this the further, go join the EFF if you haven't already, step, suppose somone were to circumvent the protections on the TNEF format and write a program that could understand it, would you be liable under the DMCA section on anti-circumvention? Admittedly, I'd be surprised if MS took this route, but it's worth considering every single time you think about decoding proprietary formats. Does this mean strings is now a circumvention tool?
Anyhow, if there are any microsofties out there, do the right thing and cut down your support costs by making ascii the ol2000 default transmission behavior for text. And for anyone using Outlook 2000, you should switch to a program that your friends can actually recieve email from. Or at least shut off that option."
It's not on by default in Exchange... rather it sounds like your Exchange admin is an idiot.
A quote from two stories ago:
"It sounds like the patch is actually correcting a lot of issues, and while it's too bad that it breaks the mods, sometimes you have to do that to get things working properly."
A quote from this story:
"...subtly breaking standards in the name of "improvement" can be far worse than more blatant attempts."
The fact that Microsoft doesn't make Quake and Id does doesn't mean that they should have different standards. Id did the wrong thing, Microsoft did the wrong things. Just because it's their first offence, so to speak, doesn't mean that they should be let off. They both screwed everyone over.
If you're going to be critical, at least do it consistently.
Strange. I have several dozen users using outlook 2000, and other users using Eudora, Netscape, OL Express, and heck I use unix mail (pine etc...). ANd to boot, many versions of each.
OL2000 seems to have no problem sending mail to others. And we are NOT using an exchange server that translates mail for people.
Now there IS a problem, that may or may not be related, whereby some attachments sent in OL can only be read by other OL users.. but that usually has to do with RTF messages (using embedded objects instead of attachments or some such thing).
For those that don't know, Outlook was really designed to be run with MS Exchange server. The server can be configured to handle mail translation for it's clients, so internally, an office can have the benefits of a more advanced(?) mail system (in an office workgroup sense), and externally, the world can get ASCII.
NOt sure where the big problem is though...
You know, I still hate MS, but after a few years in a larger network... I've come to realize that all MS tools are not bad, they are just generally used for the wrong things. This is partly (mostly?) Microsoft's fault. Saying 'using OL with exchange server provides an excellent messaging platform for your company' is very different than saying 'use outlook for mail, it rocks'. They want people to use their crap for everythingl.
But some of it, if used in the way intended, can be useful to a large degree.
There is a standardized way to represent Chinese phonemes in roman characters ("Pinyin"); it uses up to 4 of our letters to represent a single Chinese vowel.
This is the /. of old and personally I'm glad to see non-flaming objective threads that don't scream Lihnux is great and MS sucks never ending moose cock.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Fine, then go ahead and do that. The standards _do_ exist and _are_ becoming widely supported.
First off there is the concept of a MIME encoded attachment containing the meeting information. Every email client I'm aware of supports MIME encodings. Second there is vCalendar which is a standard for ASCII encoding of appointment information. The funny part is that the standard was defined by (or possibly for) the Internet Mail Consortium of which Microsoft is a member!
So here's yet again an example of Microsoft joining a standards body then refusing to adopt/comply with the standards espoused by that body! And people actually wonder why Microsoft is despised so?
Who, me?
as you've been rated up to a 5, i'm going to assume that your expirence using outlook at least resonates w/ a few other people here, and maybe you are onto something.
i'm also going to assume that people find your bombastic tone cathartic, and slashdot needs to spend more time refining its publishing model. kellan
I had this problem for several weeks, at my work, when they switched over from a Eudora(?) email server to Exchange. Suddenly I couldn't receive attachments with my Netscape client. I couldn't even receive attachments from myself. All I ever got, instead of any attachments sent, was a single attachment called TNEF.
At first I did not make the connection between the server switch and my problem (I'm not much of a conspiracy theory fan) and thought it was my Netscape client that went off its rocker. Finally, after a few weeks of aggravation and getting angry at Netscape the sys admin unchecked a checkbox on the exchange server and my problem disappeared.
Apparantly, the default behavior for Exchange was to take any and all attachments in emails going through it (all email, whether sent or received) and encapsulate them (for our benefit, of course) in the TNEF format.
Lovely feature...
Yes it is possible to send to a user in RTF format... if the other user also users Outlook, this might even be a good thing. It's also possible to send to a user in plain text... which is generally a better thing, but the point is you can certainly decide what format to send a message in.
I suppose he has the same concerns about standards when talking about the ability to send an HTML only version of a message in Netscape. Oh Crap! No plain text version that sounds like "subtly breaking standards in the name of improvement".... let's all start planning a campaign against Netscape NOW!
Can DiBona point to a single server which exhibits the following behavior: No, I think not, instead he is just making shit up because FUD is fun. Or maybe he is just too lazy to do any fact checking and decided that since it's Microsoft it wasn't necessary to make sure he was right since everyone hates Microsoft.
The Linux community is not well served by spokesmen who aren't capable of actually making an intelligent argument. There's no shortage of things which Microsoft does wrong, what kind of a dolt do you have to be to miss the mark so completely as he has here?
Does Outlook have problems? Of course it does you stupid fuck. All software sucks. Too bad DiBona couldn't find one of the real problems with it to complain about.
Any linuxsofties out there? Do us a favor and *whap* DiBona upside the head with a rolled up newspaper for being too stupid to actually fact check his rambling crap. Anyone wishing to discuss it further is welcome to stop by the Ask The Experts booth at the MEC in Dallas next month where I will happily debunk DiBona's spurious assertions for anyone not intelligent enought to figure out he's wrong on their own. CS
Notes is the same way... you just have larger messages because of lots of stuff crammed into the headers. People have done this on a personal level for years. I've been involved in mailing lists where X-HEADERS were added to aid procmail filtering and such.F /...
---
Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
In addition to the information listed above, the path to your personal folders file (PST) file and your logon name are embedded in the winmail.dat file. Although this data is not explicitly exposed to the recipient, if the recipient opens the winmail.dat file for editing in a binary or text editor, he can see the path and logon name. Note that no password information is revealed. To ensure that the path to your PST file or your logon name is not included in the winmail.dat attachment, use the steps in this article to send mail that does not include winmail.dat.
This thing is handing off two bits of somewhat valuable information to the reader of the email. The location of the senders mail store on his local machine, as well as his logon name, either too his local machine, or his server. Now I wouldn't really know how to use that info, but I'm sure there are people out there who would.
His problem is with the fact that the default format is TNEF and that it's entirely possible that if you don't send your mail via Exchange server, other won't be able to read it.
youre right...if someone decides to send me a message with a voting box, i wont be able to vote. we should all go to redmond with torches and sticks and demand that they use only plain text for sending voting boxes....sigh...
--Siva
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Depending on your approach, if you try to add any of your own attachments in the message (JPEG pictures, files, etc.), instead of making them separate attachments Outlook buries them in the TNEF attachment. So you get a text message that says: check out this neat picture, and no picture.
This is presumably because Outlook takes that picture data and inlines it into its pseudo-HTML.
I believe this particular "feature" breaks the spirit of the MIME standards, even if it is technically compliant.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Yes, but you do realise that the biggest potential market is going to pretty much collapse within my lifetime? The Chinese prefer male children, and they're only allowed to have one.
Help us build a better map!
Tell me that that isn't a good slogan for M$.
On a real note, ASCII or UNICODE (for non-Latin charsets) only, please. Most of the REAL WORLD uses text terminals to access the net and all your damned (BLINK) tags and (BOLD) and all that (FONT IS BIGGER THAN HELL) crap just doesn't cut it on pine or elm.
(I use both, so no holywars posts, please.)
Hell, I use virtual consoles and multiple non-priviledged users at a time on the portable (on a 14.4, no less!) to run several mail readers and Lynx.
And emacs.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
There's 225 million American, 5.8 billion other people on this planet, most whom don't speak English and don't write in modified, vowel poor, aplhabets.
Can you say "ASCII is cutting us off from big potential markets?" Sure... I knew you could...
Unicode will spread because it's NEEDED.
Actually, sending ASCII is equivalent to sending text in the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode/ISO-10646, since characters 0x0..0xff are exactly the same in both encodings. UTF-8 is a widely accepted encoding of Unicode. Hence, using ASCII is transparently upward-compatible with Unicode, while using 8-bit encodings such as ISO-8859-x or Windows Code Page 125x is not.
So when we have software that's actually capable of displaying the full range of UTF-8-encoded text, complete with character composition and correct bidirectional algorithms, then ASCII will just work.
However, note that some folks don't like Unicode due to the Unified Han space. While Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems all share a set of similar glyph shapes, the style of writing them differs among writing systems: there are styles that are recognizably Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. The actual glyph shapes, of course depend on the font that's being used. So, for example, if you have a document that contains text in both Chinese and Japanese, you have two choices:
In my humble but terribly insightful opinion, the differences between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean styles of the Han character space are equivalent to the differences between similar-looking characters in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, which do have separate characters for "Uppercase Latin letter A", "Uppercase Greek letter Alpha", and "Uppercase Cyrillic letter A" in the Unicode spec.
But then, what do i know?
:: "I am non-refutable." --Enik the Altrusian ::
"Apply this rule"... vulgo Milgram experiment
(Maybe you don't know or, alternatively, I am missing something --are
you making a parody?--, the application of a similar, quasi- or non
quasi syllogism has been at the heart of the Milgram experiment.)
They found a bug that would crash old versions of Netscape's email reader consistently.
I had to upgrade Netscape because my wife got tired of certain people's emails doing that. It turns out that they also broke a bunch of production jobs for a friend because the header was not properly separated from the body. (Which is possibly why Netscape crapped out.)
Oh, you didn't hear about it so this is a lie? No. First of all I understood the politics on Microsoft's part so I didn't bother to complain to them. And I know the people who were running it don't actually understand enough about how computers work to know why this was a bad thing, or why Microsoft wouldn't care. So I explained to my wife, got a more recent version of Netscape, and forgot about it.
This is the "extend" part of Microsoft's embrace, extend, extinguish pattern.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Heh, I've already encountered a problem with how Outlook 2000 sends mail at where I work. Apparently, if you choose to send mail to someone in RTF format, a copy of the message itself (along with any attachments) is put into one big attachment called winmail.dat, that is nigh unreadable unless you have Outlook 2000 yourself or an Exchange server that's willing to translate it for you. I found out about this when our financial manager had problems receiving an emailed file from our parent company's controller, who claimed he didn't have problems sending the file to anyone else. It turned out that he was using Outlook 2000 in RTF format, and our financial manager was using Netscape Messenger... and I only learned that could be an issue from reading Bugtraq. It also didn't help that we're prolly the only one of the parent's companies that use qmail instead of Exchange server...
Standards. They're a wonderful thing. Too bad MS has yet to learn that...
How many nationalized versions of EBCDIC are there? Seems like there are many, and extremely hard to get ahold of.
When Microsoft has a monopoly, actually it is.
I currently use OE for my email, but I am one of these people that as soon as I reinstall or upgrade OE I check to make sure that it's still sending in Plain Text, I hate sending HTMLmail...
But, an alternative would be to develop (or use a currently developed) third party alternative to Outlook (my personal opinion on Outlook is it's just a email client on steroids with all the calender and extra crap it does), or just become used to the habit of manually checking your mail sending settings each and every time you upgrade/reinstall your software...
I know it's a pain, but you only have to do it once...;)
"This amp is special, see all the knobs go up to 11, that means it is one louder than other amps"
\begin{rant}\begin{flame}{FULL}Get your head out of your ass. MS is breaking ASCII and RFC 822, Just try and read a comersal webpage without IE, notice all those lovely ?s they are MS fucking over ASCII and ISO Latin-1. isn't nice to know we are going to a world where a company dictats all modes of comunication? Just think about what will happen when the DMCA and the UCTIA get in full force there will not be an internet. Just think Right to read and Letter from 2020 and tell us that this is the world you want to happen. The corret resonce to someone who does these things is a FULL FLAME respoce in hopes that either a they get with the standards or commit suicide. (virtual preferd but real aceptable.) \end{flame} A full diplomate discorse my also be usefull, take your pick. Breaking standand is a bad thing, actully MS should have bin given the INTERNET DEATH PENATLY long ago but alas they are too big. \end{rant}
Grey (Chris Lusena)
"This design philosophy is at the heart of micros~1, and it's the reason ms isn't allowed in many server rooms."
Huh?
My experience has been that Microsoft is steadily marching into more and more datacenters. Over the last four years I've seen a half a dozen major sites convert from cc:Mail, Groupwise, and other products to a MS Exchange architecture. That doesn't even begin to cover the sites dropping Banyan and Novell for NT Server.
Many of the conversion decisions do not appear to be made by the techies. The Microsoft sales engineers (yes, they engineer sales) are able to work some hocus pocus on management that makes it look like MS products will solve all their problems. My best guess on this has been the claim may work something like, "Well, you use Microsoft apps on your desktop. Naturally, everything will run much better if you are talking to Microsoft apps on the back end as well."
Getting back to Exchange, it surprises me that noone has prduced a viable, open source equivalent to Exchange. There are some good concepts there. It's just the implementation that leaves a lot to be desired.
World Beach List, my latest project.
If this format is actually technologically superior and it is documented extensively then: WHY NOT USE IT
Because, for my money, its a waste of my money. Some of us outside the USofA are charged by the byte (or MByte where M=1000 bytes) for our internet traffic.
So for me plain ascii is the cheapest.
<P ALIGN="LEFT"><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">"Hello Rob"</FONT></P>
56 useless bytes in only one line of text that really do nothing to facilitate the communication do they? Imagine that mess for each line of the message (because MS still dont know how to craft good HTML). Furrfu.or
"Hello Rob"
Bzzzt. TNEF is used to encapsulate quite a few things, such as rich text formatting. In this manner, it competes directly with open standards (such as HTML) for formatting/layout of text and embedded/referenced objects within a message. Read the Exchange spec, or ask someone whose NDA has expired.
Sure, you can configure the client to send ascii or html, but this should be the default behavior, not the use of a half-baked encapsulation format for proprietary garbage that provides no better functionality than existing standards (even at the time when TNEF was first proposed in the Capone/touchdown spec). This is classic Microsoft "do less with more" that serves to enhance their market share, and not the client experience. It'll be in fashion to beat up on them for this behavior as long as they deserve it.
I think not...(*poof*)
The funny part is that Outlook Express (OE) is even worse at receiving TNEF extensions than Netscape, Eudora, or other non-MS email clients. OE is hardcoded to hide the TNEF attachment, so all the OE recipient sees when you send a message with an attachment or formatting is the plain text.
There is a program that decodes attachments, but if you're using Outlook Express, it's still takes two or three extra steps per email to decode attachments.
What positive traits can we say about Chris DiBona's insight:
- It brings in ad hits to slashdot.org
Otherwise is reeks of technical ineptitude, an unfortunately uncommon trait amongst slashdot editors.
Searching hp's openmail web site [www.openmail.com] for tnef reveals these results:
OpenMail MAPI Service Provider (B.05.00) Release Summary [ID:100-0590]
Filecodes for Microsoft Applications [ID:200-0189]
Outlook MAPI Support [ID:300-0142]
actually, "can you say 'foo' boys and girls? i knew you could" was used by Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
wont you be my neighbor?
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
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XML causes global warming.
so there, I'm fine for now.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
" ...it seems downright stupid to make the default behavior of ol2000 to send it's e-mail only in MS's proprietary TNEF format."
This whole article is "downright stupid" to borrow a phrase. You can send email in just about any typical format from outlook. I can send stuff in UTF-8 plain ascii dullness with a twitch of a mouseclick. I can send it in HTML as rendered by Outlooks wysiwyg HTML encoder, or I can type the HTML in directly. I can send a Word doc, RTF, etc. If someone complains that they couldn't decifer my email, it is a simple thing to switch down to a lower format and re-send. motherfscking duh.
The real problem here is blind mean rabble rousing antagonism from the Linux-OSS-AntiMicro$oft biker gang. A nation or culture cannot endure a rabble-rousing element for any extended length of time. Sooner or later, by whatever justification or means, this rohdiculous yacking that causes so much FUD with lies and purposful mis-interpretations and mis-representations of things like a 'MS app's features' will trigger society's rejection of such an unpleasant element as mindless zealot vitriol. We've seen it all before, society lashes out and cauterizes an unpleasant and obnoxious vocal element to retain some semblance of stability. It is the Law of Pragmatism. We as a culture cannot endure this baited nastiness forever. No matter how unjust it seems from the perspective of those directly involved in the of vocal mayhem, to silence the voices that only cause trouble, in the long run, history and the future will thank us for laying the smack down on a bunch of whiney small fry like Chris DiBona and his 'outrage' over oulooks's default format.
What I'm more concerned about is that nobody is railing over the fact that the *nix filesystem is wrapped around a 40-year old structure of dubious practicality. Nobody is railing over the fact that Linux degenerates the general computing climate and the march toward ultra-super tech with its lack of centralized culpability and abysmal hardware support. Nobody is complaining that zealotry is running unchecked and undermining the OSS movement with every whack-assed article like this.
I should mention that the future Operating Systems will eventually attain a state wherein any software, from any platform written against any API will run without any attention from the user. not that this will be relavant, as future software will make antique software (what we have today) seem an excersize in masochism compared to the latest offering. Software is divided into genres now, and every few years there'll be a killer app written to dominate the respective genre and nullify the value of ALL prior offerings. Nowhere in this vision is there room for whining and pouting like zealots do today. If you continue down this path, oh zealots, there'll be dire consequences. remember the McCarthy/Kohn era? If this zealot crap continues, questions like "have you now or ever been a memeber of the OSS movement?" will be a serious fucking question with your personal fortune and social standing hanging in the balance. I guess you could say that when society gears uup for the next big snap in one direction or the other, you zealots will be first against the wall, even before the traditionally reviled lawyers and politicians.
Thank you very much.
-=(V)0(V)0cr0(V)3=-
I wondered where 49 winmail??.dat files came from into my ..\eudora\attachements directory in 4 days (~150emails/day). Never bothered to find out what is in them. Now I know that they are not relevant and so will be disposed of. They take up from 3k to 117k of space each. Thanks, Chris, for causing this discussion.
While I agree with the Author's comments, others like Lotus Notes also do the "strip and screw" dance on mail messages/attachments that don't come from their own system.
The moral of the story is to only use apps that have a "real" standard that they stick to.
-OW.
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
I'm a bit dubious as to your take on this. Since Sony Pictures is selling and marketing their films to me, isn't that evidence that they want me to watch their movies? Well, yes. Then using software which can understand the format movies are encoded in cannot (by your statement) be construed as an attempt to violate the copyright.
We wish.
You mean like setext? (Which appears mostly defunct, alas.)
-j
Well, why in the world would Microsoft add properitary formats in email when only those dumb microsoft clients can read them? It wastes much time for the rest 80% non-outlook users.
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
Anyways, when anyone sends me something, I use Fentun. Save as ___.tnf, double click it the file, and let Fentun do the work. http://www.fentun.com/
I can just see it now...
I bet there will be a bug that makes the letters x, u, n, and l non-functional.
What operating system do you run?
"I".
Ack!
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
*sarcasm*Great, no more mails from stupid MS-users ;) Hurray, the first step to a Windoze-free world! */sarcasm*
The quote says that if the server strips the TNEF from messages then the client still receives a plaintext version of the message. What's the problem again?
My favorite example is what it does when parsing an RFC 822 From: field - it more or less ignores the spec, and tries to make it's own best guess about what an address looks like. Try this (probably requires a bit of SMTP wizardry - don't try this at home, kids): send mail to an Outlook 2000 user with the following header:
When you reply to this email, what address should the reply go to? TheKing@RockAndRoll.com? No, that's a comment, according to the spec - but Outlook 98 will pick it anyway.
At least Outlook 98 makes a choice, though. Outlook 2000 can't make up it's mind, so, in a classic burst of programming ingenuity, it glues the two addresses together. That's right, your reply will be addressed to:
I don't know about you, but in my world, that address isn't going to get very far before some MTA barfs on it. Naturally, I've found nothing in the M$ KnowldgeBase about this.
Finally, I'm dying to know if anyone can figure out how to make Outlook display the raw text of the message I'm viewing, without trying to grok it for me. I don't think it can be done.
Peace,
-McD
"Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." -- Calvin
I get e-mails from people all the time in this format -- and you have to load the attachments and pick thru the HTML to read what is usually just a scrawl from an x-g/f you didn't wanna talk to in the first place!
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
If so, you may have discovered a very interesting security hole. In an effort to improve speed, allocated memory is not cleared, but contains prior contents. Freed memory is not cleared. Not too difficult to imagine that the TNEF data contains information that you would rather not expose to the email recipient. Similar to allocating a big chunk of disk and reading it for leftover contents.
His problem is with the fact that the default format is TNEF and that it's entirely possible that if you don't send your mail via Exchange server, other won't be able to read it.
*sheesh*
I wonder if people working at Microsoft are borkies.. How do they always manage to create something proprietary _all the time_?? This is so crap.. I wonder how some of this world is still putting up with them. Why invent another content type when they already have HTML? See, experimenting is not a bad thing. But why experiment on the whole world? If it's such an amazing standard (whatever it is they create), why not publish the standard and make it open so that everyone can benefit and adapt to it? Living in the open community, I simply cannot understand what people gain by keeping standards proprietary.. especially large companies like Microsoft. Some small company may try this to pull some money, but such a large corporation??
More specifically, in this case, Microsoft wants the _receiving_ server to handle the hassles of delivering this TNEF as text. This is so dumb. How does an e-mail server know what content types the receiving e-mail client can handle? And besides, how in the world do they expect us to handle this fucking standard when they haven't published it, nor have made available some kind of filtering software to work with various e-mail servers/clients??
I just hope they stop their mad dog bitching theory of taking over the earth using proprietary shit. It makes no sense.
Banu
When I get an attachment, entitled winmail.dat, I promptly ignore it. Serves as a great way for me to be arrogant.
.. "nope, didn't get it. Oh well, maybe you need to upgrade your email client."
"I thought I sent you the timesheet"
Big deal, this is not news... move along please.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
>>WHen a company has a product that works well with another one of theyre products, they will promote it, right? Thats what this is.
From my own experience using Outlook with Microsoft Exchange, they do NOT work well together. We have switched from internal Microsoft Exchange to external Unix Qmail for our internal e-mail. Over dialup yet.
I've been using Outlook 2000 at work
I'm guessing then that you might have an exchange server at work (like we do) that is stripping out the TNEF info.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
uh. . . the successor to ascii should be a format like unicode that can support a multitude of character sets. if various stated opinions (in this thread) of what TNEF does are correct, and it's a combination of embedding both structured data (i.e, an appointment notice), and formatting information, then why not just use XML/XSL? in addition to TNEF sounding like a dirty marketing trick, it's a waste of everyone's f*&king time, since perfectly good data formats ALREADY EXIST. and don't forget that 15 years from now, when you're trying to get to some data that was originally stored in this wacky format, you'd better pray that someone still supports it -- not a forgone conclusion w/ a proprietary format by any means.
My company has its internal mail on an MS Exchange network, with everyone using Outlook 98 or 2000, except for me in Linux. Thus, I have considerable experience in this subject.
Microsoft thought that everyone would like to have boldface, italics, etc. in their mail without having to use HTML, (because spacing is harder to control there, presumably). So, they invented a format to send formatting information.
This is a registered MIME type, but if you don't have a Microsoft client, you can't read it.
This would be no big deal if it stopped here. However, the TNEF format puts cute little icons of the attachments into the mail, which must be defined in the TNEF block. Furthermore, all of the attachments are encoded into the TNEF block as well.
Thus, a typical message would say. "Hey dude, check out this attachment!". You would see an MS-TNEF attachment that you would be unable to open.
There are several programs available to sort through the TNEF attachment and find the real attachments (which are just directly quoted inside of the TNEF). Search for tnef on Freshmeat.
I don't think Chris reached the right conclusion. What he's saying is that OL2K msgs sent on non-TNEF enabled servers will make email unreadable. What the article actually says is that non-TNEF enabled servers strip out TNEF formatting to make it plain-text. At my office, we use OL2K with MS Exchange 5.5 and have never had a problem communication with the managers to the I.T. department (who run anything but Windows...one guy's laptop runs BeOS, for instance).
I do believe that everything has its place.
Right.
Smallpox, Eubola, AIDS and genetic mutations of such.
Just because it exists, does not mean that it should, or that it has a "place". There are a few ways to get it right. There are effectively an infinite number of ways to get it wrong.
Microsoft has a page here that describes various symptoms of TNEF problems, as well as hwo to adjust various mail settings so you can turn of TNEF fromatting globally, per messsage, or per receipient.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
oops, I forgot to convey my tone in the above post, sorry if it came across that I was ranting. I was actually wondering at the marvels of the english language, feeling kinda happy, and I felt like writing about it. it had nothing to do with anyone personally. I'm glad paRcat thought it was funny to read though :)
-------------------- the list is long. dirac angestung gesept
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
First off, Outlook 2000 by default does NOT send TNEF attachments.
obligatory link on format of TNEF http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?URL= /library/psdk/mapi/_mapi1book_transport_ neutral_encapsulation_format_tnef_.htm
TNEF was created in the old days (1991) of MS Mail 3.0 to send OLE attachments over the MS Mail system. It was adapted later to also send around compressed RTF message text (the message always also included the ASCII text as well).
It was to be used for all non-MS systems X.400, SNADS, PROFS, MHS, cc-Mail, oh yeah and SMTP.
Was it a way to subvert the Internet? Doubtful, MS employees knew of the Internet (from University), but they believed the pundits who said the X.400/X.500 systems would one day rule. {this was 1991 after all :-})
Now MS wants TNEF to go away, Exchange 2000 does everything in HTML and MIME.
Complaining about TNEF is very 1995, that was when the Win95 client DID send TNEF (winmail.dat) by default.
You mean 0 through 0x7f not 0xff. ASCII is 7-bit only. Actually, it's even 0x20 through 0x7e.
Secondly, I think you're being terribly unfair toward CJK unification. I see it more like unifying the Latin letter "V" that serves both as "U" and "V" with the "V" in later Latin scripts. Or Unifying the Gothic script with the Roman script.
Remember, after all, that simplified radicals are not identified with the corresponding traditional radical. It seems to me to be the sane way of proceeding.
If you need metadata, use XML. The following DTD should suit your needs exactly:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii" ?>
<!DOCTYPE t [
<!ELEMENT t (#PCDATA | t)*>
<ATTLIST t xml:lang NMTOKEN #IMPLIED>
]>
So you can just use the <t> tag with the xml:lang attribute to define the language.
In modern hebrew, the schva is pronounced at the beginning of words. In many ashkenasic dialects, it's pronounced throughout.
actually, that was the most pertinent flame i've read in quite some time.
you see, the grammar issues here are EXACTLY the same as the interoperability issues for email.
it would be nice to have a clear, exact standard for everyone because that assures 100% delivery of content (whether that content is considered substantive or not). however, if someone sends me an OL2000 email saying, "yo, you're hows is about too be bomed by terrists, and i no its more important for you two get out alive then to stay and fite them", i assure you im naught going two worry to much about there grammer.
neither would i automatically say, "sorry, i refuse to read non-plaintext messages, please resend" and then wait around for an acceptable ASCII version.
after i was safely several miles away i might duck into a wired cafe and drop them a line saying, "Greetings. Thanks so much for your thoughtful warning. It's nice to know that there are people who care enough to assist their friends in times of need. I noticed that you're using Outlook2000, and I just wanted to let you know that you should consider disabling its special formatting (called TNEF) so that you can really maximize your electronic communications with a majority of other persons. Your devoted friend, Drew."
the attempt to pin down communication to one exact, unchanging form really flies in the face of the quite naturally spontaneous nature of human interaction.
as has been said elsewhere in this forum: if you feel you receive benefit from Outlook2000 formatting, then go for it. if you'd rather use words alone, then go for that.
if you are mailing people who are annoyed by your choice, be assured they will inform you. and thus, as your priorities shift because of this feedback, so, perhaps, will your choice. but don't let the nazis on either side of the issue get to you. think of their protests and gloomy forecasts of degenerating social fabric as information that "is for informational purposes only".
human speech is *much* more robust than you think
---
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Just because you don't see any text in that file doesn't mean it isn't full of all kinds of scary stuff. :-)
How do they know exactly how high they can get away with pricing their software without starting a mass revolt unless they have access to everyone's financial info?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I love that quote!
Is this grammar school? Does anyone really care the difference between your, you're and you are? There is no difference. your is best described as SLANG for you're or you are.
Im not an english major, but im not a complete idiot either. When i write a professional document, of course mistakes like that are fixed. however, this is a bulletin board, and frankly the point is to get your message across in the simplest manner while still legible to everyone. And im sorry, but if you dont understand your you are the idiot.
touchè! :)
--8<--
--8<--
yep...plus, the tnef program that has been referred to several times in other comments has been on freshmeat for almost a year...
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
Russian has five vowel pairs, making for ten total vowels (a & ja, o & jo, etc.).
This is great news. Every "standard" microsoft creates, and keeps closed, is more ammo for the government's lawsuit, and more frustrating for MS users.
Why can't grandma sent her grandson mail at the university? Cuz Billy Borgware says so. Or, as he says, "they use legacy Sun servers, and your grandson is using a low value OS, (Linux/Mac/BSD/Beos/Amiga whatever).
Who's going to be pissed off? Poor old Grandma, who's going to vent about it to everyone in her frickin' knitting group, the Gray Panthers, whatever. Her Grandson just sighs, cuz he knew all this was coming years ago.
Of course, she can read *his* emails just fine, because federal criminals didn't write that originating client or the intervening server.
So this is good thing. Every microsoft attempt at controlling the net, and refusing to cooperate with the W3c (and other standards committees) is going to eventually boomerang and smack them right in the nuts.
Go, Billy Borgware, Go!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Hear hear
I investigated loads of different drawing programs before settling on xfig for the diagrams in my PhD thesis. I began with xfig and thought 'euurgh, how do I use this, I'm used to corel draw and its completely different'. Then I tried corel draw under wine, it worked in all areas except I couldn't save. Bummer. I tried staroffice's drawing program but it was just slow and I objected to running a whole office suite when I just wanted to draw diagrams and use them with LaTeX. In the end I settled on xfig and forced myself to learn it. And I'm very glad I did. Fast, simple and precise. I won't change to anything else now.
I am not a MS advocate. I am a unix programmer. I do believe that everything has its place, and that open-source isnt the solution to everything.
--
their, they're, there
Actually, I think this emphasises the point he was making. Any "sour note" distracts from the message.
uh. . . his heuristic device for evaluating the value of a new technology didn't really invite a discussion on the myth of progress. if anything, he's making the same point that you're flailing around -- that you can't assume that a new technology will "yield good things".
sorry, but I feel strangely compelled to correct your spelling. you want "reeks" as in "to reek" which means to smell strongly. that's why something can reek strongly of something else, i.e. "my hovercraft reeks of eels", or "her hair reeked of Clairol Herbal Essences"... "to wreak" is something complete different, and means something more like "to inflict" or "to avenge" i.e. "wreak havoc" as in "clicking on a link that points to c:\con\con\ wreaks havoc with an unpatched Windows98 box"
-------------------- the list is long. dirac angestung gesept
Whenever I run accross a new piece of software, I always like to apply this rule. It requires you to use your imagination a little.
Imagine that you are sitting in a room full of vacuum tubes at the moment the first modern digital computer was assembled. After the initial glee, the engineers all sit around and brainstorm for ideas about where it will lead. The continuously shout out: "This is great! Someday we'll be able to (blank)".
Now, take the new piece of software, hardware, or application, and fit it in the blank.
So, we have "This is great! Someday we will be able to (transmit text only to people who have our particular program)" vs. "This is great! Someday we will be able to (transmit text in a universal format that all systems can understand)"
Now, to be fair, the MS format might have some advantage over ASCII. What, I don't know. After all, we already have the UTF standard for the handling of foreign character sets, so it can't offer that. So, I challenge anybody to fill in the blank: "This is great! Someday we will be able to (blank)" and put this MS format in a good light.
I will be amazed if anybody can do that.
BTW, you may think my little thought experiment is klutzy, but it works much more quickly in my mind than it does when I am trying to explain it on /..
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't know anything about this extension Outlook 2k supposedly uses, but if its based on MIME (as a MIME insertion), then I say leave it alone. If its not, then MS is breaking E-mail standards.
If it works as a MIME insertion / attachment that Outlook 2k automatically decodes and reads, then fine, those people get to take advantage of that, and other mail readers can ignore it.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I've had one experience with RTF, and it was actually very nice. When I was in the MacQuake TF clan, my leader sent me a message as an RTF attachment. It read great in Communicator on my Mac.
By contrast, even simple ASCII's line breaks get screwed up when sent to/from macs; in such cases, I have to edit the whole thing by hand before I can read it without cringing constantly.
We can say it, we just can't speak it.
And that situation is likely to continue.
English has a much better chance of becoming a common language than Esperanto.
Politas
Actually, I HOPE that all those servers will strip out the TNEF information, because I'm sick of trying to parse HTML in my own head.
Can we say Esperanto.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Except you also can't read any attachments they send you. Of course, as the attachments were probably .doc files anyway, no big loss. :)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I am the Exchange Admin (I know, I know, but I'm sneaking Linux in there slowly...) for a large consulting company. This is a transcript of an Email discussion with one of our regional managers, who absolutely demanded that we make our main Exchange SMTP relay server allow TNEF. We barred TNEF altogether last year after our CEO complained of not being able to send to certain companies. You see, TNEF does *NOT* gracefully degrade on other SMTP servers, some servers will *LOSE* the ENTIRE message or garble it, so there is lossage involved. I, with the backing of others who went through this ordeal, successfully defended our Internet standard MIME-only, no-RTF/TNEF-outbound-to-the-Internet stance. We now have RTF/TNEF contained to within our polluted internal Exchange system only.
Note: Names have been changed to protect both guilty and innocent...
-------------------
[My Boss],
Thanks for your response. The issues as outlined by [Me] have existed with email systems from the very beginning. Also from [Me]'s initial explanation it was an issue related to Lotus Notes. Since we are a confirmed Exchange Company and many of our customers are as well it makes sense to enable this feature.
This issue arose from customer issues in the New England region rather than internal desires.
We can certainly have this region perform a work around, however it sends a very bad message when every company they deal with has RTF enabled and we are the only exchange house that doesn't.
While I understand Senior Managements position, I do not think they are compelling reasons to continue blocking this functionality.
-----Original Message-----
From: [My Boss]
To: [Me]; [PITA]; [CIO]
Sent: 8/28/00 11:55 AM
Subject: RE: RTF Files
Couldn't a RTF file be sent as a attachment within a message, rather than the e-mail itself being formatted RTF?
[PITA], please understand our hesitating to change this. This issue created a great deal of attention of senior management ([CEO] and
[misc. upper mgmt guy]) until we blocked RTF formatted messages going out. No matter how well we communicated Outlook settings to correct it, the problem reoccurred almost daily.
-----Original Message-----
From: [Me]
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2000 10:47 AM
To: [PITA]; [My Boss]; [CIO]
Subject: RE: RTF Files
I am not in a position to implement policy changes, however, I will lay out the technical issues involved and let [CIO] and [My Boss] decide the outcome:
1. RTF allows you to send E-mail with enhanced text; from Q136204 in MS Knowledge base:
Rich-text format attributes include:
Font name
Font size
Character color
Bold
Italic
Underline
Strikethrough
Bulleted lists
Exchange Forms
Meeting Requests
Voting Buttons
2. RTF is a Microsoft proprietary Internet mail packaging format. Also from Q136204:
"To view rich-text attributes, the recipient must also use Microsoft Exchange or another messaging system that displays rich-text formatting.
Messaging systems that do not support rich-text formatting will display messages as plain text without special attributes or formatting....You
may want to disable rich-text formatting in messages sent to recipients whose e-mail systems do not decode and display these attributes."
3. Only MS Outlook and Eudora understand RTF, all other mail clients will receive no enhancements. In fact, many POP3 clients will lose attachments sent via RTF. Per Q181953:
"Most POP3 clients do not understand Rich Text Format (RTF) used by Microsoft transport-neutral encapsulation format (TNEF). Consequently, the sender must turn off the option "Always send to this recipient as RTF", in order for the POP3 client to see the attachments"
4. MS Outlook is configured by *default* to send RTF.
To resolve these very interoperability issues encountered last year while sending to non-MS clients and partners (A Notes-based company specifically), [CEO] and [Local Manager] decided to turn off RTF completely at the Internet gateway. There are three settings we can choose at the Exchange server:
a) Always send RTF
b) Let the user decide
c) Never send RTF (except to specified domains)
Right now, we are using choice c). If we are going to make a policy change, I strongly discourage choosing a) due to the problems
encountered previously. This leaves choice b) which means whatever Outlook is set to the Exchange server will use. The ramifications of
making this change are:
1. Since Outlook is configured by default to send RTF, messages to clients and partners who do not use Exchange may become mangled (blank message body) and lose attachments. This will result in lost user productivity and escalations to the helpdesk on both sides until the issue is resolved. A secondary effect is that our mail system will lose perceived reliability and functionality due to these problems.
2. All [OurCo.] employees will need to be educated on what RTF is and why you need to disable RTF on messages sent to non-MS recipients. Most employees don't know or care what kind of Email system the recipient is
on, and this will create an additional burden on employees to take this into consideration. What will most likely happen is that employees will
not make the effort, messages will be mangled, and only after a helpdesk call will the issue be resolved - and only for that particular recipient. This will happen over and over again.
For these reasons, this is why choice c) above - specifying certain Internet domains to always receive RTF - seems the most reasonable
option. As long as we identify which clients and partners are based on Microsoft, we can configure all mail sent to that domain instantly, eliminating any interoperability issues and user confusion.
I think it would help in making this decision if all parties understood the exact requirements the [region] region has for sending in Rich Text Format, in order to decide whether this benefit merits making changes which may negatively affect the [OurCo.] messaging system. I am assuming that the requirement your region has for using RTF is related to sending meeting requests and other Outlook forms-based messages to certain partners or clients on the Internet. In these cases, it is well known who these partners are, and an easy addition to the list of RTF-enabled domains. If there are other requirements that I am not aware of, please let us all know.
I propose the following resolution process:
1. [PITA] will provide [Region]'s requirements for RTF format, and a reasoning why this requires RTF enabled generally instead of on a domain-by-domain basis.
2. Based on these requirements, [CIO] and [My Boss] will decide whether we need to change the policy to send RTF by default, taking into consideration the end-user impacts discussed above.
If anyone has any questions in the meantime, please feel free to let me know.
Thanks,
[Me]
-----Original Message-----
From: [PITA]
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2000 8:39 AM
To: [Me]
Cc: [CIO]
Subject: RTF Files
I passed along your information to my client in the New England Region. He brings up some interesting points, best of which is that our business requires RTF files be passed generally and not on a deny / allow basis. Can you please tell me what I need to do to get this policy changed immediately. It is causing a great amount of discomfort for my customer.
-----------------------
It is interesting to note the actual reasoning for wanting TNEF turned on --- they were getting berated by contacts at other Exchange companies (starting with Microsoft!!!) for not knowing how to turn on RTF under Exchange! This is the kind of *sick* peer pressure that happens in companies that deal with mainly MS technologies, and have not yet discovered the joys of the OS G/L software and community. So, before slamming the author of the original post (or Slashdot for posting it), please consider the effect this standard has, and how I had to defend my right to ***maintain Internet standards for mail going to the Internet***!!!
Now I have to say-- a Microsoft fan I'm not. But, I do use Outlook 2000--in fact I love it. I have no problem admitting a Microsoft product is good. In fact (and I don't want to start a subthread of raging debate on this), there's nothing like it for Linux. You can do it all with a few packages combined, but for me (and again, this is MY opinion and I'm not citing any shortcomings of linux), I prefer the integration (Go evolution!!)
My complaint with Chris's article is this--I've been using Outlook 2000 to talk to people for almost a year now. I've never once had a Linux user complain, and I've even read my mailing list postings from my Linux machine in Netscape before. Never even a bit of weird trailing garbage. In fact, even when I send html mail (shudder), it still is kind enough to tag along a text copy for the less-html inclined. After reading this article, I TRIED to make my mail unreadable to see if he accidentally flipped an option. Couldn't.
This in mind, I feel it fair that Chris Di Bono should either justify his complaint or suck up his pride and appologize to Microsoft. I don't like them any more than the next guy, but there's plenty of things they do viciously wrong. Let's not get them on one of the few things they do okey. We don't need to do that to win the battle.
I understand that, however you have to try and comprehend why this would happen.
WHen a company has a product that works well with another one of theyre products, they will promote it, right? Thats what this is. Just because it does not say on the front of the box that the TNEF format is an issue, doesent mean its not one.
The article does arise the format and its somewhat interesting, however i do not classify this as slashdot material.
This is such a tiny-influence and tiny-relation article, that its relatively worthless. This is a "1 second fix" problem.. And of course M$ is going to try and push exchange along with outlook. is microsoft being truthful up front? no. is it legal? yes.
its another microsoft quirk. you will find it all over theyre software, and find it all over open source software as well (making projects depend, or highly suggest other projects).
its nothing new.
I can only assume that you are a fellow Canuck poking fun at the notion of a Canadian doing anything cool...
--8<--
--8<--
Actually, I feel that THEF, if I understand it correct, is very nice idea. If what it does is really splitting message to bare-bones text and format information, than that's pretty smart. Your plain-old mail client reads ASCII, and your Advanced Bells-n-Whistles mail client, if you have one, reads also TNEF and draws fonts-colors-whatnot. Content/presentation separation, isn't it what we like to do?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Soon it will be RedHat - it already is, for good reason.
Linux is becoming a serious threat on the Desktop market, thanks to KDE and GNOME. Now, regarding the 'cute little icons'; the mail-handlers for KDE and GNOME will be (can't see no reason why not) standards compliant. The icons will not be viewable to the default KDE and GNOME mail-handlers. This way, a Windows user can say 'Hey, I have cool icons whenever John Doe sends mail to me', while the KDE/GNOME user cannot see them.
In other words, this is basically putting a frog in the water and turning up the heat..
Quite well done, too.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
you can't make an empty doc
.oO0Oo.
you make an ole file system
the ole format is documented or how else would plan9 mount an ole document
when outlook sends html it sends a plain version too
it does send annoyingly formatted html though
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
All normal POP3 and IMAP communication is sent in plain text, including your password. Doesn't matter what client you're using, they all do it. Now there are encrypted versions of these protocols and Outlook does support them, they're just not turned on by default.
Wow! I didn't know the United States was the only English-speaking country in the world! I could've sworn that the people in England spoke English. Not to mention Canada, Australia, and 79 other countries.
Quote from The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.2.2, 20 AUG 2000. Under definition of 'connector conspiracy';
"Standards are great! There are so many of them to choose from!"
This would seem appropriate in the software sense.
Apple's OS X's default text editor stores data in RTF format.
The default behaviour for e-mail should be plain text. Users should change it depending on their needs, but the DEFAULT should be plain text. I never know when I'll be getting it on my pager, my Palm, sitting on an *X box using a shell or on a Windows machine using Pegasus....whatever. Make it text. Code is fluff....if I want to write a letter to you, I don't enclose noise and embed pictures...those are all attachments. As usual, Microsoft could care less about anyone else using any other program. STOP MAKING MY LIFE HARDER and give me CHOICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, there are many dialects of English, but remember that we're talking about ASCII - the first 128 entities of ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1). This set includes lower and upper-case letters, with and without the diacritical marks. Unless some totally new characters or ideograms have been invented, all dialects of English should be fine under ASCII. The semantics or construction of the language (within the bounds of common Latin-1 characters) is irrelevant.
Really? Maybe we're using different definitions of proprietary, but I was pretty sure that Adobe owned both PDF and Postscript.
This means in essence that unless you are using a 'TNEF Aware' server -- like, say, hmm, MS Exchange -- you may not be able to read your mail.
Actually, it means that you won't be able to read the TNEF part of the message, you'll still get plain text.
I would also point out that any mail server which strips MIME attachments in a standard format is broken. Don't bother saying but "TNEF isn't a standard format." It's not, but it is encapsulated as a MIME attachment in the standard MIME way.
This whole article explains why I've had people send me attachments and all I see is "winmail.dat" attached. This sucks, but it's to be expected...
Michael
Do you have ESP?
Just smile and nod, that's what I do. It's not nice to make fun of the retarded children...
Reflect on the fact that you're not using my mail server, and calm the fuck down. That's the other nice thing about open source -- if you don't like a feature, you can always remove it yourself without chewing the developer a new asshole.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
What was that Macallum quote,"The medium is the message." ? This appears just to be another typical jab by M$ to induce management to buy M$.
"Why does your e-mail look funny?"
"Oh, you must not be using M$ Outlook!"
"I'll have to tell the IT department to switch!"
I suffered through the nightmares of dealing with Outlook when it first emerged from the primordial ooze. It was inferior in every respect to 99% of the products out there, with two exceptions: it looked glossy, and it had M$ pushing it. For contrast, look at it's main competitor in this arena - Lotus Notes. While anyone with any choice in the matter would avoid both products, I gotta admit M$ is better across the board, from a user perspective. And Lotus has it's own little 'extensions', notably the 'cute' little pictures at the top, and the whole 'To/cc/From/Subject' boxes. These are less of an issue at the receiving end, but still, you are losing some of the message.
Does it contain undo information?
I don't understand. Why would I want to send an e-mail to someone who is running the most up to date, and therefore technologically superior, MS products? I mean come on. If people receiving my e-mails don't have the funds to stay up to date, then their name shouldn't be on my desk during business hours ... end sarcasm here.
Seriously though, this isn't something new. I get screwed up e-mails from Mac users all the time.
ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
There's 225 million American, 5.8 billion other people on this planet, most whom don't speak English and don't write in modified, vowel poor, aplhabets.
Can you say "ASCII is cutting us off from big potential markets?" Sure... I knew you could...
Unicode will spread because it's NEEDED.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
99% of the planet wants and/or needs to use this program outside their office. The people that DO use it at work are guaranteed to be using an Exchange server, and those that run Outlook for personal use get what they deserve.
--
"A witty saying proves nothing" - Voltaire
I can just imagine in a couple of years... "Billions of dollars to fix all the ASCII strings in ancient software and databases... the programmers didn't think the software would stick around so long... so shortsighted to use 8-bit characters, trying to skimp on memory!"
Say, is there a standard protocol for scheduling things?
Now you've done it, your going on Bill's list. ;)
Rasputiin
I know this only because I've received several emails where people tell me that they couldn't read the attachment I sent them...and I think to myself - what attachment??? That's right, I didn't send an attachment but the encoded part of the mail message is getting stripped out somehow and ends up as those generic attachments which people can't read.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Seperating style from content and using UUencode (a long standing and well documented standard) to send the style information as an attachment is a smart move. I applaude ms for their idea, but I abhore them for their implimentation. I'm sure that ms marketing droids will tell you that making the TNEF the default settings was done "to make it easy".
One thing I've learned when reading about any ms product is that anytime they use the word easy is to hide the fact that they've implemeted a proprietary, floated, buggy implemetation of bassackwards hack from a 12 year old they have chaned to a DOS box in the back room. They keep sliding pizza under the door, and the little kid keeps coming up with Kerberos "extentions", Propritary Outlook "extentions", Active directory [cringe], msBob [laugh].
Email, without other users to read is useless. Therefore, Outlook should not be deployed in a business critical application.
Sending and Receiving Concerns
When a message containing TNEF information is received by a mail client that does not understand TNEF, there are three common results:
- The plain text version of the message is received and
...
- The plain text version of the message is received and
...
- The plain text version of the message is received and
...
It always sends the plain text version, but might send some useless junk along with it. Geez you guys, get a grip...Since this is a new, proprietary format, only MS really knows what it is, and therefor can strip it out. Notice how Exchange is mentioned as "a" possible server that will have this option . . .
Other mail servers shouldn't be forced to update their code because some child didn't want to play nice . . .
--
Never trust anyone over 90000.
I must admit, I didn't know exactly what TNEF was, and I got the impression that a few other people who were posting didn't either.
This is what I found at CSGNetwork's Online Computer, Telephony & Electronics Reference
Pronounced tee-neff, and short for Transport Neutral Encapsulation
Format, a proprietary format used by the Microsoft Exchange and
Outlook E-Mail clients when sending messages formatted as Rich Text
Format (RTF). When Microsoft Exchange thinks that it is sending a
message to another Microsoft E-Mail client, it extracts all the
formatting information and encodes it in a special TNEF block. It then
sends the message in two parts - the text message with the formatting
removed and the formatting instructions in the TNEF block. On the
receiving side, a Microsoft e-mail client processes the TNEF block and
re-formats the message. Unfortunately, most non-Microsoft E-Mail
clients cannot decipher TNEF blocks. Consequently, when you receive a
TNEF-encoded message with a non-Microsoft e-mail client, the TNEF part
appears as a long sequence of hexadecimal digits, either in the
message itself or as an attached file (usually named
WINMAIL.DAT). These WINMAIL.DAT files serve no useful purpose so you
can delete them.
So it's not UNICODE or something like it, it's extra formatting information that, unfortunately, is proprietary.
Since the e-mail was sent to you, that is evidence enough that the sender intended for you to read it. Using software that can understand the format cannot be construed as an attempt to violate the copyright.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Did he say "The medium is the message" or
did he say "The medium is the MASSAGE" or
both? Most people who see the title of the book will naturally (but incorrectly) see the word 'message' and not 'massage'... that must've been part of his point.
Netscrape doesn't. It'll send HTML-only messages. When Mutt receives such a message, it says something along the lines of "attachment type text/html not supported"...at this point, it's somewhat viewable if you pipe the attachment into Lynx. Since it adds nothing to the content of email, though, it'd be better if email programs dropped the ability to send HTML in email.
You: But my email won't look pretty.
Me: Tough sh*t. You want pretty mail? Go back where you came from, AOLer.
You: Your mail reader doesn't handle HTML? Get with the program!
Me: Yeah, well at least email viruses won't knock me down...:-)
_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
rongen wrote:
:b
;)
> How is TNEF superior to ASCII for conveying
> information?
TNEF is just another of Microsoft's "Acronyms of the Week"(tm). It isn't inherently superior to anything, and like all MSAoWs(tm) is only useful for conveying one message: "Buy Microsoft"(tm). Oh, the joys of a market driven company.
> The fact is that ASCII is pretty much the common
> denominator as far as interpersonal
> communications.
For programmer types, expecially on the UNIX/Linux side of things, that is certainly true. A WYSIWYG word processor is usually a dark netherworld of fonts, rulers, and non-standard file formats we only encounter when required to produce a resume in print form, or documentation for ASCII-unenlightened management.
For most computer users, it is a different story. If they want to write anything, they pull up their trusty word processors, and start typing, with an occasional tweak of the font settings ("gee, I wonder what this Juniper font looks like"), or maybe a table or two. I have a friend who has had a few programming classes and one on HTML. She's been browsing the web for quite some time, and is a very savvy computer user (various micro computers, Dos, OS/2, and Windows). However, most of the work she has done has been clerical or purchasing agent stuff. Until I showed her the wonders of Notepad a few weeks ago, she had never even thought to create an ASCII file to story anything! She uses Word Perfect (and hates MS Office with a fiery passion). She even keeps databases in Word Perfect. Not the database program that came in her WP office suite, but WP itself. She uses WP for practically everything, even composing email messages which she then pastes into her email program. Thank goodness I have programs that can read her files.
BTW, I am assuming you meant computer based interpersonal communications. I have yet to meet anyone who physically speaks ASCII, except as an ocassional joke.
Users of mutt can retaliate in kind by sending GPG signed messages. Not only do both message and signature appear as MIME attachments (by default), but quoting will throw a bunch of spurious '=', '=20', and similar characters into the bytestream.
Almost as annoying as getting broken MS shit...but actually useful (you've authenticated yourself as one clueful mofo assh*le), and, believe it or not, fully MIME compliant -- it's the mailer's own damned fault it can't read straight text.
You can even quote me in responding to those who use inferior mail clients and ask why they your mail is arriving as attachments:
I don't know. I don't care.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Brilliant flame. Well done. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have a new contender to the title of 'Grammar Nazi'!
>>Didn't the melissa virus teach you *anything*?
Guess not, but then I never saw it. or ILOVEYOU or KILLRESUME or...
...actually they did appear in a log of auto deleted mail.
There are instructions and readmes with this stuff. Try them some time, they really help and you might learn something.
BTW, it just checked a new install of Outlook2000/internet only config. The default is plain text. This is a non-issue.
That said....I don't consider sending messages fully enclosed within attachments as being standrads compliant and It was my understanding that OL2000 sent the plain text as a tnef attachment. If not, my bad!
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Actually, no.
_______________
you may quote me
Hello my name is Chris Dibona, I fool with linux and misinterpret stupid things Microsoft does to make them look worse. Btw, heres my homepage it has a picture of my car.
INETF does NOT change ascii folks. It is a way microsoft uses to send text+proprietary attachments. The attachments part quoted from MS states
"A TNEF-encoded message contains a plain text version of the message, and a binary attachment that "packages" various other parts of the original message. In most cases, the binary attachment will be named Winmail.dat, and may include: The formatted text version of the message (font information, colors, and such) OLE objects (embedded pictures, embedded Office documents, and such) Special Outlook features (custom forms, voting buttons, meeting requests, and such) Regular file attachments that were added to the original message"
I hardly see the problem with "plain text version" unless that part is not ascii or something readable ie:unicode. But the site doesnt say that is the case at all. The only thing I can imagine being mad about having these messagess floating around the internet is if someone actually wanted those prettied up attachments that you may lose. Microsoft would not create a format people without ol2000 couldnt read mail from ol2000 users. not by default, not by force. "Oh no, my outlook express can't read my bosses email, better upgrade" nope that doesn't happen. Try actually something the software industry has had forever mr.dibona, TESTING. I can't imagine how so many people continously are living with a herd-mentality yet believing they aren't simply for reading this website. and btw. LAST POST
Read the knowledge base article, and you will see:
A TNEF-encoded message contains a plain text version of the message, and a binary attachment that "packages" various other parts of the original message. In most cases, the binary attachment will be named Winmail.dat, and may include:
- The formatted text version of the message (font information, colors, and such)
- OLE objects (embedded pictures, embedded Office documents, and such)
- Special Outlook features (custom forms, voting buttons, meeting requests, and such)
- Regular file attachments that were added to the original message
So what does this mean? You can communicate with an MS-user. You will be able to read his/her messages. The only thing you won't see is the formatted text version of the message. This is really no different from someone sending you multipart mime text+html email. You educate them about it, you move on with your life.What's funny is, I spent less time reading your rant than you did writing it.
_______________
you may quote me
And as for a common standard: the reason Unicode exists is to allow for larger character sets than the 26 letters of the english alphabet. There are other languages in the world, as you may be peripherally aware. Using Unicode makes it far easier to write software that can be recompiled with a rather simple flip of a switch to work with those other language sets. I don't know about you, but I think there's a far vaster majority of potential computer users over there in Europe and Asia. We may find someday that it is their character set flooding the internet, as opposed to ours.
While many argue this is irritating, I think its a useful feature for their proprietry code. I believe if you're sending your mails to the rest of the world, you shouldn't even be using Outlook 2000. Use Outlook Express instead. It's simpler and easier to use and administrate. Outlook 2000 is somewhat like a LAN collaboration tool, something like Lotus Notes? *shrug*
This is one service that should be metered to the lowest common denominator and often isn't. By that I mean that when considering an e-mail system, one should factor in the least able reader that one will be sending to. Frequently, I see packages with integrated e-mail, such as a help desk application, that send only to itself, and don't integrate or communicate with other e-mail systems, or impose ridiculous concessions from it's users. This is its death knell.
OL2000 is another such package that should be listing. Hear the peals from the tolling bell, Microsoft?
In the silence between pulls of the bell rope, MS should turn it's gaze inward and root out it's basic fallacies, that they are the greatest, the one true way, the Holy Grail.
The geek community, at the same time, needs an understanding that what we do is not for our gratification only, or even first or second. Our work is to be like the light switch. Unnoticed and ignored (by the average user) until it doesn't work anymore. Which hopefully will not happen if we do our jobs well.
MS, by setting it's own e-mail system to break all others, it doing nothing more than the dog with the fire plug; just marking its range. We all know that MS is marking all over the computer industry. The real problem here is that, for the most part, MS is such a big dog it can get away with it.
The director doesn't care that MS is breaking things, he only knows that this MS package isn't working any more and it is obvious to him it's our fault because we are one of those subversive types that doesn't like MS, so we must have broken it.
I've heard MS sales drones espousing this to the higher ups more than once. So remember, if it's MS, and it isn't working, it's because of us subversive Open Source types making it break.
There is a destiny that shapes our ends, and it's MS. Good thing I believe in free will.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I've been using Outlook 2000 for a little over a year now. I communicate with a lot of people, including people who use elm as their client. I have hardly ever bothered to change the format of the messages I have sent. I have yet to receive a single complaint about my messages being unreadable. Quite obviously, there isn't a problem.
As for it supplanting ASCII, what part of "Plain Text is not Rich Text" do I need to explain again?
This is getting tiresome. Slashdots editors need to take at least the basic steps required to verify a story before rushing to post it just because it gives them a chance to bring out their Bill-Gates-As-The-Borg icon. I don't know, maybe stopping for a second and THINKING about it - Outlook 2000 has been out for more than a year now - wouldn't you have heard about this before if it was true?
And don't even get me started about the so-called expert who wrote the article in the first place.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Im not changing anything on my mail server.
It will help keep the spam out. Only people
i get email from are those using Mutt, pine,
and netscape mail.
OL2000 also sends out your password in plain text when you are checking your e-mail. Netscape will encrypt it. I don't know how many ofyou care about your privacy, but personally I like the idea of not transmitting my password to everyone else.
Probably just me.
These extensions have nothing to do with removing plaintext from a message, only producing fancy formating and messages within Outlook (to schedule a meeting, for example). If you send an email to a non-Outlook user they will read it just fine.
I think this is a classic case of a pseudo-journalist clearly over-stepping his or her boundaries and not properly researching the material. Nothing in Outlook prevents outside users from reading the emails. They just won't recieve the special features Outlook provides within emails (what Eudora would do with a "meeting" tag is beyond me anyway).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Quite unlikely given that the DMCA has an exceptions for computer programs and datafile formats. While one could think that this exception should apply to DeCSS (after all, a movie is in a datafile) given that movies have existed for long it will be hard to point the obvious.
Of course, if MS tried this trick and won it would only prove once more how stupid the legal system can be.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
And this is exactly what happens when I send messages from work to home. At work I have Outlook 98 client with HP Open Mail. At home I use Eudora - I get a winmail.dat file everytime in my Eudora download directory. Never knew why it was there but it really didn't bother me.
So richtext is "proprietary" but PDF is perfectly fine?
However, Outlook can be used with Unix based TradeServer from Bynari.
disclaimer: I do work for Bynari, Inc.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This is more or less a classic example of not getting enough information then placing blame on a non-blameworthy party. Beating up on Microsoft is in fashion, remember (soon it will be beating up on RedHat, then Yahoo, then AMD, etc.). It's a cycle.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
So we could integrate TNEF decoding into mutt. But the question may be: do we want to? I know one person at work who, every time he gets and attachment in word, rtf, visio, etc, always says: send it again in a non-proprietary format. (Text, postscript, pdf) I myself used to force everyone sending me visio diagrams to send them as jpgs. I'm not really interested in legitimizing their changes by making things compatible. (Although I'm sure some people believe in it)
On a positive note, a couple weeks ago I had a plane flight with a gentleman using gnome/E on his laptop, and it turned out he was a CEO/CTO of a 75-person hardware engineering firm working on cutting edge stuff for chips. Apparently all his people were using "xfig" (which is just what he ran, I've never used it) to diagram their circuits instead of something like visio.
I suppose it would then make it easier for virus writers to encapsulate their payloads in the proprietary sections. That way Outlook Transmitted Diseases have an easier time not bothering with clients they can't infect.
But to the topic - the problem is the default behavior. I think Netscape's internal client defaults (or used to default) to HTML, and users would get flamed the first message or two.
If Outlook's client results in unreadable mail on the internet, then their users will be getting flamed too. "What, the entire world doesn't use Windows, Outlook, and Exchange?".
There is a free tnef decoder already. Search for "tnef" on freshmeat.
-- Wodin
How is TNEF superior to ASCII for conveying information?
:) and just let people read the format the want (I think most mailers that send fancy mail also include a text attachment by default, thank Bob). The fact is that ASCII is pretty much the common denominator as far as interpersonal communications. You need to ask yourself what is more important: the message or it's presentation? Most people would agree it is the message.
If I have a message I can certainly write the text to convey that message. Include a link? I can do that as well by merely typing in the link...
Attachments can handle images, HTML, etc. I think what should be done with outlook is have it send both "real" and TNEF versions of it's mail (actually forget the TNEF)
--8<--
--8<--
I may be reading a bit much into this paragraph
Appartently, yes. This is the first time I've ever sided with Microsoft. I've been using Outlook 2000 at work for about a year now. I've never changed the default way of sending messages. I have many friends who use *nix, in fact I've emailed myself and recieved the mail on my Linux box.
I've never had this problem, ever.
_______________
you may quote me
No, of course not -- which is why we're switing to unicode, which is nice enough to remain compatible with ascii for the first 127 characters..
does this tnef do anything besides obfuscate a message and put useless formatting information in it? can it transmit characters for all the major scripts in the world?
ol2k is not the problem. it's exchange. where i work, we have use outlook2k+exchange. well, everyone but the developers. we use pine.
my main beef with exchange is how it silently converts all attachments to APPLICATION/X-MS-TNEF. yes, ALL attachments. if i send a mime attachment from pine to another pine user, the attachement comes as X-MS-TNEF. joy.
as far as i know, ol2k (while irritating) has never approached this level of insidious behavior.
my favorite was when the exchange server complained because i was using `ISO8859-1' charset, while it was using `US-ASCII' or some other similarly wrong setup. so it encoded the body of my message in a tnef attachment.
--
If Microsoft software just didn't work with other mail readers, it would disrupt the network effects that they rely on for market dominance. They want other people to receive Outlook messages, they just don't want those messages to look quite right (plain text instead of RTF) or function quite right (no scheduling, etc.). That way, they will spread their message to the maximum number of people: "yes, you can read your mail, but it would look and work so much better if you, too, switched to Windows and Outlook".
The same is true for their web authoring. They can't afford to cut out 30% of the market that still use something other than IE, they just don't want the experience to be really good for those other people.
Areas where Microsoft can and has created much more complete incompatibility is with Word and Excel documents. In the past, those weren't sent around that much: they usually stayed within a single company. Now, as they are being used more for other purposes and distributed by mail and over the Internet, they are opening the format up just enough (by going to XML): "Yes, you can kind of read them with other tools, but you'll get less functionality. Isn't it time to switch to Word?"
is here.
Mark Twain killed the C and left the K when he propsed fixing up Englsih spelling.
He also propsed that you replace "damn" with "very" so your editor will delete it and the wording will be as it should have been.
Now there's a standards based Email client that works. It isn't affected by all those features that make other clients pretty. And it's free!
MicroShaft, BY DEFAULT NO LESS, has opted for a format that is incompatible with competing standards!?!?!?!? I'm not buying it; the next thing you know you'll try and convince me that they engage in shady business practices and have unstable OS's.......
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Your funny and original names for outlook and exchange server add a great degree of credibility to your post.
"Smart companies save money by deploying MySQL instead of Oracle." - slashdot post
It happens every time. Micro$haft hides the attachments in their bogus proprietary format, and That's the problem!!
Please refrain from using the dollar sign in the Microsoft name. If you don't, you'll risk looking like a totally bigoted bible thumper. Sure, Microsoft never seems to listen to popular demand when it "innovates", but you're being just as idiotic and slanted when you flame them.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Hm. I never knew there was a town named Arrogance, Mississippi. Maybe it's kinda like Mars, Pennsylvania.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
That is exactly the problem, that stripping sounds like it will be off by default.
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
This design philosophy is at the heart of micros~1, and it's the reason ms isn't allowed in many server rooms.
It's this ignorant disregard for other systems on a network, and the desire to force customers to change all other systems to an ms system, that just pisses people off.
ms hasn't added a single feature, in recent years, that hasn't *first* bolstered their position of power and dominance *before* considering conectivity, stability,security, useability and, the satisfaction of their customers, *second*.
Yes, it's this kind of thinking that got them a monopoly, and yes it's this kind of thinking that continues to allow them to abuse that monopoly, but I wasn't put on this planet to increase that companies visibility and position in the market, and I believe that people are starting to wake up to that fact (whitnessed by the pitifull w2k sales).
What was that Macallum quote,"The medium is the message."?
Close! It was Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian, who said that. He was a proponent of the Global Village, etc. Had some neat ideas...
--8<--
--8<--
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
This is an MS extension. Don't like it? Don't use it. Don't like someone else using it? Ask them not to.
I had this problem with HP Openmail. Now I know that it was Outlook 2000. Should have guessed.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
Standards
There are a number of standards to consider.
Non standards Currently, scheduling/caldendar information is handled by most products in a closed way. Examples of this are MS Exchange and Notes and Netscape Calendar server
Servers
Conclusions The Windows world is far better served than the Linux world in this area. At least Today. In our company (around 12 people) we will probably use: Cyrus and OpenLDAP (rather than Exchange) for the servers, Netscape Communicator and KOrganizer for the linux desktops, Outlook 2000 for the MS Desktops. The Group diary will probably be a big shared file served up a web server into which every one records their key appointments - Or publishes their diaries as HTML or whatever.
By contrast, even simple ASCII's line breaks get screwed up when sent to/from macs; in such cases, I have to edit the whole thing by hand before I can read it without cringing constantly.
Try using BBEdit
It is an awesome text/html editor for Mac.
Automatically converts mac/dos/unix line breaks and can save as any of them. Beats doing it by hand
---CONFLICT!!---
>>We can't stick to ASCII forever.
... I'm sorry... you didn't understand the above?
You're right... And while we're at it, let's ditch that pesky Roman alphabet too.
@#$ &#^**% !#&*^@^%^ (*%^(#^@%@#*& @#@^% ##$ * !@@$@@%^
Oh
You need to switch to the new Microsoft AlphaBet ©& version 1.2
Once again Slashdot editors show what this site is really about. Science? Technology? Digital Rights? Stuff that Matters?? Hardly. How about this as your motto: " Hyped stories for elitist Linux users. Stuff that doesnt matter unless hating MS makes you feel good about yourself" Is not this maybe the fourth or fifth Anti-MS story in the last four weeks that turned out to be overblown?
This is incorrect. Mail messages consisting of email attachments with text often come through with the attachments encoded in tnef format.
To fix this use fentun (untnef).
See http://www.fentun.com
-- dIon Play: http://www.trongus.com Work: http://www.multitask.com.au
From how I read the article, it looks like it is just an attachment with extra information in it to provide a richer version of the same email. While I'm as Anti-MS as any /.er, and this format seems pretty bloody stupid ("Winmail.dat"??? Login and path information???), I figure it'll be mostly harmless, since the plaintext will always make it through, so let the OL users have their toys.
In Outlook2000 there are three message formats..
1 - Plain text, yay, it works great, and everyone can read it
2 - HTML, Great! Most can read it just fine! Netscape users too!
3 - Rich Text, Now unless your a complete fscking idiot, doesent this just scream M$ word all over it?
Im as linux suportive as the next guy.. But...
This was a 100% complete worthless article, which was only posted because this man is "a highly devoted linux advocate". Its sad that stuff like this gets posted...
I suppose next we're going to complain that exe files dont run properly on linux, and that MS hasnt made them run on WINE..
I don't understand why some people associate plain text with ASCII? MIME defines a character set attribute for plain-text mails & most mail clients understand and display them (given that you set it up correctly). So, unless I want to receive EMail bugs from EMail buggers, I don't why I would need tinnef.
No, excuse me: TNEF
Marquise
-- I need a new sig.
But this is really the first non-flaming writing opposing MS that I've seen our favorite evangalist do. Nicely done Chris.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I and a few others had the sysadmin at our work turn off an option in Exchange server that automaticly attaches a HTML copy of the email to each email. Unfortunatly some mailing-list services (mostly web-based) interpreted only the HTML part, sending everyone on the list HTML copies of the mail (with ads). It appears this option is turned on by default in Exchange.
Quite anoying.
/ The Arrow
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
GREAT use of the Slashdot priority queue.
> Netscrape doesn't. It'll send HTML-only messages.
No. You can actually set Netscape up to:
send HTML
send text
send text and HTML
:-)
Also, if I remember correctly, you can set this up on a per-address book entry (or at least flag a person as "prefers to receive HTML mail")
> Me: Yeah, well at least email viruses won't knock me down...:-)
...but they [viruses] are not in HTML (at least the recent incidents), they're in VB
Now, VB is a Bad Idea (TM), that I agree.
--AP
That explains all those blank emails with a winmail.dat binary attached I've been getting from outlook users...
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
When it's an all-Microsoft shop, you can schedule meetings/appointments with people, conference rooms (yes, there's an entry in our address book for "Conference Room # 2, Bldg X") ;-), audio/video equipment based on when they're available. You can create e-mail messages with "voting" options. You can create "routed" messages that have to go to certain people, in a certain order. For example, say you want to see about buying "item A". You know that purchasing agent "B" handles these type items, but you need approval from say your manager, and maybe he needs approval from his superior. You can route the message to go first to your manager, then to his, then to the purchasing agent. And it's all fairly automatic. Yeah, some of you will call this bloat, but people use it !
And don't worry, if you send a message to someone who doesn't use an Exchange server, they won't see any of the extras. Before everyone I worked with all got switched to using an Exchange server, some of us went through a Linux mail server ! And yes, it did cause some confusion when someone sent me a meeting request, but I wasn't able to click "Accept", "Decline", or "Tentative". All I got was a message saying there was a meeting here at such and such time.
I, by no means, want to defend MS. But, as others have pointed out, this posting is simply unfair and inaccurate !
Some examples:
-
The "begin " bug where any line in a message that starts "begin " is treated as the start of a uuencoded attachment, the rest of the message becoming the attachment title. Affects several versions of OE.
-
Outlook 97 sometimes forgets to send the final terminating full stop (period) to mark the end of a message (especially if the last line of the message ends in a full stop). Some mail systems will reject the unfinished message - and Outlook will give the sender no notification that this has happened. Others will accept the message - but if the recipient also has Outlook 97 then it will lock up trying to download the message. No other mail client will have this problem.
-
If the "Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=" line in a message is word-wrapped then all the Outlook and OE versions I have so far seen will not be able to decode the message - even though they themselves will word-wrap this line in the messages they send.
All the *nix mail clients I have used are robust enough to ignore these errors. Its the MS clients that can't cope with the errors caused by MS clients.Unicode.org has charts of the entire Unicode codespace (yes, including Chinese) in both PDF and HTML formats. There's also an ISO/IEC standard that mirrors the Unicode standard. Heck, the Unicode book (over 1,000 pages) is only $50, less than the cost of many college textbooks half the size.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I use xfig all the time for flowcharts and dataflow graphs. It's a little weird at first because it takes some experimentation to learn what does what, but it's easy and fast once you're comfortable with it.
PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Systems, but Aladdin Enterprises (not the StuffIt maker) has produced a portable GPL'd PostScript interpreter and tools called the GhostScript package. It even includes the GhostView PDF viewer for those platforms that have X11 servers.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Chris' article seems to suggest that a TNEF-encoded message, when viewed with a non-TNEF-aware mail program, will be unreadable. well, that may be true for a heavily formatted message that includes things like tables, different font styles, and, god forbid, voting boxes, but those are things that are rather difficult to produce using plain text anyway. personally i never send anything other than plain text, so if i wanted to do something complicated, i would put it format that could handle complicated things (word, ps, html, etc) and just attach it to a plaintext message or stick it on the web and mail a url. for simple "non-formatted" messages, however, this line from the KB article clarifies that there wont be any problems:
A TNEF-encoded message contains a plain text version of the message, and a binary attachment that "packages" various other parts of the original message.
what exactly is the problem with that? i find it irritating when people send me simple messages formatted with html since i then have to mentally read around it. so it would seem to me that its actually more convenient for someone like me to read a simple message because all the formatting info is stored in an attachment rather than scattered among the text itself.
so id like to know, exactly how does this mean that MS is trying to "supplant ASCII"? i think this article is just going to appeal to people looking for yet another way to bash MS. i mean, MS has done lots of things that warrent bashing, but this is not one of them IMO.
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
Original post is Message-ID {x67lk4bzvw.fsf@kharendaen.krall.org} from 30 Oct 1999 - and may still be on Dejanews.
And if the PHB doesn't get it after that, I follow Paul Tomblin's advice (also found in alt.sysadmin.recovery):It's rather nice that the recipients get the message in plain text, but what you forgot to mention here is that certain attachments are also embedded in the winmail.dat so they're not readable without OL2000.
0x or or snor perron?!
You won't be able to spell "Windows" in your reduced alphabet either. OTOH, I have created an 18-letter alphabet that can be used to write the English language. (Mail me if you want to know more.)
The letters are a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I hate Micro$haft as much as the next guy but the did follow the standard on this one.
--- This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine. ---
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
That's exactly his point. If Outlook does something that needs Exchange, you can't complain about it not working if you're using TradeServer.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Subject says it. How long before someone figures out a virus that exploits some aspect of TNEF that MS didn't think anyone would figure out?
>There are instructions and readmes with this stuff. Try them some time, they really help and you might learn something.
BZZZT! Try again.
I know enough to keep every microsquish product *far* away from anything I care about, like my mail queue, and my mail servers.
The problem with MicroSquish promulgating yet another proprietary binary format (just like those motherfucking MS Word documents), is that cretins who think that things like dancing paperclips are cool are going to try to send me mail, and then bitch when I don't take it. I'm not going to cave to the pressure to use Outlook, but the pressure still pisses me off.
I'll be damned before I'll ever use a mail client from a company that not only put a turning-complete interpreter in the mail client, but also gave its execution environment full access to the file system and the outgoing mail queue.
The mail format issue is very minor compared to the utter incompetence they've shown in the field of data security.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Of course the first thing that I configured in Outlook after installation was sending messages in plaintext only.
However I have since stopped using Outlook after a friend sent me a couple of emails with an embedded Javascript virus (the Kak virus -- heard of it anyone?). Now I use ssh to login to my Unix box and use fetchmail and pine!
I'm on the "Youth Council" of my church, and the secretary uses Outlook. Aware that not all people have Microsoft Office, she asked us in what format we'd prefer to receive meeting notes and such. As we all have software to view both MSWord and MSExcel files, and those are the programs she uses, it wasn't that tough a decision.
After finally figuring out why I recieved "application/ms-tnef" (which I could not decipher) instead of "app../msword", and then trying to explain that she was attaching files "the wrong way", I now recieve the notes in plain ascii (which is not a preferable format).
The natural reaction for a lot of people is to stay away from all those troublesome programs which require the sender to use special settings, and stick with good ol' Outlook, cause you know it works.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Freedom: "I won't!"