Slashdot Mirror
Borking Outlook Express
Johannes writes: "Swedish Gnuheter has a story on Nick Moffitt arranging with his X-headers in way that makes it impossible to read his email with Microsoft WebTV or Outlook Express. Moffitt states: 'The folks using Outlook Express have locked themselves into a
limited subset of the information that can flow over the Internet, and
are blaming me personally for not limiting my transmissions to that
outlook-centric subset.'
See also original email (in English). Immoral? Or just right?" Looks like Moffit's "Who, me?" attitude is tongue in cheek, but the creative header changes here are hilarious.
it seems to me somebody is just trying to be a jackass.
...is to disclude them as much as possible!
If he were serious (which he doesn't appear to be), then I'd say its waaay to risky for the linux community. Shutting out everyone is one of the first ways to fail in bringing Linux into the mainstream...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
But not that profound. Does it rate to be an article? Or is it a subtle trick to drive up page hits by trolling for anti-microsoft flames?
Blar.
Many people have somehow drawn the premature conclusion that
the reason I do this is because of some sort of ideological zealotry.
What I do with my e-mails was certainly informed by my technical
experience with free software, but it is not done out of a desire to
change anyone.
Ok, so he says that he is NOT doing it to change what mailer people use (hence "chang[ing] anyone") But then...
There are two ways, actually, that one can meet the
crackmonkey mailing list dress code. One is to simply use Free
Software, and not use a mailer that requires you to accept a license
that makes you promise not to share with your friends. Another is to
continue to use your Windows-based mailer, but hack the headers of
your message so as not to betray your use of the software.
So forcing users to have to change mailers or hack the existing one does not constitute a "change" anymore?
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
I read the english e-mail and he explains his position (I don't quite understand the hack though) -- rather than blocking totally Microsoft's client, why not make it display "This message would be readable if you used any other email client than Microsoft's. For a list of good clients, some of which are free, visit *url to Download.com or something*."
Same thing for anti-Microsoft mailing lists which disalow Outlook -- kindly inform anything other than Outlook is ok (due to security concerns, etc.) and provide a list of free or not-too-expensive email clients (or again a link to download.com and the like).
Sounds like a much better (and beneficial) use of time.
Thanks,
--
Matt
What was our reaction to MS disabling access to the MSN sites? And this is different exactly how?
This is immature and childish. I hope he comes to his senses and refrains from this kind of petty vendettas.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
RMS is an advocate of asking people to send the document in a non MS format that can be read using open software.
I wonder what he thinks of this?
...is to disclude them as much as possible!
umm... the word is exclude
I don't like your e-mail client, therefore I will manipulate my mail in a manner that makes it impossible to read from that client? Now THAT's mature.
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Unable to select database
I love the audacity of this guy playing god and everything and I could see lots of people here snickering but come on. This is ridiculous, do you honestly expect to win over people to open source software with people pulling this crap?
I have never written any software, webpages, etc... to exclude a subset of my potential users. To me this is incredibly arrogant and downright snobby.
Slashdotting... ever...
You know well you can't make it alone... you can't make it alone.
Hmm, can't seem to duplicate that 'line beginning with "begin" bug'
Instead, the bug is that any message that has the word "begin" at the beginning of a line will be treated as a garbled attachment from that point on.
You mean the 'begin 644' you see at the start of UUencoded messages? Still beaten with the 'view source' button in a message's properties.
Cute. An old holdover from the days before MIME. I thought they started blocking these after Happy99 caused trouble.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
begin Kris Herzog quotation:
> I know I may have said some harsh things on the Tron list, but I'd
> actually like to put all that aside, and personally thank you, as
> you've given me an idea to write an article about the larger
> picture.
>
> Basically, I'm trying to patch together ideas into an article that
> addresses the issues that we all have recently suffered through.
>
> So I'll ask you the same questions that I have of others, and I'd
> appreciate your complete honesty and I will promise that I will NOT
> turn this into a personal attack on you. This was never my
> intention.
Thank you for taking the time to approach me and hear me out.
I'll try to explain my side of things as best I can, here.
> So here we go:
>
> "In the particular example I am using, someone who was exploiting a
> Microsoft Outlook bug by modifying his X-Headers to cause his
> messages to be read as attachments on a mailing list.
As a matter of fact, that's factually incorrect. While it's
true that my headers do have some doozies, they're mostly innocuous.
The worst one probably is the X-WebTV-STationery, which sets my text
to black-on-black for anyone reading with a WebTV. WebTVs are pretty
rare nowadays, but that's easily overridden I'm told. The +++ath bug
only affects your ISP's modems (which are NOT likely to have the
hangup flaw), and it's formatted wrong anyway. That one's more of a
troll.
No, the attachment bug is far more subtle than that. It
doesn't happen based on headers, which are rightfully the section of
an e-mail that mail readers are SUPPOSED to process. Instead, the bug
is that any message that has the word "begin" at the beginning of a
line will be treated as a garbled attachment from that point on.
It's a horrible bug in Outlook, though not one that appears
when an exchange server is used (I can explain why later if you like).
Microsoft has not even acknowledged it as a bug, and apparently recent
versions of Outlook Express have had features REMOVED that once let
the user read the mails anyway. It used to be that the user could
select some sort of "view source" option and view the message
unprocessed. I'm told that this no longer works.
My other two headers are mostly annoyances. I set a Reply-By
that flags my messages as red, and my X-Message-Flag pretends that the
reason they can't read my mail is because of some censorship software
somewhere blocking my message from their eyes.
Even if I were to remove all of the custom headers from my
messages, the simple fact is that my ordinary internet-standard
plain-text messages will still cause this problem. In fact, the
problem was discovered *accidentally*, when Bruce Sterling distributed
a document via e-mail that had the word "begin" appear at the start of
a line in the middle of one of his paragraphs.
> Another example is a mailing list that will reject any mail from
> Windows-based clients.
Yes. It's true that I run a mailing list that does not allow
posting from Windows users. Many people complain about this, but in
my mind I see it as no different than a restaurant or dance hall
having a dress code. It raises the bar for entry to the list, and
ensures that users really want to be there.
There are two ways, actually, that one can meet the
crackmonkey mailing list dress code. One is to simply use Free
Software, and not use a mailer that requires you to accept a license
that makes you promise not to share with your friends. Another is to
continue to use your Windows-based mailer, but hack the headers of
your message so as not to betray your use of the software.
Both methods demonstrate an effort made to post to the list,
as well as a certain degree of technical acumen. Our IRC channel on
slashnet.org has the same sort of dress code: You can use a
non-Windows IRC client, or you can fake your version information.
> This caused problems for many people using Microsoft products, and
> as such, I'm trying to gain perspectives from both the
> Microsoft/Non-Microsoft sides to help describe the situation of
> people who believe in open-source to the point of zealotry, and how
> this can be addressed in the modern 'free society' of the Internet
> and the spirit of "Open Source" in the fact that it supports a
> non-discriminatory feeling and policy. And how some people have
> taken the battle to new level with this kind of behavior."
First of all, I am not a member of the Open Source movement.
They seem only interested in how you can make money from free
software. I am actually (believe it or not) more concerned with the
ethical and moral issues involved in the subjugation of human beings
through restrictive copyright and patent law. I consider myself a
member of the Free Software movement.
Many people have somehow drawn the premature conclusion that
the reason I do this is because of some sort of ideological zealotry.
What I do with my e-mails was certainly informed by my technical
experience with free software, but it is not done out of a desire to
change anyone.
Many people have also mistakenly joined the open source/free
software cause with the anti-microsoft cause. This is foolhardy,
since there are many proprietary programs for GNU/Linux and BSD whose
licenses are just as antisocial as any Windows license. You'll note
that there are a lot of proprietary programs that don't suffer the
flaws of Outlook Express, and they can read my messages just fine.
Don't you think that if I were doing this out of some sort of free
software zealotry, I'd break ALL proprietary mailers?
Also, there is the mistaken impression that I am somehow
discriminating against a whole class of people by writing e-mail that
Outlook refuses to read. I see this as a curious by-product of
American culture, whereby your consumer tastes somehow create a
ready-made cultural identity for you. There are a great many FREELY
AVAILABLE mailers (for Windows, even) that are capable of reading
plain-text messages. You yourself are using Eudora, which is just
such a program!
> "Would you view behavior like this as a detriment to the open source
> movement as a whole?"
[...]
> Honestly, I'd like to hear your side to this, the reasons why you
> feel the way you do, and why you chose to follow the path you have.
I've been using Unix-based mailers for well over a decade.
I've been mailed countless illegible attachments from Windows users
over the past ten years. It's immature of me, I know, but to some
degree turnabout is fair play.
I don't do it to win people over (and yes, it definitely
generates a lot of ill-will for free software among those who
mistakenly associate it with the cause), although I have seen many
people for whom this was the straw that broke the dromedary's back.
If people think my messages are worth reading, then they will (like
the dedicated posters to the crackmonkey mailing list) adjust their
computing environment to accomodate.
The folks using Outlook Express have locked themselves into a
limited subset of the information that can flow over the Internet, and
are blaming me personally for not limiting my transmissions to that
outlook-centric subset. If I were to post all of my messages in
Russian, even fewer people on the Tron list would be able to
understand them; but would there then be an uproar demanding my
removal from the list?
--
INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION
01234567 <- The amazing* indent-o-meter!
^ (*: Indent-o-meter may not actually amaze.)
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
if people were given an identical OSS browser for windows w/o all the bugs, people would use it. i hope....
that I wouldn't see this as a GOOD thing if I used Outlook?
Anyone mirrored this ? Seems the connection is overloaded already 8/
From the site now:
/data/html/gnuheter/mainfile.php on line 17
/data/hacht-ema-el/gnuheter/mainafiler.peea-haich- a-pee on der lingna sevetoon. Der databesa ist "BORK BORK BORK".
Warning: Too many connections in
Unable to select database
Shouldn't that be
"Werniga: Esha tue amany conecctionsa in der
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Is to just send the mail as HTML; as for locking out other users.
And we all know how friendly we react to those mails?
Next time you have to work flat out because of a dos attack ask yourself the same question. Undoubtedly someone is having fun at your expense.
...."because I could ". This sort of thing is damaging and should be discouraged - it is certainly not newsworthy.
Screwing headers like this is not immoral , it isn't right , it's just stupid.
I suppose spam is also acceptable under the same premise
I have the same problem with this as any pro-my-agenda-over-yours approach. If what we are seeking is equality/respect, resorting to the same tactics are unlikely to legitimately modify behavior. It's not through lynchings and beatings that the civil rights movement succeeded. It's not through imperial conquest that India became an independent state.
And it isn't going to be through holier-than-thou rhetoric couched in do-unto-others-as-they-do-unto-you that the open source/free software movements are going to make converts.
So, despite their protestations, it sounds like none of them want to play nicely.
I sure hope that this is a joke on that fellows part.
You want to know why those who are not technologicly gifted are afraid of Linux? Things like this. Silly, immature, and asinine elitism.
To punish people because of the mail client they use is pointless. Does the various versions of Outlook have problems? You bet. You don't like it. Fine. DON'T RUN IT.
Things like this destroy the credibility of the Linux community in general. You want businesses and government to think that the Linux community is serious, focused, and can provide better products. Stupid stunts like this do not give a good impression.
So he wants people to be able to use any kind of software to read email, and is annoyed that he gets documents from Windows users which are unreadable in his email program. So his response is to make sure that other people cannot necessarily read his email messages, and he expects others to adjust their computing environment to read what he sends. How is this any different from his adjusting his own computing environment to read what they send? Or is it that he just believes that the Internet should be mutually unintelligible (I mean, more than it already is)?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
(I'm confused about how bork is the appropriate word in this context.)
This seems pretty juvenile to me. He is forging headers. First he forges a bunch of X-headers which were specifically created as a place for mailers to put proprietary information. Then he forges the Reply-By header, which is part of RFC 1327. (Shame on Microsoft for trying to bring overdue items to the attention of the user!)
His only valid complaint is that apparently Outlook has a bug regarding lines that begin with "begin". Wow, a mail client has a bug.
I'm reminded of mutt's tagline: All mail clients suck.
This reminds me of all the people who think they are so elite because they use linux and want to exclude anyone who think otherwise.
On German Usenet (the de,* hierarchy), this is already common practice. In particular, these pseudo-attachments are used to fool OE users to believe that articles carry some kind of mail worm, without really using attachments (so that the posters keep to the letter of netiquette).
However, it doesn't seem to help much, quite a few people are still using Outlook Express. Other newsreaders such as Gnus display some of these pseudo-attachments as real ones, too. (And I don't think this is a bug, it's just built-in uudecode support.)
And Outlook Express has much more critical bugs, for example in quoted-printable handling together with quoting.
The author claims that viewing the raw source of a message no longer works in OE. I have the latest version (OE 6) and all I have to do is right-click Properties for the message, and click on 'Message Source...' under the Details tab.
Oh, and BTW, I was unable to reproduce the 'begin' bug.
Hands in my pocket
If you don't want people to be able to read your email, fine. But he is limiting a lot of corporations that have Outlook setup as mandatory email type. Big deal, one knucklehead I probably wouldn't want to get email from anyway. Sure it's kinda funny, in your face, MS attitude, but in the long run, he is only hurting himself.
Sent from your iPad.
you should make Klerck your friend. Unreadable posts galore!
I like your sig.
It's not different. Payback's a bitch, now laugh.
/ Per
Assuming anyone really wants to read his messages anyway.
Since we all know the FBI and NSA can decrypt pretty much at will, and they all use Outlook to read our messages, perhaps this is the best way to secure it . Well just muck the header up, theyll be too busy trying to decrypt someting that isnt encrypted to figure it out .
I am of course being my usual smart ass self.
I think someone should be free to send whatever the hell they want HOWEVER they want to their colluges, a bunch of people griping this is bad, bad for linux, what does RMS say, WHO CARES !!!!
This, if it were acually serious, it isnt. WOULD be a matter between the sender and the recipient.
Youre not going to be in or do business long if noone with outlook can read your mail.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
That make people like me stick with windows.
As far as I can tell, he is sending emails that take advantage of an admittedly stupid bug in Outlook (beginning an email with the word 'Begin:' makes it treat the email as an attatchment) and *features* in webTV and outlook's X-header interpretation. The making messages colored and black-on-black font stuff doesn't effect emails sent to your precious mutt. All it seems to be is some puffed up linux using jackass who wants to be an asshole and prove how superior he is.
In my mind, he's a step or two above website defacers. "THIS EMALE HAS BEEN HAX()RD BY NICK MOFFETT FUK U MICR0$LOTHSHAFT"
yeah, way to win some hearts and minds, buddy. Judging someone by the IRC client they use is likewise idiotic. OMG DOOD U USE TEH MIRC LOLZ NICK MOFIT SEZ THAT YOU HAVE TO FAKE UR CTCP VERSION OR WE KB U OK FAGET?
Grow up, Nick. You're just hurting those reasonable people who are trying to make Linux work for the rest of us.
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
This post is in reply to your "exclude microsoft users" post, and the attitude in the article exemplified by this quote: ``It's true that I run a mailing list that does not allow posting from Windows users. Many people complain about this, but in my mind I see it as no different than a restaurant or dance hall having a dress code.''
When did we become such elitists? When users are arbitrarily excluded and abused in the name of "free software," I begin to think that pehaps these same people now toting the supremacy of their operating system might in another time promote the supremacy of their language, nationality, or race.
I see nothing productive in this article or the attitude of its creator. The point of our movement is to produce good, useful software, and to make it available to everyone. The point is not to force them to use it, or to punish those who don't. Where's the freedom in that?
It'd just make the "mainstream" IT community reject linux, and its users, even faster. [They] We've decided, more or less, on an engine for the car, the highway has been built, some people just like to play bumpercars.
Linux is a segway. It claims it will change the world; some people try it out; some people implement it mainstream; Most people just stare and say "uhh." the world just isn't built for it yet.
[To appease the BSD Zealots: Linux is a tricycle, *BSD is a Segway. If you are not a BSD Zealot, ignore this line.]
UNIX is a Freightliner. Good when you need a lot of power and a big footprint to haul a massive amount of.. stuff.
Windows 2000 is an Automatic Transmission Ford. Good enough for the average person, they don't have to worry about it too terribly much. Most mechanics know how to fix them.
Win2K server is a nice, large Dodge. Good for hauling midsize loads. Can still be fixed by most mechanics, if they are adequately skilled. Can be upgraded to Cummins Turbo Dulie model with extended bed if neccesary. Maximum of 32 Wheels.
The analogies are endless.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Some of us at work have to use outlook.
Oh, well I didn't want to read his emails anyway.
If outlook is broken such that it thinks that any line that begins with the word "begin" implies the presense of an attachment, that is not the fault of the person sending the message.
However, to deny access to an irc channel because of the client used IS rather immature. If the client conforms properly to the protocol, there should be no reason to bar it solely based on its origin OS. No more so than denying IE or Netscape based only on the User-Agent setting. If I code properly formed html code that breaks the browser though, thats not my problem.
And its the fault of website designers who create buggy code, be it by hand or by use of a faulty
webpage designer program (frontpage and the like).
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I believe what the original post was referring to is his statement that his mailing list blocks mails from Outlook users, regardless of how readable or standard their mails are, simply based on what client they use (by looking at what it reports in the headers). This is identical to MSN blocking Linux or Mozilla browser users based on HTTP headers. Both can be gotten around by reporting fake headers (in fact he suggests that this is what Outlook users could do if they really wanted to send to his list), but both are nonsensical and wrong.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Everyone seems to be so quick as to deride his methods as immature. I missed the part where he asked your opinion though? It's a guy, and his list, and if you don't like it, you can start your own list I suppose.
MS's access restriction seemed to be Microsoft's testing just how far it could go with it's power - how many non-IE users will complain if we do this?
This guy's action seems to be his attempt to fight back, and educate. Do you use Outlook? if not, how many illegible attachments and other garbage have you gotten from people who _do_? I'd consider this to be revenge/payback to the Outlook-using world, and not foolish at all - people need to see what is wrong with Outlook and this helps point it out - anyone on this list will probably be technical enough to get why he's doing this anyway, and be understanding (it's a bug in Outlook, after all...)
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Whatever you think of his politics I love the idea of a snooty doorman looking at the M$ users and making them continue to stand in line outside the club. ;)
It raises the bar for entry to the list, and ensures that users really want to be there. There are two ways, actually, that one can meet the crackmonkey mailing list dress code. One is to simply use Free Software[] Another is to continue to use your Windows-based mailer, but hack the headers of your message so as not to betray your use of the software.[] Both methods demonstrate an effort made to post to the list, as well as a certain degree of technical acumen.
I hate to say it but this probably works wonders. I remember when alt.hackers instituted a policy in which it was listed as a "moderated" newsgroup but there was no moderator. So any submitted stories were simply mailed into the ether.
You had to edit your header so that you 'approved' your own post. Yes, it was trivial but a quick comparison between that group and 'alt.2600' proved that even that low a bar worked wonders for the level of content.
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
Which is pretty easy to do. Just add to your headers:
X-Message-Flag: This message would be readable if you used any other email client than Microsoft's. For a list of good clients, some of which are free, visit *url to Download.com or something*.
morcego
Good point
If 'From' or 'Reply-To' contains 'nick@zork.net'
: reject
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Only on Slashdot would so many people applaud this story.
If Microsoft employees sent out emails with headers that made them unviewable in Eudora or other email programs, people on here would be throwing a fit.
I use Eudora and hate Outlook (have to use Windows here...), and I have bundles of idiot coworkers that happily click on virus emails here and at home... but the hypocrisy here is ridiculous. Were the situation reversed we would be crying for another lawsuit against M$.... how is this different?
Mark
><
XBOX
Who's applauding? It's funny, but yeah, it's childish, and the guy knows it, and says so. Nobody's applauding this guy, that I know of...we chuckle at his stance, and move on. Where's the hypocrisy?
:)
I get the feeling you'd answer that, but you're too damn chicken to post under your own name, AC. So never mind, then.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
AnalOrgyBoy would be more appropriate.
Anyway, the time will come when I'm the one to post results. I'll use Gnumeric, I think. I have been toying with the idea of actually posting a Gnumeric XML file to the list... Revenge!!! ;-)
Well, I'm not going to do it just for the revenge. It has to be illustrating some point.
This got me thinking: Since Gnumeric's native file format is based on XML, it should be possible to have it sensibly parsed and displayed in a browser that does support XML, including IE, given....?
OK, so this is the question: What would it take for people to get a readable table on their browser, straight from a Gnumeric XML file?
If this would work, it would illustrate a major point: How much more flexible these products are. Those who have experienced all M$ lock-ins and unreadable documents can suddenly access a document in a format they've never heard of.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
But somebody does the same to Outlook Express users with e-mail headers, they are applauded.
Applauded? Most of the posts I've seen so far have suggested that generating mail that outlook can't read is _BAD_ idea. Most people don't like it, except a few who (almost jokingly) feel like they want to exclude the MS crowd.
Yup - you guessed it. *click*
I also can't read L337. It's exclusionary speech, meant to be read only by other members of the clique.
Free Software is a philosophy. Part of that philosophy is to share with as many people as possible. It's not a stick to beat people with, or something for the privileged techno-elite.
Go ahead - keep Outlook users from reading your mail. Write in L337 if you want and keep people over the age of 17 from reading your mail. Heck, write in Swedish! Do you suppose my desire to read your deathless prose will make me learn Swedish?
Yup, you guessed it. *click*
Another lumpen-proletarian
Excellent -- I'll be sure to add that to my headers (well when I find an appropriate link of course ;)).
Thanks,
--
Matt
I must say that it is very irritating how non-compliant Outlook and Outlook Express have been (they may be better now). I gpg-sign my email messages, and the email is sent in multipart/MIME, with the signature having its own part. So far, everyone I know who uses Outlook/OE say that the message is blank with "some unreadable attachments". I find this horribly annoying.
I'm done bitching for the day, now. I promise.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The funniest part is:
"Free Software" ONLY IF you are using free software also!
Isn't it silly? Its like saying "you can't have a taste of this burger unless you have a burger with everyone of your meals!"
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
Yup - this is exactly why my personal site features "IE-Free Sundays".
Come in on Sunday and you get redirected to a (polite) rant about how the internet should be platform-agnostic.
It won't stop anyone with much browser savy, but those aren't the people that need to be enlightened.
Ok, who is this going to hurt more, Nick or the person he sends the mail too?
I mean, why would you want to basically block your own emails from getting to the person your'e sending them to. You obviously want to tell them something if you're sending them the mail. Why make it so they can't see the mail you're sending and probably have them put you in the "asshole" filter so they'll never see any of your other messages even after you fix your headers back to "normal"?
Don't call my OS a stupid-looking scooter.
Windows 2000 is an Automatic Transmission Ford. Good enough for the average person, they don't have to worry about it too terribly much. Most mechanics know how to fix them.
I've worked on Fords. That's exactly why I'm a Chevrolet man. And I agree: W2K is just as easy to fix and keep running as my girlfriend's 1991 Taurus POS or the 1996 Crown Vic Interceptor I drive at work.
We really need the Caprice of operating systems. Fast as hell, stable in the turns, survives crashes and protects the occupants, and plenty of room to haul stuff around.
"When did we become such elitists?"
Uhm - the guy who is doing this is a member of the Free software camp, i.e. an RMS follower. I don't remember if RMS believes in "forcing the issue" but I have to agree that it is detrimental to ALL computer users, let alone to users of proprietary software.
To be honest - I think it's a childish behavior.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Why should I change? He's the one that sucks!
It seems that he is deliberatly excluding/breaking other people's clients and thus lowering himself to microsoft's dirty level
Would that make Mac OS the Delorian of Operating systems?
;)
With OS X being the back to the future car that can time travel and fly
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
He doesnt want to change what people use, if you are using outlook express, he *doesnt care* that you cant read them...
If you happen to be using something else you can read them. Hes not trying to get people to change, just exclude outlook express users, these are 2 different points
Right on, slashdot. ;)
Exact immediate punishment: make him your foe.
I have to come to defense of Outlook Express. (God help me...).
If you're not familiar with the two Outlook products, here's an overview: Normal "Outlook" is the crappy Microsoft Office-integrated, do-it-all, unsecure, scheduling, Exchange-client, mail reader and more and Outlook Express is simply the POP/IMAP that comes with IE. The latter is a great mail client.
I don't use Internet Explorer anymore - I've been using Mozilla since 9.5 (a few months now) and I love it. But I can't use the Mozilla mail client yet, it's just not mature enough. OE is simple to use, fast, manages the 10,000 emails I have in folders without problems, doesn't make me manage each email account separately (though I could if I wanted), decent filtering, higher-security, etc. Whoever wrote this app at Microsoft had a clue as it's really well done. There's not much wrong with it, except, I guess, whatever this guy is ranting about and the fact that it's a Microsoft product.
The last bit does bother me as I'm slowly weaning myself from M$ products. I have TRIED many other email programs (for Windows) and not been satisfied at all. The Bat!, Eudora, Mozilla, Opera's Email bit and others that have come and gone from my system. Until they're more like OE, I'm not switching...
I'm really pulling for the Mozilla team and gave my feedback to some of the Mail guys during the Bug Week or whatever it's called. But I'm not a C++ programmer (and even if I was, I'm not installing Microsoft Visual C++ to develop with Mozilla...) so I just have to wait until it gets mature enough for daily use.
One good thing though is that the Mozilla importer is great for pulling in my emails from OE already. So when the UI is up to snuff, it'll be a snap to switch over. (And then I can seriously consider switching over to Linux full-time also...)
That's it.
-Russ
Me
A lot of the posts here are angry at Nick Moffitt for doing what he does. But I side with him:
If you wan't to be part of something he does, you have to play by his rules. I can't see anything wrong with that. If you wan't to use Outlook you have to sign an agreeement, even if you link with GPL code you have to "play by the rules"...
Evolution will decide what good/harm he does, and there's nothing you can (or should) do about it, except act according to your beliefs.
Let nature take it's course.
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
While I'm at it, why do most Windows users get in such a huff when asked to send a file in a more readily readable format? For expample, where I work, we get graphic files in all kinds of formats and people will get snippy with us that we don't use MS Publisher (um...sorry, we use a real desktop publishing program). How is a wrong assumption on their part the reciepient's fault?
-sk
Please give more info on this bug - i tried sending mail to myself, consisting of two paragrpahs of text separated by the word "begin" on a line by itself. It rendered just fine. There was no attachment bogosity
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
I'm fucking sick of idiots using Outlook Express sending me Word documents and HTML mail and god-knows what other bollocks that means their e-mails are unreadable. Now it's time they got a taste of their own medicine.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but no combination of "begin" or "begin:" or "begin." or "BEGIN DAMNIT" at the beginning of any line (or by itself on a line) causes any sort of problem for me in outlook. Was this fixed already?
Anyhow, we're all having a big laugh about this on IRC right now.
Jordan Bettis
First of all he is not being a petulant child. He points out a perfectly valid way of making a PLAINTEXT email message illegigible to Outlook users: start a line with the word begin. I would be pretty miffed if the provider of my mail client of choice has made decisions that dictate the manner in which I compose the body of an email. I think most rational Windows users would regard this "innovative" feature to be a flagrant abuse of power on the part of my email client vendor. The other tricks he plays are less insightful but bring to light a common complaint of non-Microsoft software vendors: Microsoft blatantly disregards many standards an hijacks others for personal gain. The second point, exclusion of Outlook clients from his mailing list is also not without precedent. If I wish to create a locale where like minded people can gather I will definitely put up some simple barriers to entry for people who cannot share my opinions. In this case, he has made some decisions about how email clients should work and he only wishes to share his list with those with similar points of view. Since it is his list and not a general public utility it is his right.
was of a recent Ask Slashdot article that talks about the unnecessary HTML formatting in Windows mailers. The problems are that they force you to reply in HTML, and include HTML headers that are impossible to not include in replies. There is nothing like having to spend time reformatting a whole email discussion just because some Windows mailer HTMLized the whole thing. This guy has the right idea; Let's just not include MS mailers if they are not going to follow the standard and make everything diffcult. MS tries to reinvent the wheel too much
Say we all started doing this, would it have any effect? Probably not.
Your average Outlook user is the same person who just accepts that they have to reboot their computer 3 times/day and has never quite figured out that that "Windows Update" link on their start menu does. Basically, I see 2 scenarios:
1. User tries to open email, it doesn't work. User thinks "oh well, maybe outlook's not feeling well, I'll try again later" and keeps going... probably forgetting about the email altogether
2. User tries email, it doesn't work. User tries again later, still doesn't work. User contacts sender and gets pissed off when sender says "yeah, I rigged it so you couldn't open my message with that crappy mail program. I'm so 1337."
I mean sure it's fun to screw with exclusive MS users every once in a while but this just makes the sender look like a little brat...
Actuaries - making accountants look interesting since 1949
Now you're acting just like Microsoft.
Why in the world would anybody not want 99% of the people they send/receive emails to/from to be able to read them?? You're only hurting yourself, I'm sure Microsoft isn't quivering at all because of this.
According to this guys' email, his server limits IRC clients that are windows based. This doesn't seem like it would be harming Microsoft, but instead hurting mIRC and pirch and other similar windows clients.
This guy seems like he just needs to take the stick out of his ass and realize that nobody gives a crap about this stupid limiting function.
My $0.02
And you're a Pinto. Ugly as hell, gutless, and dangerously incompetant.
Gaah!
For several years now, I have received the occasional e-mail about how I should never write e-mail in HTML, but stick to plaintext. This has usually been followed by how Microsoft doesn't care about standards (I use an MS client), raah raah raah, and the key argument is that everybody should always be able to read your information. To me, that argument is about equivalent to "nobody on the highway is allowed to drive faster than the slowest car". If we enforced people to be compliant with all standards, we'd effectively kill progress. Even though we may not like the current trend of progress, there is still always change going on.
Anyway, here we have the exact same thing, only lockout on purpose rather than implicitly by upgraded technology, targeted against a specific client. This guy is saying outright that "Sorry if you can't read my e-mail, here are a bunch of alternatives", just like I use to do when people complain they can't read HTML.
The chief difference is that I don't send HTML mail out of malice, I do it because I think it adds value to the mail (I can format for readability more than I can in 76-column ASCII). This guy croaks certain clients because he doesn't like the clients, or rather, their maker. He's giving people trouble on purpose, and boasts about it.
That is just amazingly stupid.
Crystal Falcon
There are only two things infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not so sure about the universe. --Albert Einstein
X-Message: This could be an Outlook virus! Are you sure you want to continue using Outlook?
Wish I could take credit for it... A person who receives an email with that in the header will have a red flag displayed next to the item in the list of emails and the message itself will display at the top of the email display when the message is read.
There's more to it than this.
Intent is very different indeed.
This is the fundamental issue that's hurting the perception of Linux. The die-hard Linux supporters, a.k.a. the "Winblows Sux" crowd, are doing a very, very good job of convincing the rest of the world that Linux is a toy that's more trouble than it's worth. I've talked to many business people who have had little exposure to the Linux culture aside from a few forays into online resources like /., usenet, and some Linux-oriented help sites, and they are not favorably impressed.
That's why I gave up pushing Linux a long time ago. It's easier for me and for my clients to stick with the best Windows solution for desktops, which is still, IMO, Win2k. That avoids the hassles of trying to overcome their political bias against significant change. Getting them to upgrade Win 95 and 98 systems to Win2k is tough enough, but they like the result (read: stability), they don't have to pay for massive retraining to convert users over to a new OS and set of apps, and everyone goes home happy.
A war of incompatible email formats with Microsoft is one that can only be lost, not to mention being pointless. Microsoft has much heavier artillery in this war. For example, Outlook's dreaded "winmail.dat."
When I receive winmail.dat emails that I cannot read in my mailreader, I politely ask for it to be resent in a format that can be read by all. This is the only way I can survive in my job with a non-Microsoft mailreader. The same comment applies to most people whose job requires them to interact with outside emails. I have no intention of being cowed into using Outlook, but I would not be able to communicate with my customers or many of my friends if I sent email that couldn't be read by Outlook. It's hard for me to see any purpose that would be served by this suggestion (other than to drive the world away from non-Microsoft mailers).
I've been looking for a decent email client for windows (not for me, but for my coworkers). I wish I could get something along the lines of Kmail, but so far I can't find any. Eudora is way too bloated for my liking, and most of the others expire. I want someting that's easy to use (nice big "check mail" button, decent address book, not too cluttered). I'm sorry to say that outlook express looks to be my best option so far. Can someone show me (or them, like I said before I use Kmail) the light?
But somebody does the same to Outlook Express users with e-mail headers, they are applauded.
Hypocrites.
Funny, I haven't seen one message applauding this stupid idea. Maybe I haven't been searching as hard as you for hypocrisy.
I see nothing productive in this article or the attitude of its creator. The point of our movement is to produce good, useful software, and to make it available to everyone. The point is not to force them to use it, or to punish those who don't. Where's the freedom in that?
Well spoken. But the bottom line is... it's his choice. If you don't like it, too bad, don't participate. This in essence is what freedom is all about. How free is it if you make him conform to your idea of what is normal? It may feel free to you, but what about to him? I run a restaurant that has a dress code and we also do not allow smoking crack on the premises. My restaurant, my rules. You don't like how it impinges on your freedom... too bad, go somewhere else.
In this particular case, you are free to participate, simply by conforming to his rules. Too much work for you?? Don't understand how to do it?? These are the criteria, deal with it.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Um, I believe the vehicle that has most in common with Windows was formerly produced in East Germany. Called the Trebant, if I remember. Look it up, and tell me if it isn't strikingly similar, in a metaphorical way.
I think your point is valid, though some of the things he does is a bit different. A lot of these things are exploiting bugs in Outlook Express to show the low level of QA that has gone into the product. What MSN did was simply check the string and block out any non-IE browser, not even letting the browsers *try* to render the page, and when that check was bypassed, it was found there was no functional reason for the check.
Of course, one issue I take with his methods (from what little I can tell from them), is that half of the little tricks he pulls are not highlighting bugs in Outlook Express, but using features of Outlook Express in an annoying way. For example, the set text and bgcolor both to black looks more like using a WebTV specific thing to do something you could do to anyone with HTML mail anyway. Also, the reply-by field to make his messages red is along these lines. Highlighting messages that request immediate attention or should have been replied to by then should be highlighted.
The one thing that he does different from feature abuse is the use of the 'begin' bug. That truly highlights a bug in Outlook and that is a valid point. Just like the bug where you can crash anything from NT to XP (except the 9x series) by creating a weird file and doing a type on it in a cmd window....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm going to follow suit...
I'm sick of receiving emails from people I know at my company that use outlook... and they are full of some meta-data syntax for meet scheduling and so forth... the responsibility always seems to be mine to figure out what they contain. Now I can do the same thing back to them!
Sad tho, the net is supposed to be about interoperability. first a fence goes up, then another...
You are a big part of the reason why Linux has had an uphill struggle since the VC cash went away. Open source proponents need to be diplomatic with the rest of the world, not confrontational. Someday you will grow up and realize that you can attract more flies with honey than with a flyswatter.
Um...how many posts do you see here applauding this?
It is sad that when the whole movement started, true hackers believed that access to information should be free and open. Now people who call themselves HACKERS are restricting information access. Future is definately a forgotten past. What started as an open movement now has elements that want to close it down.
There are three stages of microsoft bashing: funny, serious, and retarded. This guy should join the special olympics.
I don't get it, what mailing list is he running that is so important that we have to give a shit?
no this is an example of microsoft doing the exact same thing again as they did w/ msn.com
the problem is not with the email, but rather outlook express failing to comply with standards. once again microsoft has set their own rules of the internet. yes it's an exploit, but maybe if enough of these incidents happen, microsoft might actually be pressured into providing a 'less' buggy version of OE, maybe even one that lets you turn off all the extra virus provoking 'features'.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
When did we become such elitists?
This is Slashdot. Just about every post involves elitism, from the constant MS bashing, to the contempt towards the rest of the population for not subscribing to whatever extreme ideologies the posters do, to the reaction towards the most minor technical mistake with pages upon pages of scorn. Personally I find this amusing, though not out of extreme hatred of MS.
Just to let you know. Linux is a tank. Didn't you read the "In The Beginning was the Command Line"?
I am talking about MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES.
The above is not worth reading.
I recieve a LOT of mail. Much of it is from Windows users.
Those users expect me to be able to read their Word format files without complaint. (Like I am going to pay almost $400 for a word processor for 1-2 documents a week.)
They expect that I read their html formatted mail with bizzare IE-only extensions.
These are the same people who become totally baffled if I send them a ASCII document with Unix line wraps.
At some point you get tired of dealing with people who expect the world to conform to their expectations and platform while making *no* effort to adapt to anything outside of their narrow world-view.
My method of dealing with people who send Word documents is to return the favor by sending them Star Office format. It is amazing how much they complain about it. They expect me to install a very expensive package, but are totally unwilling to install something that costs them next to nothing. ($50 if they buy the boxed version.)
What I find even more interesting are the people who seem to be backing the Outlook user in this "fight". The Outlook bug that is being exploited is quite old. Not only has Microsoft refused to fix it, it appears that they have removed the work-around. (I still do not see why people continue to use Outlook. The only reason that I hear from people is because they need the calendaring support and shared folders. There are other programs that do similar things. They are just being lazy.)
Part of the "PC" movement in this country is the unwillingness (in fact that absolute abhorence) to tell someone when they are being stupid. Error-correction is no longer tolerated because someone's feelings might get hurt. Since when did the most sensitive and stupid gain control of what should or should not be done?
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I have to say, I'd like to find a really good approach for dealing with mailers with built-in prejudicial statements in them.
You know the kind, where you get to see disparaging comments like
as if you are using a deficient MUA when you see such text.I'd really like a 2-3 sentence autoreply text that could bounce some of those MS Word attachments with similar pronouncements about
Most people simply have no idea what standards are, nor the ways or the degree to which they pay for the IT infrastructure that they currently use.Their responses are usually quizzical and predictable, "Uhh, so what does it look like to you when Word launches?" Answer: Word doesn't launch. It requires money to launch. It requires that you buy the whole banana to get Word. (There used to be Ted Rall cartoon years ago that parodied the whole issue during the browser war years "Works best with MS House!"
People so much consider these things like .doc to be standards, that they ought to be made into bona fide standards that are publicly documented, including all the quirks of proper display, instead of just glossing over that they cannot be displayed without paying money to see them, even if its bundled into the cost of your new PC or the Microsoft Enterprise License Agreement for Office, which is probably priced more inelastically than gasoline.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You mean Impala SS (that sweet 260hp V8 model that was killed to make room to produce more SUV's).
This is really no different from the countless web sites with such poorly-written code that users are forced to use IE for the page to display at all. Stop giving yourselves ulcers over something so insignificant in the daily course of life.
-Legion
yet another self-righeous asshole. where do they clone elitarian linux fux0rs like you anyway?
Go sell some coffe mugs or t-shirts, like every well-behaved open-source luser should. at least you won't have to resort to begging.
ummmm philly... Now I'm hungry.
poop
Come on. Get over yourself. Equating OS/software "religious" wars to real-world racism and intolerance is a bit of a stretch. They are completely different issues. I don't hear you crying "elitism" about all the websites out there that are unusable with any browser except IE, or that require Flash.
Actually, I see this kind of strategy as a Good Thing -- it's a good way to raise people's awareness of the general Suckiness of M$ and their products. Broken software, free or propriatary, needs to be rooted out and destroyed.
The dress code analogy is a good one -- it's his list to do with as he pleases. If he wants to exclude M$ users, that is his perogative. For a technical mailing list, it's not that bad an idea at all to force prospective users to have enough clue to have to exersize their craniums a little to be able to join. Just think of how many idiots we could get rid of here on
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
shouldn't it all just be plain text, anyway?
But this is completely aribtrary and misleading! They could read the email if you had sent it properly, but as you in all your infinite wisdom desided that your choice is better then thiers have blocked them out. Going out of your way to annoy someone is never the correct action.
me throwing away all snail mail that is addressed to 'Resident'? If he were to send you something you can't read, toss it....
It'd just make the "mainstream" IT community reject linux, and its users, even faster.
Which will not be as easy. My mail client (mutt) just displays everything with my settings and let me be the judge what to read and what to ignore.
Of course this assumes an RFC2822 enabled user...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Yes, let's compare a little techno-humor (no matter how meanspirited) to racism. Because as we all know, discrimination on the basis of operating system is plain evil and no one can change their operating system the way they can change their race or gender.
Also, Linux users are widely known to dominate the world, and picking on these defenseless Microsoft users is just plain terrible. God help those poor MS Souls in need!
And in closing, let me remind you that Microsoft and its user-base never reverse discriminates against non-MS-users. The benevolent community leaders in Redmond, persecuted as they are by the mainstream, never stoop to such ugly tactics as browser exclusive features or dirty almost-standard protocol tricks. And even though they don't have to, they work overtime to make sure that all non-MS programs and documents work seamlessly with MS applications on the off chance that someone just has to run Windows, or Outlook, or Internet Explorer, or Word, or Excel, or Access, or IIS, or some other program that almost no one uses.
I do not have a signature
"what would Jesus do in my situation?"
"would allah want me to blow up this building?"
Can't you just shut the fuck up? No sane human being actually cares what RMS has to say, or any other sicko who has an allergy against shoes, showers or whatever and washes himself using only a sponge, and shouts at people and shows other signs of mental instability.
BTW download.com now requires you to register before you can download any files, just like fileplanet.com does.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Facts:
k b; en-us;Q260822
The actual exploit he is abusing is described here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
and is triggered by the text:
"begin " at the beginning of a line, followed by some text. Outlook renders from the begin onwards as an attachment, even without a matching "end".
The headers actually do different stuff, as described here:
http://www.rodos.net/outlook/
Now the headers by themselves are of minor amusement, the begin exploit is extremely discourteous on public mailing lists, as for digest members, it destroys the rest of the disgest - ie. it affects the posts of others.
Opinion:
Nick seems to think he's being terribly clever, by putting this "begin " in his attribution, so that his every mail is deliberately disruptive to public mailing lists. The whole thing is just a "look how clever I am" stunt and his actions justifications are purile in the extreme.
Don't condone this behaviour if you object when people send you unreadable html mail, or when script kiddies attack your box "to make you aware of a security problem", or when people take the words "freedom", "open source", and "linux" to support such idiotic, antisocial and deliberately disruptive behaviour.
I read the english e-mail and he explains his position (I don't quite understand the hack though)
The hack is to begin the message body with
begin
Outlook interprets this as starting a uuencoded section, and turns perfectly readable text into gobbly-dy gook.
The other hack is to change the Reply-To: header as Outlook usually does when it marks the messages read. Then he adds a novel X header that seems to imply his email was actually censored somewhere along the way. So, the Outlook user sees gobblydy gook instead of a message bbdy if he sees the message at all, and if he tries to diagnose the problem will be immediately be misled by the novel X header into thinking he was censored. Whereupon he goes to his sysadmin, who will read the email in plain text, and laugh heartily. Or cry.
I was going to say that Outlook is okay for business uses (pine is my home preference.)
But as I was preparing to say so, something (MyParty?) took out the Exchange server and crashed Outlook for me.
Piece of %#$@ing $#&%!
You are still an arrogant ass. The funny thing is you think you're helping the Linux and the free software movement when in fact by purposefully segregating your little world from everyone, you're cutting it off from current-Windows users who might be interested and want to learn more about the free software philosophy.
Considering what a jerk you are, maybe it's best to section yourself away from the rest of humanity. You are the last example a sane person would use of free software. I just hope that the free software movement is unencumbered by the dead weight of your thick skull.
If he really were a Linux advocate then he wouldn't act like a twat by adding the "begin " thing into his posts to mailing lists, because that's just alienating the people you would want to ditch M$ software and switch to Linux.
From what I've seen of his behaviour on the Tron group on Yahoo he's acting like a little kid, pretending to be all innocent and then finally buckling and removing the "begin " from his posts, BUT still having a go at people for using OE.
If people take his behaviour at face value and then label all Linux enthusiasts with the same brush it doesn't look very good on the Linux community...
Trying to get people to be on your side by first pissing them off is certainly not the way to do things.
This has nothing to do with advocacy, monopolies, anti-this or that. Its good clean schlap-stick fun.
My personal X-headers include... /dev/null
X-Apparently-From: mars
X-Complaints-To:
Hmm.
grep -E '^X-[^:]+:' < read-messages| sort -u Should give me some more fodder. Hmm, those Importance and Priority headers might do something entertaining.
Doesn't seem to me that this person is making a statement about MS technology. Rather he is trying to assert his will and dominance on anyone apparently "lucky enough" to correspond to him via email.
This behavior and attitude is tacky, rude, and extremely arrogant.
And I don't even use Outlook Express!
mje0w!!!1!
How free is it if you make him conform to your idea of what is normal?
We aren't "forcing him to conform", we're forcing him to write in a format usable by all (you know, free means free across all boards, including proprietary).
Didn't RMS recently write an article about convincing people to not use Word attachments in email??
Isn't this the OPPOSITE?
Funny how you view things on the other side, isn't it?
If someone sends you a word doc, and you can't read it, its a big issue and everyone is serious.
If someone sends something that only linux users can read, its funny, and lets all shout "hurray!"
Think about it. And if you still think the second point, then you are, in fact, elitest.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I love the opinion based moderation on this post. *grin* It's quite fun to watch.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
To quote the immortal words of Loveline...
Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Caaaaaaaaaaaareeees!
Witty quotes suck.
I've read a few comments here how this is about "playing God" and it's a bad reflection on the Linux community. Funny how this kind of story will only show up on a pro-Linux site like Slashdot... and only here are people complaining (well, maybe the few Windows users who were denied from posting).
And why are Windows users the only ones excluded? Why not exclude Mac users too? Aren't they supposed to be even stupider than Windows users? So block two of my computing platforms if you want, I have more...
I'm requoting myself, but this is a great place to requote.
Its ok to say "Use anything except outlook" when you are on the linux side.
What would you say, if I said use a program that can read Word docs??
Lets use RMS's words in the opposite context, shall we?
Lets face it. "Free" means free in free software AND proprietary software. If it doesn't, then its "free" in a very restrictive manner (which I wouldn't call "free").
If you want everything free, you had better learn this lesson!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
hell I may start doing it everytime I get a doc attachment. I'l hack up the headers for my reply. Sounds fair to me. This is exactly the tactic that MS uses, and while I don't agree that it should become a wide spread process I applaud this guy for the creativity to pull it off.
Let me just add the fact that it is the MS proprietary crap that they're trying to dominate the market with that is causing the problem. I have no sympathy for anyone who can't access content because of non-rfc-compliant software.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
This guy has setup his own community, and has set rules on who can and who can't go there. Uhm.... don't we have immigration laws? Don't sports teams recruit who they want, and ignore the rest?
Is this really any different than me choosing who can and can't come to my house?
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
Forgetting, of course, that many people are locked into using Windows and even Outlook at work and places. I get away as far as using Pegasus, but I've hardly got installing freedom.
First of all, there's nothing "arbitrary": about it, the exclusion is very specific. In addition, those who are excluded are "self-selected" -- it is their choice to be in the excluded group.
I am a Windows user, almost exclusively (I also have a doorstop...er, uh, I mean an out-of-date Mac). I can well imagine reasons why the "crackmonkey" list may wish to have discussions without my participation, or that of any Windows user and that is their right! This has nothing at all to do with racism, discrimination, hate-crime or anything other than the selection criteria of a special-purpose mailing list. You are being hysterical ("insightful") about this.
National CyberCrime Prevention Foundation
I understand the purpose of the ">" is to escape the "From " that separates emails. But I never understood why it was not unescaped upon reading the email.
By the way the problem is so common that the LaTeX manual has an index entry called, "From, line beginning with", and calls the problem "a bit of fossilized stupidity".
Mod this guy down, thats total BS. Just to be sure I just went to download.com and downloaded something. No registration at all.
No, Mac OS X is a new BMW 745i: A technological tour-de-force, but with style changes for the sake of change that have most people scratching their head and wondering "What were they thinking?"
BeOS is a DeLorean*: A product with plenty of promise, undone by the temptations of the man in charge.
*: With apologies to Neal Stephenson. It's not the Batmobile anymore, unless you mean the one Adam West drove. :-)
This sig intentionally left blank.
or commit suicide. thanks.
People, people, calm down. This is a bit crazy. I've seen this 'bug' in newsgroups for a long long time now, it's nothing new and yes, it is silly and childish. However,.....
The biggest arguement i'm seeing here is that if macroshaft started altering the email they were sending we would go balistic. but it's not, it's just one guy. it's not like there is some huge conspiracy of people out there blocking users of outlook express from seeing the internet. it's one guy exploiting a bug in OE that makes it so some people can't read his posts (and you can fix it by viewing the full header). maybe if some large corporatation had a browser that millions of people used and then thousands of web sites started using tags that were only able to be displayed in that companies browser we would have reason to be angry. oh, wait.....
i can't even believe this made the front page, must be a slow day.
you're all figments of my deranged imagination
The point is not to force them to use it, or to punish those who don't. Where's the freedom in that?
Ironically, this is perhaps the same attitude that their arch nemesis Microsoft takes in how it deals with their customers...
Feh. Liberalism is becoming just as bad as fascism.
mje0w!!!1!
After all, there are a lot of websites out there that only work with IE/Windows. If someone think they can afford to ditch all windows users, feel free to do so...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...is paved with good intentions.
;-)
I don't send HTML mail out of malice, I do it because I think it adds value
Have a nice trip
-- Alastair
Start posting messages with pr0n attachments that cannot be viewed in Outlook Express. OE's market share will collapse.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I've seen what you are talking about. It only happens on some files, and I have always been able to get past it by simply cancelling the registration.
whatever. i already -have- conformed, i have a whole friggin' machine that exists just to read word attatchments and the like.
i think this is perfectly fair for those of us that have to spend several moments moving and/or decoding a mime attatchment in some awful MS format to realize they just got a 2 meg email detailing the company picnic particulars.
semantics are everything!
_we_??
/. in the same boat. One guy, a Free Software advocate, shows elitist behaviour (and hence probably doesn't read /. :-) and you surmise that _we_ are elitists? Just because some of us also support Free Software, or because some of us hate Micro$oft?
That guy is an elitist.
Stop lumping everyone who reads
Get over yourself.
K.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
To workaround this problem:
That's pretty funny.
Not really. MSN.com forbid people who were following standards. This method is forbidding people who use software that _violates_ standards. Standards are a necessity in the computer world if you want more than one company supplying tools (a bit of exaggeration, maybe, but the point is valid.) The only way a company will feel the need to obey standards is if it hurts them not to.
The difference is that MSN blocked completely standard compliant browsers when they identified themselves as Mozilla or Opera and not Internet Explorer.
He only uses the standards as layed out in an RFC.
Although of course the way something is described in an RFC is a) often not enough to be able to implement something. b) one should not stretch the RFC information to much.
I think I understand your point, but I think given all the security holes, downtime caused by them, and overall bad vibes caused by Outlook it is not an unreasonable request.
Word is quite another thing since, for the most part, their holes have not caused near as many problems as Outlook and IIS have (several very reputable entities have stated 'Do not use IIS until it stops sucking'). Plus the replacements for Word are not, in general, better or easier to use/obtain.
Thanks,
--
Matt
We should be striving to make our creations compatable with as many technologies and implimentations as possible. Excluding users from a service or offering is step backwards. I've been a linux user for many years so it doesnt cause me any problems, but i'll choose not to use his mailing list just out of principal. And if you dont like the list, then you can choose not to use it either. Its your hardware, you can do what you please with it. Go ahead and make your stuff incompatible with other products, the world will simply ignore you.
Oh boo fucking hoo. The guy made an amusing hack and ahlf the people around here start comparing him to hitler.
I guess you're going to boycott his mailing list and I am sure Mr. Moffitt is going to loose sleep over it.
And, one more point, the goal of our movement is to have fun messing around with computers. I don't know what "movement" you belong to, but when you stop taking yourself so seriously you should consider joining ours.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
I don't like your operating system and software, therebefore I will only send you MS Word files that can only be read using MS Word XP in MS Windows XP.
I don't care wether you have Windows 95 or not, buy/steal Windows XP.
I don't care that you don't have MS Office, everybody have it so pay $$$ to Microsoft to get a copy or download a crack.
hell I may start doing it everytime I get a doc attachment. I'l hack up the headers for my reply. Sounds fair to me.
Yep. That's the best way to get people to use linux. Use MS tactics. Start a fight.
Linux is making its way into the industry through free software. By your tactic, you'll make the 'free' go away. Now it'll be 'linux only'. Wanna guess what will happen?
You'll be one of the few that will use linux.
If you don't care, then I call you an Elitest.
If you are, in fact, elitest, we don't want you to use Linux. You destroy everything it stands for.
Here is a URL to a suitable category: http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10063.html?ta g=dir
Thanks,
--
Matt
Well, i tend not to declare the homosexual thing. The second part is just as stereotypical as the views of windows are on slashdot. And the name i took from the Rush Song Analog Kid - but since it was taken on IRC, i changed it to boy.
And i've heard all the jokes.
I'm assuming your name is from the occasional Mr. Obvious skit on bob & tom?
U R SO L4ME 4 UZING WINDOZE, LINUS RULEZZZZZ!!!
H4XORZ 4EVER!!!
HEHHEHEHHEHHHEEE.
He probably doesn't have a lot of friends.
Come in on Sunday and you get redirected to a (polite) rant about how the internet should be platform-agnostic.
...almost...
I find your blatant hypocracy humorous. Just re-read what you wrote. Allow me to simplify:
I log in with IE on sunday, and read:
The internet should allow everything, and you should not be restricted to just one thing. Because you use a specific browser, I'm not going to let you in!
I almost feel sorry for you!
...which program to read Word docs? Microsoft Word 4, 95, 97, 2000? I have Word on my computer, and it won't read the "new" Word formats. Although I have some other programs that read Word documents just fine. On the other hand, most of Microsoft's HTML tools can't make HTML that reads well in anything except Explorer...
I get crappy, munged-up email from Outlook users every single day, often with one or another worm or virus as a payload. Anything that encourages Windows users to get a real email/news program is a good thing.
NOW I remember where I first heard the name Moffett, Airwolf! ;)
Moffett's the guy in the first episode who steals Airwolf & kills Stringfellow Hawke's girl, but thankfully gets killed by Hawke (yay!
Bit of an asshole really.
Oh and returns in a later episode as a ghost in Airwolf who uses the helicoptor too kill innocent people (again).
Whoever wrote this app at Microsoft had a clue.
Microsoft didn't write it. They bought it.
Only in later versions did they add the security holes (ActiveX controls, executable .HTA/.HTM, ignored Content-Disposition header). The original was quite secure. Ok maybe *one* buffer overflow problem came from the original code, but it is nothing like the bullet-ridden security bugfest it is now.
I hate elitism and I dont like how this guy is doing it but everyones free to be elite if they like. Somehow I think more would be gained by trying to educate outlook users on the bugs though. But then again there are people out there who dont want to understand there computer anymore than the typical person wants to understand his vcr. They just dont care. Just like I don't care what goes in a hot dog. It tastes good thats enough for me.
Perhaps something else along the same lines but not quite so annoying would be acceptable though. Like html formating your email with the code tag and then putting the html for the email in the code tag. This way outlook displays the same crap we have to see everytime someone sends us an html email! They can still read the msg but its annoying for them just like it is for us. I wouldn't do this all the time but it'd a good once a month thing just to remind all those outlook users dome of us hate html. Even more interesting though is simply using a font tag with a class attribute to set the font to I dunno...4 or 5 pixels! They'd have to squint really hard if they used outlook but to everyone else it would be one tag. Humor like this would serve as a more polite way of poking people about html email but still let them read the page.
Jartan
Normally I wouldn't give an AC any credence, but I just have to point this out: its "incompetent".
Ignorance is a dangerous thing. According to several certification boards, and a few national corporations i've worked for, i'm quite competent. Thank you. Buhbye.
how do you know the poster wasn't just trolling and you're someone who doesn't have a clue?
And the people who need to be enlightened are by being blocked from the site on Sunday? Wow. That's a really enlightened website.
>Its ok to say "Use anything except outlook" when
>you are on the linux side.
>
>What would you say, if I said use a program that
>can read Word docs [slashdot.org]??
The point about these anti-Outlook headers is that they're still perfectly conformant with RFCs 821, 822, et al. Any conformant mail-reader can read these messages just fine.
But there is no RFC for Word .doc format. In either case, the underlying message is "use a mail client that conforms to open standards (the RFCs)."
When Microsoft releases an RFC for .doc format, then this position will be hypocritical. But until then, it's perfectly consistent. (Alternatively, they could make Outlook obey the RFCs... then Mr. Moffitt's header hacks won't bother it any more.)
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
if these are not a standard (because 100% of computer users do not use them), then there is no such thing as a standard.
TCP/IP is a standard. 100% of internet users use it.
SMTP is a standard. 100% of internet email users use it.
HTTP is a standard 100% of those who browse the web use it.
Office docs are a standard for *Windows* users maybe, but they are the ones who need to realize there are computers that don't run MS software. In just them same way I don't send HTML enabled email to someone unless I am sure they are using a client that supports it, I expect not to be sent Office docs unless someone knows that I have software that supports it. Simple netiquette.
I know of Ubizen, a Belgian security firm, that filters out all of the Outlook posts from its incoming mail for al of its users. They simply send the message back, including an explanation to the sender that it isn't quite safe to use Outlook and that they're only allowing mail from other mail-clients. Considering this comes from a renown security firm, a lot of people take this advise very seriously. Of course, this isn't quite the same thing but it still is an interesting way to look at the 'Outlook Problem'.
Damn... Someone give this poor guy a job because he apparently nothing better to do than modify his e-mail headers and whine like a little girl.
...that he's not an AOL user.
Thank you for observing all safety precautions.
anyone who's ever used mutt to send email (and evolution i've recently found out) and has sent email to outlook express users has come across this.
outlook express cannot handle RFC compliant MIME messages, and instead displays the text as attachments.
Elitist doesn't bother me, but regardless. They are the ones who aren't RFC compliant not me.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I see a lot of comments to the effect of: "How is this any different from Windows users shutting out others with Word Docs/Windows only Apps/IE only sites/etc.?"
.DOC files.
First off, two wrongs do not make a right. If you think it is wrong to be shut out because you don't use Windows, then it is certainly hypocritical to turn around and do the same thing back.
Secondly, this is even worse than those aforementioned cases because it is fully intentional. *Most* of the time non-MS clients are not shut out intentionally, but simply because of uninformed users or capabilities lacking in the software. For example, I think most people would not have a problem sending docs in RTF if they didn't use any special features of Word and they knew some people couldn't read
In this case, it is the worst of all possible scenarios: hypocritical, intentional, by a user that knows better, and not due to any lacking capabilities in the software. Deliberately targeting bugs when it is easily avoidable is no better than being a script kiddy.
This guy should get bent.
Outlook email isn't that incomprehensible of a format. Why the hell can't every e-mail reader understand it?
And don't tell me "But it doesn't go along with standards..." because that doesn't help the problem. Fixing the problem would fix the problem, and it wouldn't be that hard. I've looked out how Outlook encodes e-mails with attachments/html emails and it isn't all that special or difficult to read.
Somehow we've got to avoid the philosophy of "Why doesn't everyone do it right?" and go to "We'll make ours work right, but it'll still work with yours".
It's a good thing for MS that these problems get whined about so much.
-Dave Campbell
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
As many have already mentioned, this most likely only hurts the "Free Software" cause. Many have mentioned that it simply turns current Windows users away from ever wanting to even be part of the various "Free Software" or "Open Source" or "Anti-Microsoft" or whatever "community" you want to mention. Sure, there are distinctions between the different movements, but for the vast majority of Windows users, "Free Software" means "Open Source" and so on. Some people believe MS products to be superior. Is this kind of tactic going to convince them otherwise? (Answer: no.) Besides, many are MS users because their boss tells them to be.
However, the most unfortunate side effect here is on people in my situation. I tend to use both proprietary and free software. I believe free software has many good principles driving it. But when I see people acting this way "in the name of free software" it only turns me off to the "free software name." And I'm even an advocate of free software. I work with non-proprietary OSes about 80% of my computing time.
We must remember, though, that this is only one (or a few) voice(s) of the entire community. It's to be expected that there will be the few extremists who wish to prove a point at almost any cost in any way (however silly that way may be). And that goes for either camp (proprietary vs. "free"). It's best to take what they have to say with a grain (or two) of salt and move on with what you believe in personally.
When did we become such elitists?
What? WE? What is this we shit? HE is being an elitist, and I for one can see his point. You do not have to include yourself in this "group" you just invented. Saying "we" in the context you used it is like McDonalds saying "When did we become such elitists?" when they hear that some snobby downtown restaurant was instituting a stiff dress code.
Face it, they guy felt like having some fun and making a point. Get off your own moral high horse where you think everyone can just be nice, get along, and make concessions to a moronic company and its moronic users.
Anyone who learns a lot about something will find out, almost invariably, that the rest of the world doesn't do things the best way. I find myself in this situation a lot, and I often find myself frustrated in how difficult it is to get through to people.
The whole reason I even bother to post to slashdot any more is as an exercise in this kind of argument. (The slashdot crowd is particularly susceptible to this kind of quasi-technical emotional stuff.) Here are some lessons I've learned.
Rule #1 is: Never be a pedantic asshole. Nobody likes one, unless he's already on his side!
Rule #2 is: Entice people to do it the better way by showing them how cool it is.
That's it. Just show people why your thing is better in a non-annoying way. Be excited, not hateful. Most people are very reasonable, and even if they are not convinced, you may have changed their minds slightly and they won't resent you (and your movement) afterwards!
This is immature and childish
He even states that in his mail. But maybe making a point often is. His point is, that outlook only displays a limited subset of mails, and to demonstrate that he tweaked some mails. That was apparently necessary, since seeing is believing (and now Microsoft can't go on saying "But noone would ever do that"), and we know the users of Outlook to be mostly ignorant of theoretical possibilities until one of them happens to actually manifest and destroy their harddisk.
Microsoft gets its hands dirty in undermining and muddying standards, the result is, that a lot of people wonder what to do with that 'word' document, why they get sent web-Pages in their e-mail, or how to avoid being diverted by nazi webservers, that refuse to serve pages to non-microsoft browsers, even if their client could render them perfectly well.
This behaviour of microsoft, adopted by web-masters, businessmen and Windows-users all over the planet, who refuse to let you join their club until you've got Windows+IE+Word installed (and don't even think about it) is widely accepted and good standing business practice. Now someone dares to raise awareness of that fact and it's childish. Maybe Microsoft should do some more lobbying to get it into the DMCA that any e-mail has to be outlook-compliant. Or maybe the folks over in Redmond should have taken it upon them to read some RFCs.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Actually, your analogy isn't really very accurate.
"Use anything except outlook" allows the use of 99% of the email clients out there, disallowing only one.
"use a program that can read word docs" is the opposite, that requires you use one (or one of a handfull) of particular document readers while disallowing the other 99%. A more appropriate statement would be "use any document reader except staroffice". Which would be perfectly reasonable if you felt staroffice had some ridiculous bugs.
The word is "lose"
Thats funny. Now only if ISP's wouldfilter out OutLook E-Mails, At least office documents
Is Outlook Express doing something to the emails that is not covered under whatever spec governs email formatting? Shouldn't it be able to read what he sends? He says that he sometimes gets messages from OE users that are unreadable. Is that because they don't comply with standards, or is it some other reason?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Ah, you mean Trabant! wicked little car...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
"When did we become such elitists?"
This deserves no response.
Farmer Dale sold a mule to Farmer Jim saying that the mule would do whatever he's told. Farmer Jim took the mule home, and went out to work the next morning. Hooked the mule to the plow and yelled, "Hoe mule, hoe."
Mule didn't move. Jim spent half the morning trying to get the mule to plow, but eventually ended up calling Dale. Dale came over, cracked a board across the mules head and yelled, "Hoe." The mule dutifully started pulling the plow.
"I thought you said the mule would do whatever he's told," Jim said, increduously.
"Yep, but you've got to get his attention first."
Old joke, but it applies here. You can't be an elitist unless there is something to be elite at. Most people using Outlook don't even realize that they're using a piece of crap and send trash that others can't use; furthermore, they will refuse to even look at the problem until someone cracks them over the head with something.
From here on out, everything I post to mailing list and newsgroups will begin with:
Virus infected or Microsoft software may be confused by the following message:
begin
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Just like the bug where you can crash anything from NT to XP (except the 9x series) by creating a weird file and doing a type on it in a cmd window....
Could you tell me more about that bug? What is the file supposed to contain?
I don't have OE handy (thank god), but it seems to me:
There is a large level of Goofiness involved in using 'begin ' to make a uuencoded section
Anyone that goofy wouldn't have any qualms about hacking around it in their outgoing text... using some sort of escape sequence.
Bah... I wave my paw at thee!
http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/c srss-backspace-bug.html
It is kinda interesting, a long standing bug in CSRSS causes backspaces in high-level output to be handled so badly that it can bring down csrss and the whole system with it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Your attitude (which is shared by many) is a significant barrier to businesses looking to move towards open source (you'd fare GREAT in my business - clients love being told they're wrong). Businesses know that they can't treat their clients like you treat people, and they think that's their only option if they move to open source.
It isn't. You can win by sending documents in RTF or PDF, and _asking_ them to do the same - and explain yourself. If they don't, then convert the documents and open them in StarOffice and get on with your life.
Also, you can get a free Word viewer - assuming you have access to a MS platform (and since you suggest buying Word as a possibility I assume you have access to one) - but shouldn't StarOffice be able to convert them decently anyways?
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
What would you say, if I said use a program that can read Word docs??
I'd ask which RFC that's specified in so I could verify compliance. Email, unlike Word documents, is a real standard that was written specifically for ease of implementation and interoperability (even between machines with different ideas of character set).
The world welcomes MS to inspect the relevant RFCs and implement a compatable product. MS doesn't seem to have published a description of Word format anywhere.
Word is a proprietary format (not at all standard) that shifts like sand in the desert with no consideration of interoperability or safe interchange of data.
He's not shutting out all Windows email clients. Only Outlook Express.
Poeple not Lookout Express can still read his email, even if they are using Windows.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Outlook internally is one of the most poorly-engineered systems ever created. Its security model is a complete crock of shit that has several times nearly brought down the Internet. Microsoft's "programmers" wrote the attachment parsing code several times, each time being different and broken. (Proof: certain attachments aren't shown to the user because that broken code doesn't properly parse them, but if the user does "File->SaveAttachment" they *can* be saved because the saving code *does* properly parse them.)
You're free to bathe in a sewer if you want, but that doesn't mean people have to let you into their clubs.-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
Just today I got 2 "see the pictures from my party" attachments from a clueless contractor who apparently is using Outlook; something that is actually prohibited by company's software regulations. Excluding Outlook users might even be construed as a security measure. :-p
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
This "attack" is nothing more than starting a line with the word
begin. Nothing more.
As the guy pointed out in his comments, they discovered it because someone on a mailing list happened to
begin a line with the magic word and *bam* every Outlook user who wasn't connected to an Exchange server (which sounds like a typical MS bug "fix") found the message to be garbled.
When MTAs and NNTP server had a from bug (where any line starting with
From was capitalized by the transport software, everyone agreed it was a bug. A nasty one, since it there were reasons it couldn't easily be fixed, but the message was still readable.
But suddenly we're "elitists" for saying that it's a bug - a critical bug - when MS Outlook interprets *any* line beginning with "begin" as the start of a UUENCODED block? Even though this produces unreadable garbage? And the latest versions of Outlook apparently don't even have an option that will allow the user to view the original message?
I agree there are some bloody annoying elitist attitudes on full parade here, but it seems to me that the elitists are the people who think every person on the planet should check their messages for any text that triggers Outlook bugs (e.g., lines beginning with "begin", any HTML keyword which will trigger the mandatory interpretation of the message as HTML, etc.) instead of MS admitting that they screwed the pooch on this one and issuing a quick patch.
They don't even have to use the same standards I demand of my own code - simply checking for a pattern where the "begin" is followed by an octal number would eliminate most of these false hits.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Slashdot has funny HTTP headers as well :)
Aren't Outlook and OE users punished enough for their foolishness by the likes of sircam? :)
It's intended to enlighten those who don't even know there are such things as IE-only sites. I provide an email link so that they may write me and when they ask, I give them a direct link around the main page to whatever they are looking for. I've had a couple of people write that they didn't even know there were other browsers available to them. I taught them something that I believe is important to know.
Now, virtually everybody who's reading my post here would defeat my punky javascript in about 2 seconds but you aren't my audience with this trick.
It boils down to this. The people visiting my site want something that I have (mostly pictures of women wearing bodypaint). I have something I want them to learn. I only do it on Sunday - the slowest day of the week for my very obscure site. I'm not obnoxious with my message. All in all, I don't think I'm being a jerk. I think I'm doing a tiny bit to make the internet a better place.
You can like it or not.
No, it isn't the opposite. Dumb, but not the opposite.
The reason the Outlook users couldn't read the email is -not- that the emails were in a proprietary, hidden format (as is the case with Word attachments). The reason they couldn't read it is because Outlook is a buggy PoS.
It wasn't "Only Linux users" who could read it. Anyone not using Outlook could read it. You don't have to change OS', just stop using a crappy mail reader.
It's the difference between not using a standard and not accomodating people who use crap.
The enemies of Democracy are
What the f*8k is up here?
Any STANDARDS compliant mail reader will read his message, how is this a problem?
Oh, Outlook isn't standards compliant, and whose fault is that? Tell MS to fix their software.
You could, of course, avoid writing emails that would not exclude Outlook users, but you would have to be careful not to
begin any lines of your message wrong, which means that having your mailer arrange the line-breaks for you won't work.
Obviously, working around all of the bugs in software which people might use is a pain, and shouldn't be your
responsibility. After all, it is local mail delivery programs that deal with lines that start with "From". It would suck to
end up having to carefully tune your content to broken implementations. And if you've decided not to support broken mailers
why not trigger the bug intentionally, so people don't read part of your conversation before running into a message
they can't read? I think that people using mailers which don't understand the MIME format shouldn't stop you from using
attachments. If a message conforms to all applicable standards, it's fine by me. Attaching a Word document is perfectly
legitimate, although the document itself doesn't conform to any Internet Standards other than "binary data".
Oh god. Yet Another Automobile Analogy (YAAA). You are not an american by any chance are you?
They could read the email if you had sent it properly, but as you in all your infinite wisdom desided that your choice is better then thiers have blocked them out.
Unless a line in my email naturally started with the word begin! (for whatever reason). Thanks to MS, email has gone from a simple text message to a mixed bag of html, lines ending with an '=' and messages with unreadable attachments which repeat the body text (and are often larger than the message itself). Since asking politely hasn't done away with the crap, perhaps this will have to do.
We aren't "forcing him to conform", we're forcing him to write in a format usable by all (you know, free means free across all boards, including proprietary).
O.K., let's change the focus. Use a RFC Compliant e-mail program (not OE or Outlook) and you can belong to the list and read my mail. If you CHOOSE to not use a compliant mailer, well, that's your choice.
If the standard is to communicate in letters and you insist on using binary numbers, what would that make you? Elitist?
After all, everyone understands 1's and 0's don't they?
.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Although I definately agree this has neat hack value...
I have to ask. What purpose does this have other than making his mail unreadable on OE or WebTV?
"Forcing him to lock his mail into a subset of readers"... no.. this is the opposite.
He is deliberately excluding a subset of users.
For THAT matter..
Who really has a problem with OE? Outlook, yes, it's done many bad proprietary things that make it a pain in the ass. I *STILL* receive lots of attachments I can't read because they are proprietary to Outlook.
But Outlook Express seems to me to be fairly well behaved.
Of course.. I use Eudora on all MS platforms... because it makes keeping years worth of email in folders MUCH easier, and I like how it deals with attachments much better.
The Linux cult cannot accept software from the Evil Ones.
My point exactly. They can't handle the fact that MS has a far better OS than their toy, Linux.
I hate all zealots!
Slashdot. News for Zealots, Stuff that matters (if you're a linux zealot!)
Given that Microsoft has chosen, deliberately, to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" non-Microsoft networking standards, and , why should there be any complaint when a private individual gives them a dose of their own medicine?
Why should there be a complaint when an internet user choses to defend a standard by sending email that is only readable by standards-compliant email clients?
And why should there be a complaint when an internet user choses to exercise his free speach rights by posting anything he damned well pleases?
That's freedom. Get used to it!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Given that Microsoft has chosen, deliberately, to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" non-Microsoft networking standards, and ... after a careful analysis of the competing Netscape browser, sell tools that excercised bugs in it, causing it to crash ...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Lookout Express" - Christ, you're a comedian!
Or maybe you're just dyslexic, given the poor quality of the rest of your posting.
Either way, please get off the Internet, you're an embarrassment to us all.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
There's no comparison between these two bugs. The "From" bug (which can actually be introduced by any intermediate system handling SMTP or NNTP) causes a minor inconvenience or at most crypto signatures to break. (In extremely rare cases, it could corrupt UUENCODED data, but MIME encoded data should be unaffected unless there's also capitalization.)
1 $KNc3419u7L4;l$%*1
In contast, with this Outlook bug once you hit a O!@3412kt611kjS*Q!*lk$(&)(C$k1$nkc3)_($ce31knjER9
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
This isn't about conforming. It's about doing something deliberately for the SOLE purpose of not allowing outlook express users to read the mail.
This is not a case of going with the lowest common denominator for compatability purposes, or refusing to do so. The changes made to the headers have no other purpose other than to screw with Outlook Express users
w00t w00t!
is stooping low indeed.
Well, email is the single biggest cause of traffic on the internet, beating web browsing, P2P apps, ftp, etc.
Source please? I'd be really surprised if this were so. I can look at my school's stats here and the % of traffic due to email doesn't even come off the xaxis. P2P apps were basically every byte until we installed a Packeteer: now it's mostly web.
Perhaps if you count attachments, but then the attachment is basically the entire size of the message: adding HTML is just epsilon.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
When users are arbitrarily excluded and abused in the name of proprietary software? How many Outlook badly formated HTML/word/rtf e-mail's must we put up with before we scream enough! (Well, I just ignore them myself.)
The user isn't doing this intentionaly (well, except for the webTV thing.) and who he allows on his mailing list is up to him. You don't like it, start your own mailing list.
Don't go blowing a trivial issue out of proportion.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Broken software, free or propriatary, needs to be rooted out and destroyed.
No, broken software needs to be fixed, not destroyed. What is there gained by trashing something that's broken? Instead, learn from the experience and improve the product.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A major perveyor of software intended to support standards, reguarly sends me mail-shots (I did ask to be informed, this is not spam) about their £2000 training sessions. Their e-mails can only be read using some client I don't use - probably Outlook Express! - They are losing business - never mind that the e-mails are unreadable due to defective HTML - they clearly can't support standards, so I don't think their software can help me.
Outlook Express does not run on my (Win98) workstation, cos it screwed the registry, and won't install again, unless I wipe the hard disk, which I am not prepared to do, as OE can go to hell as far as I care (I really dont need a virus today).
In short, this guy is doing WHAT MS AND MANY OTHERS do all the time, but for Linux.
Why do we care if some people can't read his e-mail We can read it, in the unlikely event we want to. He cant read e-mals from some people - who he says he doesnt want to read e-mail from - what is the big deal here?
In short, he tells people how to mangle their systems so they half work. If people need half working systems, they can follow his advice. Why does this upset people?
It isn't the opposite as sending word attachments, not is it the same. It's a bug in outlook express. I've seen it myself. Outlook incorrectly interperts your text message as an attachment and displays it as such. Outlook isn't totally RCF complient. This isn't at all suprising.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
The latest MSIE supports XSLT, so if you provide an XSL doc with the XML they wouldn't have any problems accessing the data.
There may even be scripts that will convert XML into Excel format, although the conversion the other way is much more problematic given the lack of standards.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
And in closing, let me remind you that Microsoft and its user-base never reverse discriminates against non-MS-users. The benevolent community leaders in Redmond, persecuted as they are by the mainstream, never stoop to such ugly tactics as browser exclusive features or dirty almost-standard protocol tricks. And even though they don't have to, they work overtime to make sure that all non-MS programs and documents work seamlessly with MS applications on the off chance that someone just has to run Windows, or Outlook, or Internet Explorer, or Word, or Excel, or Access, or IIS, or some other program that almost no one uses.
So when a *nix user pulls the same tricks that we constantly bash MS for, it's all just fine and dandy? That's what most folks call a double standard.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to do something about the horrible security in Outlook, but encouraging people to rig their mail headers for no other reason than to break some software is in the same league as virus writers as far as I'm concerned.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Was it the message body, or just any line at all? The impression I got was that Bruce Sterling discovered the bug by using the word "begin" at the start of a paragraph -within- the message.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, there are actually quite a few programs that can read word documents (abiword, wv, staroffice, et all), but it's the search for something that can read word docs *WELL*. The next step would be to get something that writes word docs well.... countless hours I've heard my boss bitching about how staroffice munged up his powerpoint presentation when he imported it, changed a word or two, and exported it.
:)
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you, the OSS community and in fact, anyone who doesn't use MS software is screwed when trying to find something decent to read/write word docs, but they do exist, they're just not high quality. For the stuff that is sent to me in word doc format, abiword works "well enough" to read it and let me understand what it is they are trying to communictate to me.
Actually a buddy of mine just hit on a good (obvious) point.... the problem with OE is that it's not good, but it's good enough
When will all these Linux zealots realise that their petty little crusade is OVER? Linux has lost, the GPL lies in ruins as its supporters flock to other software licensing schemes.
I've been wondering the same thing. We've got a lot in common, my brother.
Slashdot. News for Zealots, Stuff that matters (if you're a linux zealot!)
I have never heard a better car-computer similie; NT/2000 are just like Caprices in that the (civilian model) Caprice is a whale of a car: huge, tons of body roll, probably the latest (and last) example of a "boat on wheels" manufactured...
The word "arranging" is misused. The verb "arrange" is transitive, and thus takes a direct object. To fix the sentence, just remove the word "with." There are various ways to shorten "electronic mail," including "Email" and "e-mail," but not "email," which would be pronounced with a soft "eh" sound.
Moffitt states: 'The folks using Outlook Express have locked themselves into a limited subset of the information that can flow over the Internet, and are blaming me personally for not limiting my transmissions to that outlook-centric subset.'
Capitalize "Outlook." The combination "Outlook-centric subset" is confusing, and should be rewritten.
See also original email (in English).
This is a fragmentary sentence. It is more appropriate in a footnote. The word "email" is a problem again.
Immoral? Or just right?" Looks like Moffit's "Who, me?" attitude is tongue in cheek, but the creative header changes here are hilarious.
No problems in the last sentences. Let's hope that starts a trend.
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
The point isn't to exclude MS users. The point is to exclude users of software that don't conform to the standard.
I we start to accept a subset of the standard as the standard, just to make people happy, then why don't we just concede every standard to MS, and be done with it.
It isn't about being elitis, and it isn't about free software, it is about using a standard the way it was written, even if not intended.
"nobody on the highway is allowed to drive faster than the slowest car"
HTML e-mail is not a speed issue; it is a compatability issue. A more apt analogy would be:
Since Cadillac has come out with their night-vision ability on the Deville, Cadillac users may not have to use thier headlights at night time however they have to still use headlight at night so that *other* people can see them. If a Cadillac user decided to use this new feature exclusively, it may give that driver more flexinbility and perhaps force other car manufacturers to equip thier cars with this innovation but in the mean time anyone who does *not* have night vision may not be able to use the road because of safety concerns.
In most cases I don't care if mail is HTML formatted, however those times I use pine it annoys the hell out of me. When I'm a pine user HTML mail forces me off the road just like the Cadillac user who does not run his headlights would force non-night-vision drivers off the road, however if the Cadillac user uses his headlights it would cost him little but allow everyone to use the road. Same with plain text. The cost is little but allows everyone to read the mail.
That is why all my mail is plain-text. The only usable gains by using HTML that I can think of is bold, italics, underline, font size and font color. The rest can be handled by attachments. The gain is minimal at the expense of readers who aren't using HTML mail readers all the time. If the gain were much higher I would be less inclined to give an argument.
I have Netscape 2.0 and Mosaic 1.0 in my computer and it won't read the "new" web page formats. Nothing works, not java applets, not php, not asp, not even jpegs. Man, Netscape really sucks for making such a crappy older product. I'm glad Netscape and Spyglass are dead because I couldn't stand to be forced to use their latest software.
There are a lot of reasons to bash Microsoft but, the inability of an older version of software to read a newer version's format is not one of them. Just because Acrobat Reader 1.0 can't read a document created in Acrobat 4.0 format doesn't mean that Adobe sucks. Dimitry means they suck, not new formats.
In related news, future versions of all Microsoft products will autocorrect any occurance of the word "begin" with a suitable replacement.
No word on when the riots by visual basic programmers furious that the new version of that language requires start/end blocks instead of begin/end blocks will end.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
For the most part, people are in no position to "give em hell" when "em" is MS.
Wouldn't an e-mail reader be "just plain better" if it could read Outlook-ified emails? It's a feature. It's good. It would improve the product. It wouldn't have to send out crap e-mails, or compromise how it read non-Outlook email. This is possible. And not that hard.
Would making this work mean that open source has compromised its standards? No, it would demonstrate that open source can provide the best, most productive platform.
Instead, people look at open source and say "These people value a vague ideal over interoperability, over ease of use, and over my time - cause I _must_ read this kind of email to do my job".
MS isn't going to change - but open source can. Open source could provide a product that _just works with everything_.
In the end, the excuse really doesn't matter to most people. They see this: "Outlook is better because it can read this other Outlook email". And open source COULD take that advantage away.
But stupid people with attitudes like yours just don't get it.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
It's the Linux Zealotism Attitude: "You don't use linux, you suck!"
They have this idea that Microsoft is part of the Evil Empire(tm). MS is not the evil empire. Give it up, you idiots! Linux is a toy. MS is real, and has plenty of real software out there for you to use! Not the shit you can download for linux that was probably written by some pimply teenager locked in his dark closet with his ancient 386.
Slashdot. News for Zealots, Stuff that matters (if you're a linux zealot!)
From here on out, everything I post to mailing list and newsgroups will begin with:
Virus infected or Microsoft software may be confused by the following message:
begin
<aside>Good Joke</aside>
Maybe I'm missing something, but I tried that message beginning and some other text (sent from Mozilla 0.9.7+), back to myself and read it just fine with Outlook Express 5.01 SP2. No exchange servers in-between.
I'm wondering if the problem only affects Outlook and not Outlook Express, or is it only certain versions???
But suddenly we're "elitists" for saying that it's a bug - a critical bug - when MS Outlook interprets *any* line beginning with "begin" as the start of a UUENCODED block?
No, the elistist part is purposely exploiting the bug to exclude certain users.
If people drop OE because they were arbitrarilly mislead, I don't think that's such a bad thing. After all, they probably started using OE because they were arbitrarilly mislead in the first place.
I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If you have something that really needs to be a webpage (which I highly doubt) then you can send a webpage as an attachment, and explain why you are sending that in the email body. There is absolutely never an excuse to send inline html in an email, and if you think using funky fonts and colours is "adding value" I probably don't want to waste my team reading what you write anyhow.
But I do believe it's not out of malice that you do this, but rather out of stupidity.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Excluding Outlook users might even be construed as a security measure. :-p
Not funny at all. According to Microsoft, Outlook was "just built that way" and I quote
"Will the virus impact my Macintosh if I am using a non-Microsoft e-mail program, such as Eudora?
If you are using an Macintosh e-mail program that is not from Microsoft, we recommend checking with that particular company. But most likely other e-mail programs like Eudora are not designed to enable virus replication.
So, if you were writing a program (trojan) that was designed as a virus delivery system (trojan), would you get upset if someone created a method for alerting users to this aspect (trojan) of your software? (Anti-Virus) The key here is that even Microsoft acknowledges that Outlook transmits viriii by design.
.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Problem: The Caprices I drove were fast and utterly dependable and could take no end of abuse.
Now, the W2K installs I've used have been better than the run of the MS OSes, but they're not magical.
When users are arbitrarily excluded and abused in the name of proprietary software? How many Outlook badly formated HTML/word/rtf e-mail's must we put up with before we scream enough! (Well, I just ignore them myself.)
Try getting a MIME compliant email reader -- you know, MIME? That standard which has been around since about 1995/96?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Elitist is the wrong term. Elitist would be if he only let a small number of email clients participate. For example, "This list is only for mutt users," would be elitist. He's just excluding a single email client out of the many hundreds that are in use.
Excluding 99% is elitist. Excluding 1% is something else (just good ol' hate, I would say). Calling it elitist .. uh .. somehow
trivializes elitism, which is a weird concept now that I think
of it.
By sending a Word doc to a person who does not own a copy of MS-Word (or who is trying to get by with Wor95 or something), you are placing an unwelcome financial burden on them.
Great logic. In any case, I guess I'll respond to you and the AC - who both seem to think I'm MS apologizing...
The only way open source will win the fight with MS is by producing a platform that always takes the higher road. What would be an idea e-mail program?
1. Sends out well formatted, standardized emails, and reads the same.
2. Feature rich. Great user experience.
3. Is able to interact with all the major email programs/servers out there - even if they don't play fair.
I understand that the article was talking about a bug in Outlook's own renderer. It should be fixed. Yes.
But the parallel complaint, that Outlook produces illegible email, should be laid to rest too, and not by MS (cause they won't do it). Our favorite open source packages should be made to "just work". Open source needs to produce this sort of product, something that "just works" if it is ever going to win (not that I'm suggesting that open source's only goal is to win, but I think it would be nice).
As to my username, it's from a PalmOS game I wrote - Jumpman Zero. And since you've given me an excuse, here's a plug - www.betweenyourears.com/jmzero
Have a good day.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
That is not what happened in this case. Anyone (except Outlook users) can read the messages, not just Linux users. How many platforms are out there? Maybe a couple dozen? How many email clients are out there, maybe a few hundred? And all of them except one can read the email. And the one that can't, isn't locked out due to someone thinking they don't have enough marketshare to be worthwhile. They are locked out due to a defect of their own.
If there were a situation where the roles were reversed (e.g. a FreeBSD email program couldn't read a standard message for some reason) the bug would simply get fixed and it wouldn't be an issue. But Outlook users are slaves and don't get bugfixes, because they make self-defeating choices. So they get laughed at. I don't normally laugh when someone gets shot, but I do when they shoot themselves while showing off.
I didn't really say it was fine or dandy. But if the software, by not adhering to the standard, tends to break, I guess I don't have much sympathy for the users thereof. On the other hand, I'm not going to rig my headers because I have better things to do with my time. As to this being in the same league with virus writing: no way in heck. Outlook viruses affect all of us, either by flooding mail servers or our inboxes. This exploit only affects Outlook users in a fairly passive way. And I didn't get any sense that this harmed the Outlook user either... other than to keep them from reading a specific email designed not to be read with their client.
I do not have a signature
O.K., let's change the focus. Use a RFC Compliant e-mail program (not OE or Outlook) and you can belong to the list and read my mail. If you CHOOSE to not use a compliant mailer, well, that's your choice.
If the standard is to communicate in letters and you insist on using binary numbers, what would that make you? Elitist?
After all, everyone understands 1's and 0's don't they?
There's nothing about RFC compliancy here.
The poster on CrackMonkey notes that he has a number of tricks -- one is a header which sets the stationary on WebTV's to an unreadable color. Another is one that on some ISPs, shuts down the modem (which I actually think is more likely complete bullshit, due to the way that AT command strings work).
So there's a couple of lame hacks that try to make things difficult for some users. X-* headers are standards compliant, even if they might have different results on different systems.
The problem here is the UUEncoding init string that is automatically detected by Outlook Express. This is meant to be a convenience for the user; it'll automatically work out that there's an attachment in the post.
UUencoding is obsolete, by the way. MIME should be used instead. But hey, they have to keep it for interoperability with people who don't have MIME compliant browsers, don't they?
That'd be PINE users, for a start.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
But HTML doesn't add much overhead - a few dozen characters of headers and trailers, plus however much decorative formatting you want to add. At minimum, most HTML text uses "p" tags for paragraphs (an extra three characters), and "b","/b" and "i","/i" tags around bold/italics (an extra 7 characters per word/sentence/whatever.) That's seldom more than about 10%.
If you insist on creating HTML by converting from a proprietary word processing format using a badly broken format converter, you can inflate things a bit more (using lots of "FONT=longbogusname SIZE=+2" junk and using font-change tags instead of paragraph-type tags), but it's still not usually that inflationary.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Actually, I think it's kind of a cool hack, myself. I've been putting X- headers in my email to display messages to people I know that use Outlook ever since I discovered I could.
As to the elitists out there, hey, if they don't like it, they can go start their own damned list. In fact, they should do what the rest of the Democrat whiners in this country should do, especially Tom Daschle and that idiot Ted Kennedy: sit the f**k down and shut the f**k up.
- There are two ways, actually, that one can meet the
crackmonkey mailing list dress code. One is to simply use Free
Software, and not use a mailer that requires you to accept a license
that makes you promise not to share with your friends. Another is to
continue to use your Windows-based mailer, but hack the headers of
your message so as not to betray your use of the software.
Which is exactly the hypocrisy I can't stand about GNU-zealots.[...]
First of all, I am not a member of the Open Source movement. They seem only interested in how you can make money from free software. I am actually (believe it or not) more concerned with the ethical and moral issues involved in the subjugation of human beings through restrictive copyright and patent law. I consider myself a member of the Free Software movement.
He doesn't want to subjugate others' behavior, except by using software in the way he thinks is right. He wants to be ethical and respect people's rights, except where he feels he has the right to impose on others how they release technologies or extensions that rely in small part on his code.
This is why I prefer the Artistic License or the BSD licenses. They don't create stipulations, or only create stipulations on the original code. Code released under these licenses will always be available for everyone regardless of their creed.
If I build a project, and see some subroutine code that is GPL restricted, I know not to rely on it, because it limits my options on the code that I write. Why would I limit my options on my code, just to give someone else a woody? No thanks, GNU.
[
Yea, right. Lamo. And Microsoft was trashing the messages in Outlook Express, by default, because they knew that every Outlook Express user regarded Blue Mountain as spam. It was a wonderful new "feature" right?
/dev/null
Spam or not, my mail shouldn't go to the trash unless I say so. Your mail ->
Yes, but the goal to force Microsoft to stick to the standards is real. I agree we shouldn't be asking users to switch their software; we should ask Microsoft to stick to the standards. Microsoft has a right to make software just like everyone else.
What bothers the open source community is that Microsoft uses proprietary undocumented protocols, claims to implement protocols but then doesn't, and then sues people who try to interface with their software from unix.
If we can make a point of sending messages that comply to the official standards, but break Microsoft products, we might actually get Microsoft to fix the bug.
Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?
Microsoft has, for years and years and years, encouraged web site authors to write their web sites for Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer only.
If you want to call us "silly" "immature" and "asinine" for exercising our right to begin an email with "begin", then you'd have to find accusations ten times worse and levy them against Microsoft for all the dirty tricks they've foisted over the years.
And if folks tried to break every application that wasn't 100% RFC compliant, you'd see a lot of broken software out there. RFC's are great, and they should be adhered to, but technological progress often outstrips the RFC's ability to keep up. Am I justifying violating an RFC? Absolutely not. I hate working with broken software as much as the next guy, and I sure as hell wish MS would at least adhere to the specs that DON'T get in their way.
But history has pretty much shown that when standards get stodgy, they get superseded by proprietary implementations, and sooner or later the proprietary stuff becomes an RFC. This encourages companies to violate an RFC because if they make the next neato-killer doodad extension that gets wide acceptance, they get to more or less define the new RFC. Microsoft knows this, that's why they're playing fast and loose with the standard in ways that 99.9% of folks won't notice. OpenGL being superseded by DirectX is another nice analogy, albeit one that isn't quite yet finished playing out.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We became such "elitists" about the same time that Outlook insisted on being a major virus vector.
Outlook is not a mail client. It is a virus vector, specifically designed to spread viruses as quickly as possible.
By preventing Outlook and OE from posting to your mailing lists, you can save yourself and your subscribers a whole world of hurt.
Structuring your email in such a way that Outlook can't read it (but everyone else can) is as much a statement of opinion as it is a warning to people that Outlook has many bugs.
I'm so sick of all goddamn html, img bloated,
bullshit email....I just delete it if it's not
plain text..
I love it...keep it up Nick....LOL
Now the f*ckers know how it feels to connect
to a site and get this bullshit..response...
sorry you cannot access without paying bill...
Anyone try to get into anarchy online web site
with netscape 4.x shiiiiitttttt
That's some shit huh...?
Telling me I need to get a browser that's
Internet standard.....lol
Oh Yeah....
Hey Nick...that's a good one....you need to
admonish the suckers...with a screen that say's
they need to get a email client....LOL
Can anybody provide a list of MUAs that misinterpret "begin" in the message body?
I only have the internet, therefore all content must be routed that way so it is accessible to me and others like me.
Otherwise you guys are immoral in the use of the words free and freedom.
Let me add something to that definition of yours, something you may have forgotten until now, freedom is also about choice. The ability to chose for yourself.
liberalism.org has more of all that mumbo jumbo.
Its pretty kewl aye..
Sorry teacher I will never ever mock
Mark my words. I protect my freedom by controlling yours.
Seeing I was the one who sent the 'original e-mail' to Nick to begin with...
(and for those who doubt, search google under my Slashdot login, and you'll soon discover the truth)
A quick timeline for the issue:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Tron/message/3654
"It occurs to all of a sudden posts by Nick Moffit cause daily digests from
the server to get corrupted and now I'm starting to get the following
attachment:
Now I know Nick's email have been a problem to list readers before, luckily
I wasn't one of them... now I am... or it could be Mr Lawrances stuff... or
a combination.
Notice how the email reply below dies at Nicks message....
----- Original Message -----
From:
To:
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2002 8:24 PM
Subject: [Tron] Digest Number 611
There are 16 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. New Tron 2.0 info on IGN
From: "ryanosity"
2. Re: Re: Cropping
From: Jerronimo
3. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: Jerronimo
4. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: esotek@a...
5. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "Peter A. Peterson II"
6. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "John Silveria"
7. Re: Re: Cropping
From: "John Silveria"
8. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: Scott Jerry Lawrence
9. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "John Silveria"
10. Re: the new score and what to expect from
2.0
From: "John Silveria"
11. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: Nick Moffitt
12. Re: Re: Guard cut in half on solar sailer?
From: Nick Moffitt
13. Re: Re: Guard cut in half on solar sailer?
From: Nick Moffitt
14. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "Adam D. Moss"
15. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "Adam D. Moss"
16. Re: bloopers and practical jokes
From: "Lake Me Poster"
*text cut*
Message: 11
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 10:58:21 -0800
From: Nick Moffitt
Subject: Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
>
>"
After some discussion of the issue on the list,
which you can read in the archives, I started writing up an article to ferret out info on why people felt the need to do this.
Discussion also started after a bit on CrackMonkey as well.
Then, after a few emails from the EFF and Opensource.org, I bit the bullet and asked Nick the self-same questions that I had to others.
You now know this as the "original email".
Now, the article is waiting for more comments and some fleshing out, and I don't know if it will ever see the light of day, but I do intend on finishing it.
When I first started it, though, it was intended to see 'how far was too far' when supporting something like open source or free software.
Originally, I had accused Nick of being a zealot with this. I have since recanted that, and while I disagree with his methods, having heard his side, something I discovered that many people were listening to, that his point is well put.
While on one hand, he was, as I saw it mentioned earlier, "punishing the users for the crimes of the OS". It can be true to say that it's not their fault that Microsoft isn't repairing these bugs, but it can be also the user's fault for not making sure that their product is fully updated.
On the other hand, one could think that Nick was trying to force people to see his way of thought.
On yet another, he could have been doing it for the laughs.
Like all jokes and lessons, though, the line must be drawn when it stops being funny.
For some, it still is. For a majority of others, it stopped being funny a while back.
As for the mailing list issue.
Nick has said in no small words that the list is restrictive. If was a Yahoo group, or something publicly hosted, then the issue could be raised
that he was censoring content.
But it is a private group, and being as such, he can and has put restrictions on membership.
As a private group, hosted on his own equipment,
he can and does have every right to raise the bar a little. View it as a club with a dress code, as Nick suggests.
The whole issue originally arose on the Tron mailing list, a Yahoo! hosted mailing list.
Because of this, this could have been acted upon
by Yahoo! management as a disruption of service for some people.
So the argument comes down to whether Nick was in the right or wrong. Everyone will have their opinion on this. I only ask that you listen to everyone before making yours.
Don't be so blind to your cause, whatever it may be, just because you agree. There are always two sides to a story, and at least have the courtesy to listen to the other side.
Nick was doing it for the laughs.
He is a supporter of the Free Software movement,
but he was not doing it in support of that.
It did cause problems on a public mailing list,
and a rather lengthy and great flame war on another. This is one of those events that may bring light to a whole new issue.
Discrimination by what Operating System you use.
Ponder that issue, while as a Windows user, I'll go sit in the back of the bus.
"A Geek for all Times!" - Dave Adler, PMEB mailing list, 3/14/99
Anyway, as long as it enforces RFC2822-compliance (i.e. unlike browser detection), then it's fine.
Thanks to MS, email has gone from a simple text message to a mixed bag of html, lines ending with an '=' and messages with unreadable attachments which repeat the body text (and are often larger than the message itself). Since asking politely hasn't done away with the crap, perhaps this will have to do.
Um, those would be examples of messages in MIME format. MIME is defined by RFC 1521. It predates Outlook, so son't blame MS if you aren't using a MIME-conformant mail reader.
A line beginning with "begin", two spaces, and one or more non-space characters anywhere in the message body will trigger this bug, based on the CrackMonkey thread. I suspect that this wouldn't work in the headers, but I don't think starting a line off like that wouldn't be RFC-compliant anyhow.
Oh, and I'm a sysadmin who would read one of these messages in text and laugh loud and long if one of my users complained to me about it.
Why do you make it compatible? Well, you don't have to.
But if you want to give your users something really great, then you do. It's a good feature to be able to read Outlook-ified e-mails - and a feature many, many people would appreciate.
As to MS changing their formats, they might. But probably not by much in this case (as they will likely choose to retain backwards compatibility, and thus can't change too much).
And if some future MS e-mail program creates new, crappier emails? Well, then your "reading Outlook email" feature becomes less valuable - and you have to choose whether or not to try to be able to read the new format.
Your answers to these questions doesn't change the fact that the feature is a valuable (if not critical, to many business people) now.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
We are not zealots just because we
see things differently.
If you aren't interested in freedom and
choice go somewhere else and leave us alone.
For everyone complaining about what he is doing and how he's being unfair in making his email unreadable by Outlook Express users, lets put this into a little perspective. "All" he is doing is writing email that would go similiar to this:
For today's meeting let us
begin to address the the standard... etc etc
This is an Outlook Express "bug" that is making the email unreadable if a sentance starts with the word begin (or at least the rest of the message after that word).
I would think that instead of being outraged or ticked off that someone would have the audacity to write an email unreadable by Outlook Express, that you should instead be directing your anger at M$ for having such an obvious flaw in their email client and instead of fixing it, just deny it exists and then even go so far as to remove the "view source" button which gave people the ability to read the message anyways.
If M$ fixed their obvious bug, then this would be completly a non-issue. As far as Monkeymasters mailing list, well it's his list, and his server he fully has the right to allow whatever clients connect to it he chooses.
This is a wonderful example of "You're not cool enough to use my resources" baloney that strikes fear into the hearts of managers. it makes them skeptical of the entire Open/Free Software idea.
"Sure, it's free, but I'm concerned that it won't play well with my installed software base."
"Sure, it's free, but man, you just never know what project might 'offend the sensibilities' of these Open/Free developers and then they'll walk out, making me look bad."
And the most damning truth in the big bad world:
"not a team player."
We can all sit and yank our own cranks thinking "they're full of it" but the fact is, there are a lot more of "them" than "us," and things like this won't change that.
Jumpman was created by Epyx. I had permission from Randy Glover, the original programmer to make the game. I was 7 when I first played Jumpman - I certainly didn't create it.
This comment posted anonymously so that the rest of you needn't read it.
-JMZero
There's a difference, though. All they have to do use use a different email app. If they're being forced to use Outlook, then they should complain to Microsoft for the bug, and not the guy for taking advantage of it.
BlackGriffen
I'm not arguing against evolution of standards. For example, I'm fine with moving to MIME. This is easy enough to do by sending HTML messages along with a text version of the message and allowing the client software to decide which one to show-- and for non-MIME readers this puts the text version at the top.
But this is a case of a guy, one guy, messing with his mail headers so that people he doesn't want to have an easy time reading his mail, can't. He hasn't written an email client that automatically fouls up Outlook users-- and even if he had, it would have about four users, all of whom could have easily modified their headers themselves anyway. This isn't part of some broader movement. It amuses him to do this and it harms no one.
In fact, we might consider he's done these users a favor by preventing them from easily reading his messages. Nothing he's going to say is bound to be too popular with them anyway, right?
I do not have a signature
to use headers that are *only* recognized by OE. Problem solved ;-)
FUD. The last time they changed formats was Office 97. (I still use Office 97.) The two versions before that were the same. And before that, everyone used Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS.
people who don't have MIME compliant browsers, don't they? That'd be PINE users, for a start.
PINE doesn't support MIME? I must be missing something here - I use pine all the time and never have problems with attachments done using base64 with mime headers. Can you tell me what I am missing here, please?
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Hmm? Pine has featured MIME compliance for years. I use it as my primary mailer and I can sling attachments with the best of 'em.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Your outlook can't do what? Your copy of the program is broken not the program itself.
And let's get this straight, this is a problem with outlook in internet e-mail only mode problem. Outlook is the client that ships with exchange and works in that environment without this flaw.
Oh and so I'm not totally off-topic, this dude can do whatever he wants; no one HAS to get this mailing list and if you do, he's provided a workaround.
I am personally happy to hear these kinda news and I don't see anything wrong about it!
Web standards state that if there is something that the web browser isn't built to handle then ignore it. Anotherwords, if there is an HTML tag that isn't supported then it should be ignored and then the rest of the HTML tags should continue to be processed. If an IMG tag points to a "BMP" formated graphic and your web browser doesn't support BMP format then it should ignore it and render the reset of the web page and graphics. MicroSoft violated this. If IE v.3 see an IMG tag with points to a valid PNG formated graphic then it crashes on attempting to display it. So, rather than following the rule ignore what isn't supported, a new MS rule of "Do not use PNG on web pages" has become a popular rule of thumb.
MS has again violated the standard. They declair that "begin[space][space]" is identical to an uuencode attachement! A probably formated uuencoded attachment provides the Unix permissions immediately after the first space such that it is always "begin[space][0-7][0-7][0-7][space]{filename}" MicroSoft's method of detection declairs that a "space" is an approbate 7th character where the real standard requires a numerical character! And again, MicroSoft declairs another new Internet policy of what they consider to be a properily formatted SMTP message with a "do not rule." They do not bother submitting a "Request For Comment" (RFC) on why these MicroSoft "Do Not format {with PNG, with 'begin ', etc}" are good for the Internet community because MicroSoft knows that they are NOT good for the Internet community and a Request For Comment may result in comments on why a RFC of "do not do what our violation of standards does not handle correctly" are dumb. So, they skip submitting the RFC and expect to effect internet standards anyways. I have a better idea, write software that treats "begin " as being just that, a line with a "begin " and no permission numbers which indicates it is NOT following uuencode standards. "begin " can accidently be run into and since it DOES NOT follow the UUencode standard the mail clients of the Internet should not be required to change that.
There are two ways, actually, that one can meet the crackmonkey mailing list dress code. One is to simply use Free Software, and not use a mailer that requires you to accept a license that makes you promise not to share with your friends. Another is to continue to use your Windows-based mailer, but hack the headers of your message so as not to betray your use of the software.
Both methods demonstrate an effort made to post to the list, as well as a certain degree of technical acumen.
This is a technical mailing list which is not intended for newbies or trolls. The idea is not to exclude MS users, but to exclude those who don't have the skills and knowledge to contribute to the discussion. Would you also accuse a Subaru owners club of discriminating against Ford owners?
He goes on to explain his stance, and even to answer your charges:
there is the mistaken impression that I am somehow discriminating against a whole class of people by writing e-mail that Outlook refuses to read. I see this as a curious by-product of American culture, whereby your consumer tastes somehow create a ready-made cultural identity for you. There are a great many FREELY AVAILABLE mailers (for Windows, even) that are capable of reading plain-text messages.
Outlook is merely a tool, and it has many freely available alternatives, any of which can read messages containing lines that begin with the word 'begin'. Would you say that my company, because our building only has stairs and ramps, discriminates against those who prefer to use elevators? I could just as easily argue that Outlook descriminates against people who would like to share their Pascal source code.
I've been using Unix-based mailers for well over a decade. I've been mailed countless illegible attachments from Windows users over the past ten years. It's immature of me, I know, but to some degree turnabout is fair play.
In other words, he's merely pointing out to those who might otherwise be unaware, how MS is limiting their freedom!
The folks using Outlook Express have locked themselves into a limited subset of the information that can flow over the Internet, and are blaming me personally for not limiting my transmissions to that outlook-centric subset. If I were to post all of my messages in Russian, even fewer people on the Tron list would be able to understand them; but would there then be an uproar demanding my removal from the list?
This one is aimed squarely at you. What is more elitist? Requiring readers to use any email program other than Outlook? Or requiring that all email be readable using Outlook?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
E-mail formatting is a published standard (see whichever RFC it is...). Microsoft has released a product that FAILS to correctly view e-mails of a certain type that adhere to the standard.
Note that you can run any other e-mail reader you choose, and you'll be able to see these e-mails. You can even run a proprietary OS like MacOS and still read these e-mails. Oh yeah, not to mention BeOS, palmOS, or OS/9 (not sure if there are really that many e-mail clients on OS/9 tho). This isn't really a linux only filter, it's a filter for e-mail readers that do not actually render e-mails correctly. It just so happens that MS is the only company/organization that has released an e-mail reader that doesn't adhere to the standard.
This is a bit of backlash against "Embrace and Extend". If MS could write software that worked correctly, there wouldn't be any problem.
SOME of the stuff done is aimed at disabling particular clients, like the WebTV stuff. Maybe that's not cool, but the rest of it is.
Discussing moderation is off-topic and will get you downmodded just as quickly as a "page-lengthening post" will. One way /. squelches disapproved ideas is to give them the same sort of down-mod as troll-garbage. They are not the same, but they are treated the same, so they become the same in the minds of users. Neither subtle nor charming.
Not just transparency, in my experience; PNG in general. I was testing a site in Mozilla and IE6. Everything was fine in Mozilla, but IE6 was color-shifting my PNGs a little, in effect darkening them. They didn't match my HTML-specified backgrounds anymore. It looked horrible. I switched to GIFs and it looked fine in both. I really wanted to use PNG because they were significantly smaller files in my case, but I also don't want to have IE6 users bugging me about supposedly bad pages.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
It shows up as an attachment whose file name is what you type after begin 644. It opens in simpletext. That means windows users are not necessarily excluded. I have yet to try this in entourage (mac client/outlook port) for 9 or X.
As an aside, note that the MyParty worm currently doing the rounds uses the "begin" bug to carry the payload.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
a phrase that goes something like, "Hate the sin, not the sinner." Think about it this way, "Hate MS and their damned software, not the user of that software." Whatever, inclusion is where it's at, NOT exclusion.
Well, at least M$ found a way to fix the bug.. just don't use the word begin (lower-case, followed by two spaces)...
Seems like a good solution to me.. If your product has a problem with a language, just change the language.
I'll stop using 'begin ' in e-mails as soon as M$ stops using the word 'innovate'
When Mozilla refuses to render webpages that aren't compliant with standards, it's Right and Just because We Should Uphold Standards.
When Outlook Express doesn't display messages with horribly maliformed headers, it's "Funny Cause M$ Writes Peice of Shit Porgrams".
Furthermore, if someone uses Outlook Express, we should send them messages with maliformed headers so they can see how terribly wrong and immoral they've been. "Bad Microsoft Person! You're such a luser! You suck! Neener neener neener!"
Frankly, this is a feature, not a bug. If someone is petty enough to actually do that, I don't want to hear from them. Ever. I'm switching to Outlook Express.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
What an elitest asshole. Its you geeks that fuck everything up. Go back into your bedrooms and build another network to play in!!! Its not your internet anymore you fucking LOOSER GEEKS. Give up.
...now that there's an exploit for it? Microsoft usually don't do anything about a software flaw unless they can be shown it can be exploited. Well, the MyParty worm uses exactly this "begin[spc][spc]" vulnerability.
On a related note, anyone else a bit suspicious about the timing of these two events? No, I'm not saying Moffitt had anything to do with the creation of MyParty. But it's at least quite something of a coincidence when a furore over an Outlook bug is quickly followed up by an exploit for the very same.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
If that's the case, then why do people have trouble reading emails like the one I've included below? There is a text-only content segment of the message, and an html segment. A truly MIME compliant email reader will pick the one it can handle and display that.
B 0"
m ; =
. ht m
e su me.htm">http://home.ear=
o rt folio.htm">http://home.=
----
Subject: Test
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 15:39:38 -0800
Organization: Popcorn Films - http://www.popcornfilms.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0005_01C1A811.FED4BD
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C1A811.FED4BDB0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
test
test
test
test
--
Looking for an accomplished Win32 developer to work on your project?
Please check out my resume and portfolio: =
http://home.earthlink.net/~simoncooke/resume.ht
http://home.earthlink.net/~simoncooke/portfolio
Experienced in UI development and design, applications architecture, and =
shipping projects on time and on budget.
------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C1A811.FED4BDB0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=3DContent-Type content=3D"text/html; =
charset=3Diso-8859-1">
<META content=3D"MSHTML 6.00.2712.300" name=3DGENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2><STRONG>test</STRONG></ FONT></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><EM><FONT face=3DArial =
size=3D2>test</FONT></EM></STRON G></DIV>
<DIV><EM><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>test</FONT></EM></DIV&g t;
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>test</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>--<BR>Looking for an accomplished Win32 =
developer=20
to work on your project?<BR>Please check out my resume and portfolio: <A =
href=3D"http://home.earthlink.net/~simoncooke/r
thlink.net/~simoncooke/resume.htm</A>=20
; <A=20
href=3D"http://home.earthlink.net/~simoncooke/p
earthlink.net/~simoncooke/portfolio.htm</A>& lt;BR>Experienced=20
in UI development and design, applications architecture, and shipping =
projects=20
on time and on budget.</FONT></DIV></BODY></ HTML>
------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C1A811.FED4BDB0--
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Great, where can we get the source to this Outlook program? Hard to fix without that.
I'd bet that most of the people compaining about this guy's exclusion of OE users would probably be the same ones to justify a video game company not developing for anything but Windows. Typical. The analogy may not be exact, but the principle of the action is the same.
I know, this is Slashdot, and not everybody has Windows. I'm just trying to do a little public service here and point out that you don't need to spend the big bucks to buy Office to view .DOC files. You need to spend the big bucks to buy Windows. :)
You, sir are a daft fucker that can not read.
The problem is NOT with Windows or MS, but OUTLOOK EXPRESS, it is also a BUG.
"It's idiotic that anyone would go out of their way to snub a large part of their potential audience, just becuase you don't agree with the OS someone else uses. "
People who use glass OS'es shouldn't cast stones.
Um, those would be examples of messages in MIME format.
Actually, my mail readers are fully MIME compliant. That doesn't explain the soft returns '='. Also, MIME was meant more to allow sending attachments rather than to replace body text with an attachment. As I recall, many netizens found the whole thing to be quite rude, especially on mailing lists.
To workaround this problem:
Do not start messages with the word "begin" followed by two spaces.
Use only one space between the word "begin" and the following data.
Capitalize the word "begin" so that it is reads "Begin."
Use a different word such as "start" or "commence."
I'm laughing my ass off. That's just what out look does to my letters! Try to start a text message, and the stupid thing goes and capitiolizes the first letter for me. Try to use more than one space and the stupid thing puts green squigglies underneath it or changes it. "Start" They love that word. Start making sense M$, your code has a high level of presumption.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Kids who launch Outlook worms find themselves on the wrong side of the door when the FBI comes a-knockin'.
Sysadm who installs RC5 client is charged with felony trespass of the very systems he is responsible for maintaining.
It is not a big stretch to think that some LUSER with too much time on his hands and too little technical knowledge and a "How To Get Rich Suing Everyone For Dummies" book could get this guy his very own criminal indictment for exploiting flaws on a computer network, a transgression he ought to know is tantamount to supporting terrorism or even - heaven forbid - cracking a cipher on RIAA-owned media.
Edith Keeler Must Die
IIRC, Nick at one time had code in his webpage (crackmonkey.org) which would exploit a Java function that could write _any_ file on a WinBloze(9x) system. He used this "feature" to whack numerous (M$ using) visitors' registries, effectively killing their computers. He doesn't appear to be terribly fascinated by verbal communication with M$ lusers, preferring a more physical approach.
/. as "A Microsoft World(tm)".
/. anymore) who can no longer muster any sentiment towards the Empire other than open hostility. Telling us that it's futile to fight against an Evil Empire which continues to exist only because it enjoys a 90% market share only identifies you as one of its advocates, or, at least, tolerants.
Complaints (all from M$ lusers) caused his DNS provider to _compel_ him to remove this code. Non-M$ users were unaffected, just as we are unaffected by his present mail header innovations*.
Simply, he's a somewhat militant Free Software advocate, and such stunts are (IMO, I can't speak for the man) an amusing way of retaliating against what I've seen described right here on
Of course you're free to label this "immature", but there are several of us (well, maybe not moderating on
I applaud Mr. Moffitt's ingenuity in continuing to find innovative ways to fsck Micro$uck "software" and its lusers, most of whom seem to feel that it's the _rest_ of the world's responsibility to use Micro$uck "OS"en so as to be able to communicate with _them_. Mr. Moffitt's position appears to me to be that there is little or nothing coming from the M$ world (regardless of its size) that is worth listening to, and I find myself in agreement with this.
* Innovation(tm), n: something my software can handle properly which yours can't.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
You obviously haven't met RMS. He believes in freedom to use GPL software and would abolish proprietary software given the chance.
It requires two blank spaces after 'begin', and your email client may strip the spaces out before sending it. I had to add a word after it to make it so O2K could break itself.
Best way I've seen of it being used is the person who set their email client to reply with "Begin [space][space] quotation:"...
-jupo
Talk about blowing something way out of porportion. You'd think that he killed a tower full of people. Let's turn this boat around a little bit. Let's say that you have a world populated by users, 99% running an E-mail client that's non-standard. You want them to first be aware of the problem, and then move over to something that's standard. How would you accomplish this, with minimumn impact on yourself. Keeping in mind both the characteristics of the group in question. As well as the 'unseen hand' of the writer of said non-standard software.
NOW
Where do I sign up?
The scariest thing about this comment to me is that it makes Windows a Robin* and therefore Linux is an Austin Mini* (in my mind, at least.)
*The 'Robin' is one of those light blue three-wheeled cars you see in the Mr. Bean sketches. They are notorious for tipping over. The Austin Mini is what Bean always drives and uses to tip over the Robins.
"You want to know why those who are not technologicly gifted are afraid of Linux? Things like this. Silly, immature, and asinine elitism."
Silly us. I though all this time it was the installation.
"To punish people because of the mail client they use is pointless. Does the various versions of Outlook have problems? You bet. You don't like it. Fine. DON'T RUN IT."
So if one hits one of those "best viewed with" or worse. Are they being punished? If so, can one get on "./" and rant about it?
"DON'T RUN IT" Ha! Someone's obviously out of touch with reality. You're more than welcome to come over to were I work and "convince" the higher-ups that they shouldn't run it. I need some morning entertainment.
"Things like this destroy the credibility of the Linux community in general. You want businesses and government to think that the Linux community is serious, focused, and can provide better products. Stupid stunts like this do not give a good impression."
One first has to have it before it can be destroyed. Or so says all those articles that have been posted for the past two years.
So which one is the "E.F Hutton" around here? The software, or the blabbermouths on a website?
We aren't "forcing him to conform", we're forcing him to write in a format usable by all (you know, free means free across all boards, including proprietary).
Sure. So I think we need to get non-english websites to change to english so it will be in a format usable by all (but relative to me).
Oh god, relativity shows it's ugly face again.
The rest of you AC's...thye guy condescends to post here on the topic (which he did not submit), and you respond with flames and insults. Nice way to "grow the community."
I suspect that the bulk of the AC postings flaming the guy for "elitism" are Microsofties attempting an Astroturf (fake grass-roots) operation on Slashdot.
Much like the way they recently circulated an internal memo encouraging their employees to respond to an online poll about what server software their organizations were going to use, resulting in a stink when the media organization taking the poll noticed (and published) the sudden burst of responses from microsoft.com IP addresses. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wow, have you been misled. Outlook has it's own crappy database format. It puts all of your mail into one huge binary file. As per the usual M$ deception it displays a tree of that file's contents in a way that makes you think you have put them into directories and have a well ordered mail system. Performance starts to crap out after a while, though making many subdirectories can help. When you learn that all of your mail is in one file and you worry that corruption can cause total loss you will be very dissapointed in the export features. It only does one directory at a time, so you have to mouse your way through all your subdirectories. The database always craps out in a year or two of normal usage, and we all know what happens to old M$ file formats. Co workers have taken the time to rename that file and write it out to zip disks because they got burnt that way. File compression typically reduces the stupid binary format by a factor of 10. I consider a it a very poor mail client that wisks all of your mail away to a bloated, unreadable binary format and then looses it. Beware, your mail might just go poof one day.
Thanks for the tip on Mozilla being able to pull my mail out. I remember Netscape's text exporter was very good, and I expect Mozilla's to work nicely too. Published and free standards eitherway. Hopefully it can ignore all of those nasty Power Point presentations.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
probably the same amount I think, maybe a little less but not much. It doesn't take much computer knowledge to pass any kind of test for slashdot.. Hmmm
Why should I have to find another piece of software to install on my machine just to access some information, I use my computer to work with, not to mess with and sometimes use Outlook Express - on my Windows box at work it loads quick, can be easily changed around for playing with mail servers and on the rare occasions I need news access it gives me what I need.. But then I use a different (equally broken in many aspects but still way cool) mail client - Lotus Notes against a Domino server (and why is the Outlook client not so bad when used with Exchange? (so the article or something says - I find I get way more winmail.dat attachments through Exchange..)
Yep, and if someone doesn't want to serve homosexual people or black people or people that are afraid of iguanas at their restaraunt, it's their choice too. Right?
Security through obscurity.
If MS can't get it to work. Let someone else take a whirl.
Who's restricting what? The one who doesn't play by the rules the rest of the world agreed on, or the one who has the balls to point it out. The emperor may have no clothes, but I feel sorry for the first peasent who points it out.
Think about it. And if you still think the second point, then you are, in fact, elitest.
Uhh, no it's more like when people post Outlook generated or M$ Word files to his mailing they might just break it. M$ ignores accepted standards and insists on using secret binary formats that they routinly use to break other people's software. Keeping that kind or trash off your list is not elitist, it's self defense.
Who this man let's post on his mailing list is his business.
Getting Word files in email is not that big a deal, but it does make sure that I don't get to read what you sent me. No, I'm not going to buy MicroShaft software anytime soon. I have better uses for my money. If you want to talk to me, you can kindly not give your money to M$ and send me plain text messages that I can read.
How absolutly arrogent for M$ to think that everyone in the world is going to either buy their inferior software or slave night and day to be able to read it. They are free to comply with real standards if they wish, and get down from that high whorse (imagine that). Their cost would be nothing.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
From the article:
I've been using Unix-based mailers for well over a decade. I've been mailed countless illegible attachments from Windows users over the past ten years. It's immature of me, I know, but to some degree turnabout is fair play.
Folks, it was always my belief that it was the content of a message that determined it's base value - rather than the manner in which it is presented? Or did format just become more important that quality?
As a followup, I tried it with just two blank spaces after the begin and everything was readable. Spaces were not stripped out. However, if I added a word after the two spaces (on the same line), sure enough, I got an illegible attachment. (Unless you count looking at the source, which was exactly as I sent it.)
As we know M$ has used it's binary formats to break other people's software in the past, banning M$ trash is more like self defense than etiquite. "Leave your weapons at the bar, gents".
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
RMS' point was that "any" open format should be used in favor of a very closed proprietary one. Yours seems to be that "one" open format should be dictated for all. The two points don't seem to have much in common to me.
Terminology is a problem here. I use closed and proprietary together to denote the following:
a) it's difficult to reverse engineer.
b) it might someday be *illegal* to reverse engineer.
c) the authors want to keep it mystified in hopes of profit.
d) the authors willingly sabotage competition in hopes of profit.
As for elitism, I have thought about it. Microsoft purposely breaks other people's software by changing their OS and other products. Why shouldn't Free software retaliate in kind?
Note: I run Windows at work, but I can still read/post to such a group. In fact, MS code is all that's required. Lookout and telnet.
No; the best way to convert people from Microsoft is to ease them into an environment where all their old applications and systems work and they can freely interchange with said old applications. Yes, you'd exclude yourself from Microsoft; but then Microsoft users would exclude you.
Your statement though sharp and quick-to-the-point missed the nail by a half-yard. You're obviously overzealous and obsessed in your own stereotypes of people and how they should immediately hop on the free software bandwagon when they get the chance because "they can". Remember, I <b>love</b> and <b>use</b> free software in replacement to and instead of proprietary products as much as the next person here on Slashdot, but when you begin forcing your views down someone elses throat, you really draw the line.
Then again, there is yes, the people who go in full force by saying that "there are equivalents available for free "in" Linux". This is a sad view which only masks up the real lack for well-developed software on the platform. I think Linus did a superb job in setting up and managing his kernel, but collaboration sucks and the end result is a collage of buggy releases and unprofessional products. At the core is an enterprise-level system with all-around-excellent performance but the second you leave that small circle, you enter the world of the Segmentation fault.
Thank you.
~Your friendly neighbourhood Katz flamer/troll/spammer/crapflooder/strange story submitter.
April 21-27-- Slashdot Blackout: Do your duty.
After all, this is only a logical extension of Microsoft's own attempt at quarantining that Petri dish known as Outlook by blocking content.
I begin to think that pehaps these same people now toting the supremacy of their operating system might in another time promote the supremacy of their language, nationality, or race.
Or promoting the supremacy of not being elitsts?
If Moffitt chooses to put funny headers in his emails, or start every line with 'begin', it will not drive people away from the Great Satan of Software. That was never his motive, not according to the posted email anyway. Or have I misread the email or missed something?
What he has done is more of a pratical joke. Like he explained (and you left this out), is that Windows user can still use his mailing list.... if they know how to fudge wit the headers. That's a far cry from the nationalism and racial supremacy that you allude to. Don't try to make the man sound like a Nazi SS soldier for such a little thing.
Don't take this situation so seriously. Afterall, it is Mottiff's mailing list, and he can ban whatever posts he wants. At the end of the day, if he decides to drive away intelligent people like you or me, it is more of his loss then ours!
In a sense I'd love to agree with you. But in another sense the fight between Microsoft and the GPL is a fight for survival. While I respect the pacifist who stands by while their family and self are murdered, I will never be such a one.
Personally, I think reverse engineering, publishing exploits not addressed, and many other seemingly questionable activities are very important. We must think and act freely if we'd like to continue to do so.
>> The point is not to force them to use it, or to punish those who don't. Where's the freedom in that?
> Ironically, this is perhaps the same attitude that their arch nemesis Microsoft takes in how it deals with their customers...
Hmmm..perhaps you've missed the various articles on Microsoft's contracts with its OEM customers, the contracts that forbid installing multi-boot systems?
Or the way they deliberately borked their older OS versions 'til Lotus wouldn't run correctly on them (if at all), and then blamed the other software? No customer confusion there.
Or the way they meant consumers to have a 'jolting' experience if they wanted to select a different picture viewing software (...say, Kodak's...) over the MS-installed stuff?..
There is lots of consideration given to interoperability and even backwards compatability in the Microsoft Word document format.
Microsoft engineers carefully consider ways to implement their format to break both in an attempt to force as many folks as possible to upgrade to the latest Microsoft eXPerience.
I currently avoid much of the MS-induced email madness by using Spamcop's HTML sterilisation and Attachment stripping features on my public email address. Unfortunately, both of these features are going away in the new "flat-rate" version. Does anyone know of any other email filtering system that can return sanity to email?
40m and 80m SSB, 6wpm morse code.. .. seems fair enough to me..
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
OK, so where in that quote does it say that Outlook is designed to enable virus replication? The quoted text says than other email programs aren't so enabled, not that Outlook is.
If you're going to raise objections to Outlook, and God knows there are enough valid ones to go around, at least make ones that aren't ridiculous based on your own quoted sample text.
I mean we're all glad that you're so fucking smart that you can reverse engineer version 4.2.1.32 of the Microsoft Outlook email format, but what about someone writing a mail client who doesn't have your innate ability to commune with Microsoft products?
And what are you going to do, bright boy, when Microsoft changes the format ever so subtly just to break your code and then claims it's a bug in your product and that your poor user's problems would just go away if they would only use a "standard" mail client like Outlook?
I'll be sure to send him a bunch of Word documents.
Hi!
I send you this file in order to have your advice.
I run a mailing list server. When HTMLized mail came along, I read mail in yarn, and the tags ticked me off, so I had my software reject them.
.doc, but it does a pretty nifty job on what's left.
Then, I started to think, heck, I *don't* run a technical mailing list. Accessibility is important. So instead, I wrote my software to *convert* people's posts, regardless of how wacky they look, to plain text. It can't do something as severely encoded as a
But you wanna know what ticks *me* off? The stupid sites like Hotmail, and recently Excite, that send *bogus* HTML stuff, with no BODY tags. The Perl HTML-to-text library I'm using reads that as a blank message (no BODY? Okay, no body). Bah.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
"Elitist, hypocritical and generally insufferable" will almost certainly be in the first sentence. If absolutely nothing else, the words "open-minded" and "Linux pundit" in the same sentence will at least bring upon a brief guffaw.
Really -- try it out if you're not convinced.
That doesn't explain the soft returns '='.
So, you're saying that Outlook uses the quoted-printable encoding without labeling it as such? Digging through my old e-mail, I quickly found a couple random e-mails I received from Outlook Express 5.5 and 4.7 that used = for soft returns, and they were properly labeled as quoted-printable.
Also, MIME was meant more to allow sending attachments rather than to replace body text with an attachment.
Actually, multipart/alternative was meant to facilitate exactly the latter.
As I recall, many netizens found the whole thing to be quite rude, especially on mailing lists.
But my whole point was that all MS did was make a mail agent that implemented an RFC. Certainly, if clueless users send MIME format e-mails to mailing lists whose policy requires plain text, that is rude, but it isn't MS's responsibility to ensure that its users are clueful.
Can they understand HTML?
These people pay outrageous prices for the service, only to get spammed and to receive messages that their phone can not display.
Yeah it could....
It's a bad idea to run anything as root that you don't have to. Basically, there are a lot of subtle ways that software can be made to preform bad things remotely, by IRCing as root, if someone finds a way to manipulate your client remotely, then they can easily open up a root backdoor to get into your computer with.
BTW -- Some great trolls lately, keep it up! I especially like the way you handled that "humyn" feminazi.
> The Linux cult cannot accept software from the Evil Ones.
My point exactly. They can't handle the fact that MS has a far better OS than their toy, Linux.
As much as I hate to respond to such blatant OS advocacy :3
It may be hard to remember, especially somewhere like here with a very vocal band of rabid zealots on every side of every issue, but not all of us Linux users are like that. Personally, I use Sylpheed and I don't care what other people use to read their email. I send my family virus alerts for big stuff when I hear about it, but that's it. I don't harp on them because they don't use Free (as in ... yeah) Software. I use Unix. Other people don't. Big deal.
<retaliation>
It's not nice to randomly call other people's preferred tools toys, by the way. ^_^; Linux is a valid Unix-like operating system. It's no more a toy than BSDlite, System 7, or Windows 2000 Professional. Unless you'd like to imply that the operating systems that serve practically everything on the Internet (Unix variants and Windows-based server platforms) are toys, I'd take some more time to consider what you say. Remember, when you make unbacked claims like that you're no better than the "Linux bigots" (or ANY OS bigots) you (and, coincidentally, I) hate so much.
</retaliation>
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section for any class on how to use a computer.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Subject line says it all.
Integrity is what you are when nobody is looking.
RMS is opposed to MS Word, becuase it is a closed format that does not allow for any other program to read it. This guy is using not only totally open specs, but what is legitimate specs. MS elected to subverte the mail and this individual is simply responding back with totally legitimate data that causes Outlook to go buggy. As long as it is in the open, AND it meets the specs, I have no problem.
"There's a difference, though. All they have to do use use a different email app"
Same argument for Word attachments.
All those Linux whiners have to do is use MS Word. Its available on all popular platforms (Windows and Mac).
All you have to do is us a different OS.
Or is your OS your religion? I use mine to do work. You apparently use yours to make a political statement.
That's freedom. But PLEASE don't whine when people use their FREEDOM to send you a Word document as an attachment.
Promise me you won't whine, ok?
Thank you for making my point. The games on PbsKids and other pages require Shockwave, not Flash. Shockwave is Windows only (and maybe Mac) I have flash installed. I installed it when I installed NS 6.2. Now, I'm not Joe AverageUser, but I am a firm believer in the KISS mindset.
I have had several people at my LUG tell me that shockwave works fine under wine, but I have to ask. If all I want is my kids to be able to go to kids sites and play games, and I own a copy of windows anyway, why run an emulator? To me that would be like installing a PS2 emulator on your PC, when you have a working PS2 in the closet.
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
I couldn't reproduce the begin exploit in Outlook Express 5.0 running on my Mac.
It's been my default email client for over three years now; it's really nice to use (and was intuitively so from the start). Of course the best mail client is the one you are used to; much of the discussion seems post-hoc justification of ossifying prejudice.
As for rendering your email illegible to potential recipients... most people just want to communicate, not engage in platform wars. Deliberately making your email unreadable to others seems a bizarrely self-denying ordinance, but, hey, it's his life. Me? I just want to communicate.
You can never eat too much, only cycle too little.
Outlook Express is the problem, not what this guy is doing. He's just highlighting the problem for OE users. If Outlook Express can't read a standards compliant message, who's fault is that?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Hell---there should be a required netiquette section before people are alowed to buy a computer.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
It doesn't implement the RFC. Thats the point. If you
begin a line with "begin"...
As if the subject of the story posting himself to confirm the parent post isn't enough...
For those who didn't read the link, the parent comment very accurately summarizes the viewpoint of the guy this story is about.
He's not a free software zealot with and agenda, nor is he an idiot, and he knows exactly what he is doing. Read the story. He makes perfect sense. Let him do what he wants. If you don't want to read his emails, then don't. Use outlook (or not) and be content.
Mozilla
You think these people are elitists, talk with the people in the Java camp.
A lot of people have actually e-mailed me to tell me that I'm an idiot - and that support is actually quite good under a few different e-mail programs.
Interesting how that doesn't stop people from arguing. It's a good break from work anyway.
Have a good day - and thanks for not calling me an idiot.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
...exactly the same kind of thing Adequacy.org does, only in reverse. They actively discriminate against Free Software and Open Source users in deference to Windows users. This is despite the fact that their site uses and is running on Free and Open Source software. And, like crackmonkey.org, it's their site; they can do whatever they want with it, but at least Nick's not a hypocrite.
More power to ya, Nick.
It's a very dark ride.
Mercy...mercy meeee....things aint what they used to be..oh...no...no....
It's been mentioned that possibly mother nature
will consider mankind a virus and act accordingly.
What a terrible mess we have made of this world.
When in the last century or so...have we heard
"For the good of mankind" rather than
"How much can I get for this"
DMCA
Intellectual Property
Comes pre-loaded with
Made for WindowsXXXXX
Ebay
Microsoft Standard
netbios
Wouldn't the world be a better place without
all these....??
How many real life saving new inventions and
discoveries will be made and held back for profit
Cures for Aids
Cancer..
The Only Fucking use of the word "WIN" here is
"WIN DOES IT FUCKING END..." ?????
Don't you see the problem? Look at all the overhead that's tacked on because some marketing bozo wants his email to look 'pretty'. IMHO, MIME is ok for adding attachments for images, data files, sounds, etc. Sending two copies of the same message, one in plain text and the other with tons of markup seems a bit ridiculous to me. Do you send all the other recipients of an email that's been forwarded a dozen times when you forward the letter on to someone else?
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section for any class on how to use a computer.
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section on MIME compliancy for mail readers.
Two copies of the message, one in plain text and the other with markup makes perfect sense to me -- because, frankly, color and formatting can help a LOT when it comes to getting your point across.
Heck, even the original VT52 terminal creators recognized this -- no color, but the ability to do certain kinds of markup (underline, bold, inverse).
However, nice dodge. Whether it's efficient or not isn't the point.
If we're looking into efficiency, why isn't all email dictionary encoded and then huffman encoded before being transferred over SMTP? Why are all the headers text fields rather than simple binary fields?
The answer is twofold; for redundancy (including backwards and forwards compatibility), and human readability.
This is why the same text is sent twice in the message; once for obsolete / down-level clients, and once for clients that can handle HTML.
If efficiency were a concern, email gateways wouldn't be limited to 7-bit character sets, so don't even try to get on that high horse.
Regardless; HTML and text are supported in the same email through the MIME standard, which specifically allows this behavior. If your mail reader can't cut it, then tough crap -- get with the standards program, or get out of the game.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Hmm? Pine has featured MIME compliance for years. I use it as my primary mailer and I can sling attachments with the best of 'em.
Attachments are not the sole reason for MIME. MIME is a standard for denoting and handling content encoding and multi-format content in heterogeneous environments.
Take a look at RFC 2046 and read the section on multipart/alternative segments.
The problem with PINE isn't in its ability to push around attachments. It's that (from reports from friends who use it on a daily basis), it appears to be unable to handle multipart/alternative entities in any kind of intelligent (or standards-compliant) fashion. So you get garbage when you read an HTML-encoded email, even if it provides an alternate, plain-text encoded message entity for downlevel clients.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
How is it non-RFC compliant? Maybe you shoule re-read the RFC and figure out what X- headers are for.
The point RMS was trying to make was that there is a better way to send documents over e-mail. We have PDF, Postscript, plain text, etc. Those are all superior to .doc for reasons other than just system portability - .doc can carry viruses among other problems. Now it is true that Outlook users are more susceptible to getting viruses, but that doesn't affect non-Outlook users (well, it does to a point, but we can and should protect ourselves from viruses and not expect others to do it for us). .doc - it places an undue bunden on the recipient. That is, at the least, unkind to your recipient. And for what purpose? Are the hacked headers somehow superior? No, this is for spite. IMHO, that is detrimental to the cause of open software.
Here we have an example of intentionally making it harder for someone else to read mail you send them. That is exactly why RMS is telling people not to send
Frankly, we don't need to sink to the level that MS has. We can take the high road. If users want to use Outlook, that is their business. Don't get me wrong, you couldn't pay me to use it, but I still think people ought to have the choice to use the softwre they prefer, now matter how bad it is. What people should avoid is intentionally inconveniencing other people who make different choices.
If you keep making up your own words we're going to "disclude" you from Slashdot.
Yes - look for Jobs to get caught smuggling cocaine sometime next week.
On the other hand, it's better than getting a message that can only be read in HTML. (On the gripping hand, multipart/alternative can be abused. I've gotten messages whose text-only portion said "This email can only be viewed in HTML." Gee, if you wanted me to view the message in HTML, why didn't you just send it as HTML only?)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
Actaully, a double standard is when they do to you
first and then complain when you do it back to
them. This case is what we call "fighting fire
with fire."
ACHTUNG - ALLES LOOKENPEEPERS
Das Machine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen
der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht
fur gewerken by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseeren musten keepen
das cotten-pickenen hands in das pockets - relaxen und watchen das
blinkenlights.
That's not funny at all!
;)!
Rob is a very sweet guy, and you all should be proud of him for what he has done for you guys (and girls!
Maybe when you find somebody you really love, you will feel bad for what you have said.
Whatever happened to doing something interesting just because you can?
No agenda, no deep reason - just the simple pleasure of having figured it out.
People like you should stick with Windows.
Forget about anybody's trying to make Linux work for the "rest of us". There is no reason why Linux or any other OS should be dragged down to the depths of retardedness that would need to be plumbed before people like you can be happy with it.
Your happiness is not important. The happiness of people like you is not important. It is not important to convert users to Linux. It is not important to convert people away from Microsoft. There are enough users in the free software world to keep it alive as superior alternatives to Microsoft's offerings.
Microsoft products suck because they have to suck. They are broken. They are expensive. They are intentionally crippled by Microsoft to maintain the Microsoft revenue stream. Microsoft has to do it this way because if they dared to compete on the merits of their products, they would lose.
Do not let that scare you, though, you imbecile. Microsoft will probably be around forever because there are millions of people like you who will continue gladly to fork-over both your and other people's money to Microsoft. Your minds are weak and you are all lazy. Each breath you draw is a waste of oxygen. But I do not mind sharing the planet with you because we will someday need raw material for the Soylent Green factories. Microsoft's registration for the XP line of products is doing an excellent job of collecting the names. I do not fear that I or my children will go hungry.
no thats not the same, its easy to change you mail client, its hard/imposible to change your color/sexuality/phobias
42
Poeple not Lookout Express can still read his email, even if they are using Windows.
This is a poor comparison because word files can also be opened within Linux; it's just not convenient and doesn't work that well. Sure, Microsoft users can view the emails with another program, but it's a hassle to change your software. FortKnox is entierly correct.
You MOTHERFUCKER, you kicked me off #slashdot tonight.
I will make sure you pay for it, by hating you for
the rest of my long life, and praying for god to
harm you.
I hate you, YOU shit eating scum bag. You called
me a JEW, you fucking racist.
I beg the lord to give you hemroids IN YOUR ASSSSSS.
mememe
Hmmm, I didn't realize that Word was part of MIME...
(1) Pine does a decent job with HTML-encoded email.
(2) You can look at any of the parts by using the > key.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Yes, though the message source thing mentioned in one of those emails is viewable in Outlook Express, whether or not it is in Outlook I am not sure.
beginhappy99.exe .signature virus! Please copy me into your .signature!
This is a
See Microsoft KB Article Q265230 for more information.
end
First people were telling him that he had a virus, then people were telling him that he was being a jerk, etc... was extremely amusing :)
I need to do that next time I post to a MS newsgroup :)
A lot of people are posting comments similar to,
:), who cares what my grandma uses?
"It's crap like this that prevent people from
using Linux. We'll never move into the mainstream
that way."
So what? What's going to be so good about moving
Linux onto everyone's desktop? Foolish pride?
I'm all for getting more people with technical
know-how into Linux. Means faster support for new
hardware, all the good things in the "Bazaar"
model.
However, how many mainstream desktop users are
going to start kernel hacking and significantly
help? For those that aren't going to help, what
difference does it make if they use Linux or
Windows or Mac or FooOS? It's not like they can
kill Linux.
As long as I have my Linux (or FreeBSD, as the
case may be
Hmmm, I didn't realize that Word was part of MIME...
That's what multipart/alternative is for -- read the spec. RFC 2046. You can write your email in Word, Illustrator, PDF or even TeX if you like, provided that your mail editor supports multipart/alternative correctly. It's polite to provide multiple representations -- eg. plain text, HTML, and El Weirdo File Format in the same message -- for downlevel clients. And it's all fully spelled out in the spec.
Outlook does this; it provides both an HTML or RTF content entity, and a plaintext one. Compliant readers that don't support HTML should only display the plaintext content entity.
Word = RTF or HTML depending on the version, when used for email.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Well, presumably my friends have an older version of Pine then, because they're definitely having trouble with HTML mail -- and looking at the raw message source, they definitely are getting the plaintext fallback content.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The simple fact is that you don't have the right to force him to do anything. His mailing list, his rules. You don't like it, too goddamned bad. You don't have any standing to complain about the issue, especially when you could easily comply with the rules (e.g., load Eudora, for chrissakes) and play along with the rest of the folks on the list.
I don't like it when people send me Word attachments, but hey - that's their choice. It's also *my* choice to throw them away unanswered, as I always do. Thems the breaks.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
No, that's called choice. His game, his rules. Either play by those rules or stop your whining.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I don't, that's what document translators are for! I'll admit it is annoying, but eh, I get along. The big difference is that the examples you cited are not due to bugs! OE should be able to handle any male I send it, not bug out if a line starts with the word "begin". Also, it is a lot easier to change email applications that operating systems (investments in hardware and/or software).
You're problem is that you want to shoot the messenger, rather than solve the problem, you coward.
BlackGriffen
That's kind of the point. When I write code and release it under the GPL, I'm very much aware that I'm limiting how *you* can use *my* code.
Let's get that straight, shall we? *MY* code - not *your* code. If you don't like it, write your own damned code.
Simple enough.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Actually, in some German newsgroups people have signatures using the "begin " bug for quite some time now to show those OE posters that posting HTML to the usenet is not the only strange behaviour of their newsreader. It's funny to see this on /. so much later...
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Once again we have the raving Windows lunatics screaming about how restricting access to a *private* mailing list is somehow "arrogant", "elitist", "asinine", and a host of other colorful descriptors simply because the restriction deals with *their* mail utility - Outlook.
Let's review, shall we? Putting aside the fact that Outlook is a crock of poorly-written shit, these enraged jerk-offs seem to completely ignore the fact that the mailing list is - dare we say it? - private. Repeat that to yourselves, you outraged loons - priiiiivvaaaate. As in, the guy owns the show, he makes the rules, you either comply or take your marbles elsewhere.
Somehow, somewhere, some Windows-using twits have gotten the idea that if they're denied a private service then they have cause to bitch, complain, whine, and generally act like 9-year-olds whose parents say "no" to the candy bar in the store. To the casual observer it's both hilarious and annoying, as well as a bit mystifying - at what point did these yahoos decide that they have a god-given right to impose themselves anywhere they please? Or were these folks just born complete fuckwits with no sense of private property?
Well, guess what. In some places you just aren't wanted. That isn't arrogant, that isn't elitist, it's just the way things go. I have a website complete with forum that only allows users with a password access - does that mean I'm being elitist simply because I won't give you the password? If you think so, then don't be surprised if you look into the mirror and find the word "LOSER" tattooed on your forehead.
Of course, in this case the guy makes it painfully easy to get on to the mailing list, practically giving you a step-by-step on how to go about it with a minimum of effort. No where near as restrictive as I am with my own property - my website and my forum, to do with as I please.
His mailing list. To do with as *he* pleases. Same as you can, if you can master the basics of setting up one in the first place.
Like I said, if you don't like it take your marbles elsewhere. You don't have a right to demand entry, or worse - to demand entry on your terms. It ain't your property, it ain't a democracy, you don't have a vote nor do you deserve one.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
*Sigh*... sometimes irony goes completely over peoples' heads...
What I meant was, the original poster was complaining about how people sent him Word files, you suggested MIME as a remedy, and I just wanted to point out that that would be like saying "I hate banner ads" - "So use ADSL", i.e. the difference between content and carrier.
He doesn't want to subjugate others' behavior, except by using software in the way he thinks is right. He wants to be ethical and respect people's rights, except where he feels he has the right to impose on others how they release technologies or extensions that rely in small part on his code.
The 'Free Software' community seems to believe that subjugating people under their ideas of how things should be is better than letting Microsoft subjugate people under their (MS's) ideas. While the FSF's ideas may be better (at least I can fix the code myself), it's still subjugation.
This is why I prefer the Artistic License or the BSD licenses. They don't create stipulations, or only create stipulations on the original code. Code released under these licenses will always be available for everyone regardless of their creed.
I agree with you here. My philosophy is, here is my code, if it helps you, use it. I have already written the code, and I don't code for profit (nor would I if given the chance), so why would I mind if other people use it? Hell, if you need MY code to help you, you have bigger problems than licenses anyway.
Freedom through freedom.
--Dan
I reckon the best way to stop people complaining about "Bugs" in Outlook is if Microsoft (officially) invented their own mail system, calling it MSMail, still supporting both the RFC email standards, but only enabling sending using the MSMail standard.
:)
Then again, they're already doing this... its just not official.
I swear, if I see another Slashdot comment with "It will be interesting to see"...
However, many of the games *do* work with konqueror; in fact the one I mentioned above was the
only one I saw that doesn't work. So there is reason to be hopeful for linux on the desktop..
A working java applet :
game1
Working flash games :
game2
game3
game4
Outlook 2000 seems to be immune...
YES I use Outlook 2000. But I'm not working for myself....
Sorry I'm AC, but, well...I just can't bring myself to correct the all-seeing AnalogBoy whilst signed in.
It isn't its.
It's it's
I feel dirty.
Where the hell the moderator found any insight in your demented ramblings I don't know.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
When did we become such elitists?
When iloveyou came out? When any of a dozen other e-mail viruses came out? When Microsoft not only produces buggy software, they refuse to allow you to disable HTML mail/scripting in their e-mail clients, even though these things have been happening for years?
Let's face it, he is generating perfectly valid e-mail, as is his right. It's your (read: the users') stupid, poorly-written e-mail client that is choking. He is not outputting garbled messages, he is outputting perfectly normal messages that people with crap mail user agents can't read.
I have seen elitism, and this is not it. This is setting a reasonable bar, and watching Microsoft's software screw it up because of their incompetance. If it were a broken message format, I may agree that it is elitism, but as it stands, I do not.
--Dan
If they want to read the mail, they should get some software that is standards compliant and can claim to properly read mail. If your mail client misinterprets properly formatted mail, then too bad, so sad. I have no qualms about setting the bar at a mark that MS is too lazy to reach, but could if they cared.
--Dan
*Sigh*... sometimes irony goes completely over peoples' heads...
What I meant was, the original poster was complaining about how people sent him Word files, you suggested MIME as a remedy, and I just wanted to point out that that would be like saying "I hate banner ads" - "So use ADSL", i.e. the difference between content and carrier.
Irony's great, provided it's in context.
The original poster was complaining about malformed emails that used RTF and HTML instead of just plain text.
Read the post again:
How many Outlook badly formated HTML/word/rtf e-mail's must we put up with before we scream enough!
That's not a Word document he's talking about. Not an attachment. We're talking embedded content here.
Si
Coming soon - pyrogyra
When did we become such elitists?
When did we become egalitarian?
The point (if Nick is serious) ist not arbitrarily excluding someone, but deliberately excluding who is unwilling to adapt to accepted culture. Guess what, I'm thinking about doing the same, because those malformed emails from Outlook users are annoying me on a Linux User Group mailinglist. They intrude with their non-conformant software, they get excluded. Simple, isn't it?
If efficiency were a concern, email gateways wouldn't be limited to 7-bit character sets, so don't even try to get on that high horse.
They're not. All modern MTAs and MUAs support 8-bit quoted printable. 7-bit is for backwards compatibility for anyone whose network/server admins still live in 1982.
8-bit quoted printable works fine, and if your recipient ever gets garbled mail, then mail the administrator of the server that garbled it and tell them to upgrade, because they're holding the internet back.
--Dan
You read it your way, I'll read it mine...
Well, for starters, this HTML is crap. Physical markup, redundant tags, simply annoying. Still, I could live with this mail. What I cannot live with are the mails that say "This is an HTML message." in their plain text version.
The trick is to have 'begin', two spaces, and then something else after the two spaces. Maybe this will work.
--Dan
His isn't.
When I said "the whole point," I was referring to the point of this thread, which started when I responded to sjames whining about getting MIME messages from Outlook users. Errors is Outlook's ability to display certain standards-compliant e-mail doesn't mean that the e-mail it sends violates the standard.
some HTML email. Or maybe even a Word document...
Actually, multipart/alternative was meant to facilitate exactly the latter.
Except there is nothing to ensure that the alternatives are even the same message.
They're up to their heads in shit over there. 9 words.
Don't you see the problem? Look at all the overhead that's tacked on because some marketing bozo wants his email to look 'pretty'.
Whilst adding nothing to the content.
Sending two copies of the same message, one in plain text and the other with tons of markup seems a bit ridiculous to me.
Anyone can read the text anyway, so why not just send that. The quoted-printable ie also redundant too. Remember also that if someone wanted to be nasty they could use this technique to send 2 (possibly more) completly different messages in the same email.
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section for any class on how to use a computer.
Especially covering how to reply to emails and follow up usenet posts. SOmething many OE users appear to have big trouble with.
Two copies of the message, one in plain text and the other with markup makes perfect sense to me -- because, frankly, color and formatting can help a LOT when it comes to getting your point across.
Heck, even the original VT52 terminal creators recognized this -- no color, but the ability to do certain kinds of markup (underline, bold, inverse).
In which case it would make more sense to have a system of markup which is human readable. Then if the software supports displaying the message differently it can do that. If it dosn't then someone reading the message can see that there is some kind of markup of the text. Maybe even something like *bold* _underline_ #italic#, etc.
my plan is working perfectly! continue your bickering my children..... beezelbub
I hope your mother dies of cancer. She did you ignorant little shit.
I'd like to add a different perspective here. Perhaps by outright saying this, you *BSD folks will get off my back about my preference for GNU licencing.
Open source- any open source, whether under BSD or GNU liscence- is about choice. Vi or EMACS? GUI or CLI? *BSD or Linux? Of course, there is no one "right" answer- each person will have a different approach. For this reason, I wouldn't care about Open Source lisences except for one reason only: Microsoft.
Microsoft wants to reduce our choices (to only their products) and allowing Microsoft to "borrow" your code to include in the next version of their product only encourages this philosophy. As you said, "if you need MY code to help you, you have bigger problems"- well I think the two of us would agree Microsoft has some pretty big problems (if only legal). I don't want to encourage them or help support, in any manner, their attitude of world domination (and I boycott Microsoft and do not pirate their software- they truely get zero support from me). Until their attitude changes, I will do everything in my power to ensure my work does not get used to oppose my own philosophy (though I could care less about you, as long as respect for my choice is given). I realize this may be tossing the baby out with the bathwater, but my choice is to do so, rather than risk taking a not-strong-enough stance. And I will not criticize your choice: to do so (IMO) is hypocracy. If I am to have a choice, I ought to respect other people's choices (including the choices of using Microsoft products or to take a different stance than mine).
Tweaking emails to be unreadable in Microsoft's software, to me, is a grand joke. I would find it just as funny if it were aimed at an Open Source reader (or any other viewer) for exactly the same reasons. It exploits a flaw in the code in a novel and insightful manner; I care not what or whose code it is (though the simple nature of the exploit is critical in it being quite so funny). However, this also serves as evidence that Microsoft doesn't care about standards or users (else this level of flaw would have been caught in testing) and only adds fuel to my hatred of Microsoft products.
Do you like Japanese imports?
I really don't care what the guy has to say for himself - so I don't mind if my outlook doesn't show his messages. It's not like I'll be missing anything constructive.
That's what multipart/alternative is for -- read the spec. RFC 2046. You can write your email in Word, Illustrator, PDF or even TeX if you like, provided that your mail editor supports multipart/alternative correctly. It's polite to provide multiple representations -- eg. plain text, HTML, and El Weirdo File Format in the same message -- for downlevel clients.
There is nothing to ensure that the different versions actually are the same message though. You could quite easily have a text email with some HTML intended to work as malware...
First, I have to say that I like your response to when people send you MS Word files. Very creative.
I also agree that you should tell people why you think something they do is stupid.
> (I still do not see why people continue to use
> Outlook. The only reason that I hear from people
> is because they need the calendaring support and
> shared folders. There are other programs that do
> similar things. They are just being lazy.)
What other mailer can sync with Hotmail/MSN for offline mail management? I find that a very compelling reason to use OEX. Of course, as soon as Mozilla supports the protocol that OE uses, I'll turn to the lizard!
It's actuall informative!
:/
what a sad world
I have better uses for my money. If you want to talk to me, you can kindly not give your money to M$ and send me plain text messages that I can read.
How much is it to NOT talk to you? Whatever it is, I am sure it is worth it!
whining about getting MIME messages from Outlook users.
Actually, you were assUmeing that I was talking only about Outlook. I was also including messages from older email programs as well (whatever that abomination shipped with '95 was called). NO, it didn't mark the messages as quoted printable, it simply appended an '=' to the end of each line that didn't contain an explicit CR/LF for no good reason.
As for the other attachments, it wasn't quite a violation of RFC, it was just very rude and unnecessary.
MS had every opportunity to default to a more acceptable convention, but didn't bother. I note that until that time, many people and corps managed to implement nice, easy to use email programs that caused no problems with RFCs or conventions.
MS doesn't stand alone there, Netscape's email defaulting to HTML was equally annoying and hated by many.
If you use OEX and get a message in such a format, just drag it to your desktop, edit it with a text editor to remove the offending extra space after the 'begin', and drag it back to OEX.
Or you could just look at the message source via the 'properties' context menu item.
That doesn't excuse MS for the stupid unpatched bug of not looking for a corresponding 'end' of a UUencoded attachment...
If you had read the original note by the author who hacked his e-mail thus preventing a certain non-standards conforming Microsoft user agent from being able to parse them, you would have learned he didn't profess to be a card-carrying open source bigot - he simply wanted to restrict access to his mailing list from those using defective Microsoft products and not knowing any better otherwise. His choice - which is what *Real Choice* is all about.
Actually, you were assUmeing that I was talking only about Outlook. I was also including messages from older email programs as well (whatever that abomination shipped with '95 was called). NO, it didn't mark the messages as quoted printable, it simply appended an '=' to the end of each line that didn't contain an explicit CR/LF for no good reason.
As far as assuming goes, you referred to MS by name. I didn't know they made a mail agent other than Outlook. Your experience sounded exactly like reading a multipart MIME format message in a non-MIME-compliant mail reader, so I assumed that's what you were talking about. I had no actual knowledge of which Windows mail agents were compliant. Sorry about that.
Anyone know of a Windows GUI e-mail client that supports imap-s with unsigned certificates? I've tried Eudora and several other clients from Tucows. Only Outlook Express seems to happily work with my SSL'ed IMAP server that has a self-signed cert.
Until I can find such a client, I'll continue to use Outlook Express in spite of my desire NOT TO (of course, I do go in and turn mail messages into plain text mode instead of the default HTML mode).
"Population 1,656"
You're taking this way to seriously. Consider the source where this guy posts to:
Crackmonkey: Non-sequitor arguments and ad-hominem personal attacks.
It *IS* funny if you're bashing someone who uses outlook express and he can't even see the original message to try to respond. And despite what others have said on this story, no one -- not a single person -- requires the crackmonkey mailinglist to do his or her job. If you subscribe to that list, you agree to potentially put yourself in ridicule's way.
But in another sense the fight between Microsoft and the GPL is a fight for survival.
Lord help us if those are our only two choices!
One is no better than the other from the point of view of promoting true freedom and avoiding ideological restictions on what may and/or must be done with the program or code in question. Both the Microsoft and the GPL license models *force* restrictions on how programs are to be used. Many of us find either sort of restriction unreasonable. The more I look at the deplorable behavior of the FSF crowd (the GPL is the ONLY valid license, and nothing else is compatible with it unless it is virtually identical - and resistance is futile, we'll bully you if you don't agree with us) the more convinced I am that the BSD folks are far closer to "right" - thier license and others like it are actually considerably more free than the GPL, which places onerous (and one hopes, ultimately unenforceable) restrictions on what may be done with programs in order to advance a blatantly communist/socialist political agenda.
(I know I will be flamed unmercifully for this, but the simple fact is that although RMS and the FSF deny their communist leanings, any thoughtful reading of what Stallman has written over the years make it clear that such a denial is just a ploy to deflect legitimate criticism. Stallman is fundamentally opposed to the very idea of capitalism in the modern world, and seeks to enforce his view of a communal software state through deliberate (even admitted) abuse of copyright protections. In typical Big Brother fashion, he calls his totalitarian scheme "freedom" - while nothing could be further from the truth. I'm constantly amazed at how few people realize that what the FSF is doing will ultimately bring about a situation far worse than we have today.)
This doesn't mean I'm abcking Microsoft, either: I don't want software controlled by either Microsoft *or* the FSF - if ever a "none of the above" vote was needed, this is the place!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Actually I can see a benefit to this kind of behavior.
Previously, most commonly things that were restricted so that they didn't work on all systems worked on Windows only and not anything else. Therefore, people who didn't use Windows were excluded, and the solution for people who wanted content to "just work" was to use WIndows, whether they would want to otherwise or not.
Creating content that doesn't work on WIndows eliminates the position of Windows as the single platform on which all content can be expected to work.
If some virus writer wrote a virus that make Outlook Express put a begin word in every e-mail, OE user can't read the message they sent to them selves.
Scenario:
Joe using infected OE
Harry using infected OE
Dick using Eudora
Joe sent message to Harry & Dick
Harry can't read it
Dick can.
After a while Harry using Eudora
Harry met sally
sally can't read her friend e-mail
then Harry say "I have the same problem, but it now gones when I use Eudora"
repeat 1Million times
then MS lose 1 Million OE user.
Now...
Wouldn't it be fun????
and it also has as its theme, the killer app of the net which is email.
so the venue is the net, and the audience is
manipulated. windows visitors may have to have
a linux user explain the difficult parts.
The idea that the full potential of perhaps the
most important application by the world's richest man (tm?) is a new definition of subverting the common denominator. Applause to whom?
Perhaps some people would like mr. gates to be
mentioned on the site as artistic collaborator?
X-Message-Flag: Message text blocked: You are using a broken Microsoft mail reader which is probably being hacked as you read this.
?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
There is nothing to ensure that the different versions actually are the same message though. You could quite easily have a text email with some HTML intended to work as malware...
The same applies to the To: From: and any other fields you might pass to the app; unfortunately, security, traceability, authentication and integrity aren't really features of the SMTP spec.
Si
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Too bad folks. This is what comes from allowing the computing enviornment to become fragmented and non-standardized. Microsoft is not a standard-bearer (other than their flag), and has on many occasions BROKEN the standards that existed (vbscript instead of javascript for instance).
The simple fact of the matter is that Microsoft, IBM, Sun, etc, have set the sandard for competitive , evolutionary, cut throat tactics in the computing industry. These large corporations have repeatedly introduced non conforming, incompatible products to "gain market share". They employ marketing tactics to obfuscate the facts about their products and attempt to squash independent discovery and exposure of flaws and incompatibilities.
Well, where was the debate when I could not open my word 97 documents in WordPro or WordPerfect? Others here have mentioned the cross-browser problems. And there are still cross platform incompatibilites which have only STARTED to be addressed now that the internet is here.
Is it wrong to specifically deny access to an email to certain mail readers? Before I can answer that consider this. Is it wrong for Outlook to have features only other Outlook users can use? Your answer to both questions should be the same because the operation is the same! In either case there is data that is unreadable by an unsuitable client.
Our clever friend is not the first computing entity to make a non-compatible standard, and he will not be the last. Those of you who use outlook are as much to blame for this by supporting this behavior by the behemoths in the past. You have been warned in the past that MS products were not great, only adequate or less. You persevered in purchasing them anyway. In essence YOU SHOULD NOT BE SURPRISED THAT YOUR MS PRODUCTS DO NOT WORK TO SPEC. You've always liked it that way in the past, here you go. YOu should have been ready.
Stop crying in my beer.
...than a list that blasts anyone who posts from a Hotmail.com, aol.com or msn.com e-mail address, or who uses a bad post from one of those dns names to openly blast all from them?
It's no big deal, really.
Is that ISP in Hawaii that openly mocked/discouraged AOL users from getting an account with them still in business?
Moderators on crack rock again.
information wants to be free
More like, selectivity through obscurity. alt.hackers don't want to "secure" their channel, but just be selective about it.
This is a societal prinicipal that's been going on for years, dumbass.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I'm not sure about Outlook, but I am using Oulook Express 5.5 here. I just sent myself several emails with lines beginning with begin. Not once did it do anything to the text of the email. It arrived begin (then the rest of the email was just the plain text that I sent.
I guess MS must have fixed it.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
I just tried 3 test messages with varying amounts of text, and none of them were displayed incorrectly in Outlook Express 5 (5.50.4522.1200). And I don't know what he's talking about, about not being able to view the 'message source' either.
Has anyone actually tested this and seen it work as reported? Seems that, at the least, it is outdated (says that ALL versions have this bug), and at the most totally untrue...
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
I've actually considered this before (though my position may not so indicate). My philosophy is so:
Microsoft ripped of FreeBSD's TCP stack. What does this mean? It means that WIndows 2000 and Windows XP are better products today. They're not great, but still, MS probably spent more effort on porting the BSD TCP stack than they would have spent fixing the older one they had.
I understand the monopoly point of view, but my counterargument is that MS software is going to be omnipresent for a while, and then will collapse like Big Blue. At least in the meantime, the software no one gets fired for buying will have a good TCP stack.
--Dan
My mail client can handle it, but it just seems to be a waste when most of the time, the html tagged part doesn't look any different than the text section or if it does, it is quite annoying. It is better than the situation where the email is sent with just html tagging (and lots of it) and no MIME headers so the mail program can treat it properly. Fortunately, most of that is spam, so I don't care if I can't read it. I've never seen mailing list digests handle html email properly either. Maybe the mailing list software could rip out the html and just use the text, but none that I've subscribed to do that.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Just strip all tags between angle brackets and dump the text as is.
What is your Slash Rating?
Alright, sorry about giving away the "big secret". It's been so long (3+ years at least) I wasn't even aware they still did it.
Also - it was SO trivial I didn't know it was SUCH a secret.
Anyway - not much I can do about it. I can't edit my comment and I had mod points I was willing to spend, but I guess it's passed out of the edit window because it won't let me mod it.
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
So anytime a company takes GPL'd software and repackages it you're going to block both the repackaged software and the original?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
BTW, my gripe is not with the MIME standard or how various mailers may or may not implement it. It is with its use. Sure there are cases where having both is needed and it works great. However, for what most people use html email for, it's over kill. And yes efficiency in terms of message size does matter. Sure it could be smaller if it was compressed at the message level, but portability is more important since compression can be done when it is stored or during transmission. Even with compression, an email with text and html is going to take up more space than one with just text. This is a consideration if you are archiving thousands of messages or have metered internet access where you pay by the minute or by the byte. I hate getting lots email with duplicate content when I'm traveling since it ends up costing me more to download it. My sister didn't understand my 'only plain text email' attitude until she moved to the Caribbean for a few years. She went from a relatively fast flat rate or free service to one that was slow and had very expensive per minute charges. She started telling people to cut out the html, use Bcc if sending to a big group, and to clip address headers of messages that have been forwarded several times.
People have the same sort of gripe about those who include huge signatures or when replying to a 100 line email, cite all of it and include a line or two as the response. It's a waste of a shared resource and is inconsiderate to the recipient of the message.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Actually, a double standard does apply.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. Also any misstep my Microsoft affect a lot of people.
I you want to consider virus writers as harmless pranksters, fine by me, but I think there's other people who would disagree.
That ends up with some extraneous stuff, like the title, things like that. Might have to switch to doing it that way, though, if the things can't send out proper HTML.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
There are two points:
- Can this guy write emails that can be also read by Outlook? YES
- Can a $100.000.000.000 produce an email client that conforms to open standars? YES
So judge both and not only the guy in this list, a list which, in fact, is of no interest to you.
As for words attachments, there are supposed NOT to be read with non Microsoft products. Have you ever complained about that? I would tend to think so because you seem well intentioned.
unfinished: (adj.)
$100.000.000.000 company is what i meant...
unfinished: (adj.)
I've been seeing X-Get-A-Real-Newsreader: <blink> headers on Usenet for years, but this goes that extra step....
I've been using pocomail for quite some time now. It's small effecient, is not spyware or addware, and it has loads of features. You can use multiple mail boxes for multiple accounts, it has a junk mail filter that doesn't suck, you can skin it, it has it's own secure rendering engine that is not vulnerabl to all the outlook viruses, you can check mail headers on the server and delete useless mail and viruses from there w/o ever downloading them to your PC, you can use the bounce mail option instead of adding all the annoying >>>>>'s, and you can edit and customise all the email headers with a simple script. The list goes on. The default skin is ugly as hell but some of the availible skins are cool. I registered the program and am currently using the beta 1004 release. I think I like it more than Kmail...
It's not pronounced 'pedantic', it's pronounced 'pedantic'.
I DID finally get it to work (well, NOT work I guess). You have to start the message with "begin ", begin followed by TWO spaces. That wasn't made clear in the original story, but luckily someone posted the MS Knowledge Base Article number (Q265230) which gave that small detail. It really is a stupid bug...
----
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Looking at your arguments, I generally don't agree. However, interestingly enough, I agree with your conclusions. :-)
:-)
1) It adds little or no value.
I'm just now using HTML coding to emphasize what I'm quoting and what's new text (mine). Agreed, this could be done using quote marks in mail, but the usage of <I> and <B> makes me able to add readability value. More if we start using lists and their markup instead of ASCII. I'm sure you've seen what quoted lists look like after a few generations.
You know, I'm not talking about using <H1><FLASH> here. Just the kind of editing you'd find in a book.
2) It wastes bandwidth
I just looked at one of my mails here. The headers were 1634 bytes; the mail body was 1000. Ergo, header information in short mails make up a larger portion, relatively speaking. Also, note that I'm not talking about posting MsWord documents in HTML - those are bulky. I'm talking about bold and italic tags, the occasional HR, and embedding a sig in FONT SIZE 1.
Everything consumes bandwidth. You're putting personal opinions here as to which bandwidth is "wasted" and which is not. At some point, this needs a drilldown as to how much bandwidth feature X uses vs. its extra value for the communication; at this point, when looking at manually composed mails, we're talking about 5% maximum size increase. I really don't think that is worth crying murder over; energy is better spent elsewhere (such as reducing those damn headers).
3) Not all mail readers cope with HTML properly
This was what the entire discussion was about, and I think is a valid point. However, if you were to stop using a standard every time a new client emerged which did not support it, you'd have a hard time using any standards at all. You have to make blind assumptions about the capability of your recipient vs. the message you want to convey. This happens every day. For example, you typically assume that a person you address for the first time understands English. Every now and then, this turns out to be not true. These occasions do not and should not stop you from using English.
4) HTML spam is much worse than plain text spam.
Agree wholeheartedly. However, mostly I find this to be due to overformatting and making the mail an angry fruit salad. I've seen HTML spam with good HTML usage, too.
Regardless, you don't have to convince me spam is bad. I use SneakEmail to cope with this. Excellent service IMHO. And free. I never get spammed any more to my primary addresses.
5) I have a big, fast connection now, but I didn't two weeks ago. Until two weeks ago, i had a 33.6 dial up connection with 'phone charges per minute. HTML mails sucked then because they're bigger, and they almost invariably come with img tags
Ok, so now you're talking about HTML mail in general, and not the ones I send. Like I said, my markup generally adds a max of 100 bytes to an e-mail message, and again, I believe this to be a good tradeoff for the increased formatting.
At the company where I work, people always use HTML or rich text messages. It didn't take long before I started to dislike plaintext, which I'd used 15 years before that - mostly in FidoNet, actually.
That said, I do think that everyone should feel free to send mail in whatever format they want. Of course, everyone also has the right to request that people communicate with them in a different format. Kind of like if I started speaking Japanese to you - I'd expect you to ask me to speak English.
Hm. You know what? It actually looks like we've been in agreement most of the time.
Crystal Falcon
bah!
.. these "assertions" sound like pure propaganda.
Hmmm..perhaps you've missed the various articles on Microsoft's contracts with its OEM customers, the contracts that forbid installing multi-boot systems?
As a capitalist, I do not have a problem with this. Exclusives are nothing new in the funtastic world of licensing.
Or the way they meant consumers to have a 'jolting' experience if they wanted to select a different picture viewing software (...say, Kodak's...) over the MS-installed stuff?..
Nonsense. i've been using 3rd party graphics programs since 1995 with no problem, now even on XP. Photoshop, ACDSee
mje0w!!!1!
I reproduced it under OE6. If you're not able to reproduce it, make sure you don't have any other attachments to the mail you send to yourself (like a vCard or some such). These use mime-like headers in the message and thus the mime stuff makes the text into text and the attachment into the attachment.
To view the bad message anyway:
1. Right click the message line and select Properties
2. Click the Details Tab
3. Click "View message source"
There's the unadulterated source. Works fine.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
To do this, start the message like this:
And this will do exactly what you want. Everything above the "begin" bug will be displayed just fine. Everything below will be interpreted as a bad uuencode attachment. That's the bug.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Well, when I copy and paste this into an mbox file, fix the bullshit spaces that slashcode adds (one unfortunately in the boundary definiton in the multipart/alternative header), it seems to work OK in pine 4.33 - it attempts (mostly succeeds) to render the HTML portion of the message, while making the text portion available through an attachment list. If you select the text portion in the attachment list, you get it. If you select the html portion, it start konqueror (this is on RH7.2). Seems OK to me.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
What kind of capitalist could support buying the right not to have competition? That turns temporary advantages into insurmountable barriers, destroying the market's ability to efficiently allocate resources.
"and not accomodating people who use crap. "
This is what hardware companies should respond with when bothered by Linux users about not supporting Linux OS.