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.

Comments

Borked?

[Soko]

From the site now:

Warning: Too many connections in /data/html/gnuheter/mainfile.php on line 17
Unable to select database

Shouldn't that be

"Werniga: Esha tue amany conecctionsa in der /data/hacht-ema-el/gnuheter/mainafiler.peea-haich- a-pee on der lingna sevetoon. Der databesa ist "BORK BORK BORK".

Lighten up!

[refactored]

Lighten up lad. "It's funny, laugh!"

This has nothing to do with advocacy, monopolies, anti-this or that. Its good clean schlap-stick fun.

My personal X-headers include...
X-Apparently-From: mars
X-Complaints-To: /dev/null

Hmm.
grep -E '^X-[^:]+:' < read-messages| sort -u Should give me some more fodder. Hmm, those Importance and Priority headers might do something entertaining.

Re:Stupid...

[ChrisDolan]

What was our reaction to MS disabling access to the MSN sites? And this is different exactly how?

In one case, case Microsoft software denied the user the ability to view content.
In the other case Microsoft software denied the user the ability to view content.

Hmm, I guess I see your point.

The answer, as with everything, is pr0n

[flacco]

Start posting messages with pr0n attachments that cannot be viewed in Outlook Express. OE's market share will collapse.

Microsoft's support page.

[BubbaFett]

Here's what Microsoft has to say about it.

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."

That's pretty funny.

Re:Use his power for good, not evil (or less good:

[iabervon]

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".

Microsoft's recommended fix

[coyote-san]

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.