Slashdot Mirror
Outlook 2010 Bug Creates Monster Email Files
Julie188 writes with this snippet from Network World "Office 2010 is still in beta and a patch is already out. Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space. The Outlook product team has offered a bug fix for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, although previous emails will remain super-sized. This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry."
Oh my heavens! A bug in a beta? What is the world coming to?
rooooar
A bug in beta? From an MS product? Thanks slashdot!
So what if they're just covered in shiny material and cost 10x more than regular email files? The guy in the blue shirt told me they were worth it.
Buttercup: Westley, what about the E.O.U.S.'s?
Westley: Emails Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.
[Immediately, an E.O.U.S. attacks him]
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
And I'm not talking about UCE.
Simple abuse of email as a broadcast medium means that I receive a mean of around 100 emails per day (in a corporate environment) from dozens of different people and organisations. Sure, I have filters, dozens of them and constantly adding more, but, you know, it's really just not worth it for the numbers of useful and relevant emails which I do receive. Particularly when outlook is so dire at handling large numbers of mails.
Deleted
I'd say this this is a problem for programs that don't limit sizes. TFA doesn't state any numbers, but I wouldn't want my BlackBerry to try and open files with thousands of lines of redundant CSS code.
What's this story doing in "Mobile"?
Besides, a beta bug? Front page news? Come on... :-S
No one I know even use Office 2010 in a production system yet.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Sounds like half a solution to me. When will they fix the problem going backward?
Can they be any bigger than the emails dumbass users send around anyway? Single Lolcat pictures as ppt? A dozen numbers as a honking big Excel file?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
More than just free email limits size. Size limits are one of the variables you can set in Exchange 2003, and I believe the default maximum email size is 5MB. Given that most private organizations do not have unlimited email space, setting a limit on size is just as important as monitoring the size of the Information Store. (Fair warning, I may be wrong about the specific default max email size for exchange 2k3.)
While we're talking about it, I thought I'd use this space to inform others about how my Outlook 2010 beta is going on Windows 7 64bit. Back end is Exchange 2010 RTM.
Uninstalling it and moving back to Office 2007 32bit fixed all my problems. Some of the new features are pretty cool though, and I'm looking forward to having a true 64bit Office SOE Workstation
Because the garbage collection in .NET keeps building up until almost out of memory. Maybe it is getting attached to every new email to try and get rid of it? :)
Tokyo is so screwed!
Outlook creating unusually large e-mail files was not by design?
No, this kind of thing is why you have beta testing. It's only February and I think we already have a strong contender for "Non-story of the Year" here.
No this is the kind of thing a BETA is supposed to catch, i.e. bugs that were not caught by internal testing. The entire purpose of a beta is to find these sort of bugs.
I mean really? A bug in beta software? This is outrageous, haul Microsoft up before congress immediately.
OpenOffice 3.2. Seriously, no email problems.
oh wait...
Is /. turning into Fox News now?
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
You mean the fact that Outlook "creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space" is new?
Silly me, thinking 3K of HTML/header overhead to send a one sentence email fell into that description, because Outlook has done that forever.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
And Outlook 2007 is a *shipping product*.
Searching a subfolder inside your inbox still doesn't work (it will find items but you can't open them), It has the must unusual ideas about drag and drop attachments (sometimes it just attaches a GIF icon, but not the document itself), And my favorite, it will randomly exit with an error (an error has occured, would you like to send a report?), when right clicking selected text to change the typeface...
Outlook 2003 was a miracle of speed and stability compared to 2007, so I imagine that, given their reputation to build worse and worse products over time, Outlook 2010 will be a disaster of titanic proportions. With a slew of "features" no one ever wanted or needed.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
MS Grunt: Sir, people are reporting Outlook 2010 having a bug that creates massive file sizes.
MS Manager: Outlook's been doing that for years. Let's call it a feature.
Can't imagine why this is on here and why any of us are wasting our time replying. Dang! Just lost 30 seconds of my life.
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We don't know when this defect was introduced into the code. It could have been a recently introduced defect or one that has been around for awhile; we have no way of knowing.
Bottom line is this is a BETA release. Sometimes the simplest defect can cause very nasty looking symptoms and look like a giant problem even though it has a very simple solution. And the most harmless looking defect can really be the tip of the iceberg, a huge design defect (or whatever) that is extremely difficult to resolve. It is pretty pointless to speculate about the state of a product just by looking at defects it has at any point on the pre-release stages of the product's lifecycle, because we just don't have enough information to make a meaningful conclusion.
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
This is a Word bug according to the article, where Word is used as the email editor and in-lines a huge number of CSS styles with the same properties, thereby massively increasing email size.
I have experienced the same problem in earlier versions of Word (2003) saving as a normal .doc file. In some circumstances, nested lists create a huge number of redundant styles stored in the document file (10-50kB). This is particularly obvious when you then save as HTML (thousands of lines of CSS all declaring the same styles), and massive file bloat.
Obviously there's a recursion loop going awry somewhere, and it's been around for a while. TBH, I haven't checked to see if it's ever been reported on before, or fixed.
Events that happen elsewhere, especially in OSS, for some reason are press stopping announcements. Maybe because its due to Slashdot's bias against anything non-Linus. Had this happened to Linux, it would be called a feature and you'd be pilloried for daring to cast a flaw, erm, "feature" in Linux in such a bad light. OSS has some of the most hypocritical fanbois around. To think that OSS can be flawed, that just isn't possible in their mindset. They are really no different from jihadists in their mentality. Good thing the only things they blow up are love dolls, not bombs.
> I still don't see how this is news. It's a beta. If someone is running an important e-mail system and using a beta, they're crazy...
I should introduce you to the management at the place I work sometime... Sometimes, "crazy" is just being polite.
Just for one example (a true story, alas), suppose you have a production worker who hurts himself, hides it, then ships out a product that is *covered in blood* without bothering to clean it. Further suppose that said employee was on drugs at the time and everyone knows this and that he's been in the local police reports, having spent a few days in jail for assault. Do you:
A) Fire him.
B) Call the police.
C) Give him a paid vacation ("administrative leave with pay")
D) Blame everyone else for not noticing the blood (even though they complained about the drugged behavior)
E) A & B
F) C & D
(The correct answer is F, of course.)
But you really think that management won't do minor things like run beta products to handle email? At least email isn't that important, no matter how much they protest otherwise. We just have our customers use an old hotmail account when our email server craps out.
the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space.
Isn’t that expected behavior for all MS Office programs? ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It has to be an Easter Egg. But what is it? I, for one, would be quite happy to discover during the course of examining my work email files that there was a new way do something constructive with my day, perhaps a World of Warcraft ICC rep run. And as far as bugs go, I could always use a few more stacks of Nerubian Chitin.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Not only did Microsoft announce this on their Outlook 2010 blog back on Jan 22, but they announced the patch for it on Feb 11.
And it's beta software. We kinda expect it to make mistakes. Unlike some companies that keep their products in beta for a decade.
I've been using Office 2010 for a few months now and absolutely love it. It's not very different from 2007. Just refined, like Windows 7 is to Vista. It has a few new features in each application that users will enjoy, especially in Sharepoint environments.
One very cool feature in Outlook is the "People Pane" which appears optionally next to the message you're reading. Expand it and it will show you all of your prior appointments, emails, IMs, attachments, and more that are connected to that person. So when Fred sends you an email and says "what did you think about that other email I sent you?" it's a piece of cake to find it.
But oh noes! A beta has a bug! There must be nothing else to bash Microsoft for today.
-David
"This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes..." It's not necessarily a program that limits the size of an email message, it's an internet service or email provider that limits the message size to or from it's servers. For example, Gmail (remember, it's Google as a company that sets the limit on the message size, not the Gmail app itself) has a 25MB limit on message size, AT&T and Comcast are still 10MB, I believe, and companies like Earthlink (that are still in the ISP dark ages) are 5MB. Also, I believe Earthstink still only gives people a 100MB inbox, while most other ISPs are 1or 2GB or more.
Cheers! - Steve from MyBrotherSteve.com
Virtually no consumer software is without bugs. You try programming something that large-scale that works flawlessly, especially with the oversight of a team leader, a division manager, etc. In fact, due to all that bureaucracy, large corporations are in some ways more vulnerable to bugs than smaller teams.
You miss my point: this is the type of bug I'd expect to get caught before it reaches beta.
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And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that this is one of them. Please understand; I'm not Microsoft bashing, just wondering why this particular bug didn't get caught earlier, because it looks like it's triggered by a very common type of text.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I'm pretty sure this bug has been there since Outlook 2003.
*waits for 4GB PST file to back up over the network*
.
.
(*places spare change into piggy bank to save up for MS Exchange*)
I wonder if LookOut 2010 will render html-formatted emails using something besides Word as the engine. LookOut 2007 is awful.
I probably wouldn't have noticed this as the number of users I see who attempt to email files between 50MB and 4.2GB is amazing! They actually complain that it is taking forever to send their email or that their email has stopped working completely because they are receiving a massive file which clogs their receive queue!
Back in the Windows NT days, a coworker emailed a 36MB core dump file to his boss and accidentally sent it to everyone in the company. Email was offline for three days as the admin deleted the offending email from every user account by hand.
[grin=on]... was that a bug? Outlook and big files?
by now, I got used to big bloated files; so I didn't really care about them at all!
[grin=off] (wonderful to control those muscles on command)
am I glad I'm using Thunderbird ... since I'm still searching "The right" alternative.
The Bat from Ritlabs used to be good..
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I got the diagonal buzzword bingo with "going forward."
You owe me a beer.
To get rid of those older monster e-mails, the Outlook team suggests running Conversation Cleanup, a new feature of Outlook 2010, which moves all the older, redundant messages in the user's e-mail conversations to the Deleted Items folder. Cleanup keeps the most recent message around, Microsoft says, ensuring users have all the content in the conversation while allowing them to delete the redundant messages.
I hope this "feature" has the intelligence to scan all the earlier messages in the thread to make sure that all the people in the conversation are clueless and have blindly quoted the entire conversation in each of their posts.
I wonder how it handles branches in the conversation? Does it keep the final message in each branch?
I will create an account but . . . although it is a beta doesn't that mean its nearly ready for prime time? I've given up on Outlook 2010 because it eats opened emails. I always had a problem with Word but just as I get it running the way I want it to MS comes out with another version. 2010 beta is a challenge; like things that go bump in the night. I'm trying OpenOffice (not a beta) to see if there is a word processing program out there that meets my needs.
I've watched specifically Microsoft since 1986, my friend. They've done bugger-all for creating anything proper - they really DON'T care about fixing things, they only truly care about making use of marketing, PR, F.U.D. and the likes to push products into the market. If they truly gave a care about creating a perfect product, they'd have done so - and probably would have used Xenix as the base. Sorry to trod on your Microsoft-apologist feelings.
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire