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."

Comments

A bug in a beta?

[Evro]

Oh my heavens! A bug in a beta? What is the world coming to?

Re:A bug in a beta?

[nametaken]

Exactly! So what? Isn't the point of a beta to identify bugs before the software goes into regular use?

I mean, unless you're Google, who seems to use it like a marketing term for "exclusive!".

Re:A bug in a beta?

[ls671]

Of course, IMAP, POP and SMTP are so limitative that the World needs proprietary solutions and Exchange servers in order to save itself ;-))

More seriously IMAP is fine ;-)

Re:A bug in a beta?

[grcumb]

Oh my heavens! A bug in a beta? What is the world coming to?

Indeed, though a story about recursive dependencies in any product does introduce a little welcome schadenfreude into my day, it's a pretty trivial issue.

What I found infinitely more newsworthy about the article was this:

With Outlook 2010, Microsoft is trying to take yet another stab at one of the most perplexing issues for computer users -- e-mail sprawl. Microsoft has introduced "conversation arrangement" features in previous versions of Outlook -- as have other e-mail program makers -- in which messages are saved based on the participants in the "thread" and in the order in which messages were received.

Microsoft, the company that single-handedly destroyed email communications in the 90s by placing replies at the top of the message and refusing to support inline quoting, then relying on Word (WORD!) as the default editor... has finally discovered threading!

It's touching, really. Kind of like watching an autistic adolescent say his first word....

Re:A bug in a beta?

[Wayne247]

That's not all. To this day, we still occasionally receive an email consisting of nothing more than an attachment "winmail.dat"

i eventually gave up on trying to tell mail administrators to set outlook clients properly or to set Exchange rules for outbound formating. I've installed "Lookout" plugin on all users' Thunderbirds.

It's really as if Microsoft deliberately tried to break email interoperability so they can attempt to monopolize it. Hmm.....

Re:A bug in a beta?

[Nathrael]

It's like the Magic 8 Ball told me - "Outlook not so good"!

Stop the presses!!!

[gad_zuki!]

A bug in beta? From an MS product? Thanks slashdot!

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[Zouden]

Yeah, they should really put their products through some sort of testing phase, perhaps open to members of the public so that bugs like this can be reported and fixed.

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[CannonballHead]

Uhhh. I could give you an e-mail client that you could use against real servers, too. 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...

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[StayFrosty]

What happens if I am running an important e-mail system for my company. None of the users of my email system are running any sort of beta client. Now, someone who is not employed at my company (a client or whatever...) starts using the Outlook beta and starts sending oversized messages to users on my email server. I would care about where all of that space went. If my accounts have a limited size, my users may care as well and it's nice that now I would have an answer for them.

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

*closes GMail and whistles innocently.*

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[CannonballHead]

But my question is: how is this any different from any random person sending giant e-mail addresses to your servers? Isn't that fairly easy to do, without a bug in a client?

Yes, it's a bug. Yes, it's a major bug. Yes, it's a major bug in an open beta. Of course, not having read the article, I have no idea HOW MANY people or how many e-mails it affected, how it affects them, etc. I don't know if it's sent e-mails or received e-mails - it sounds like it's sent e-mails, otherwise the ywouldn't bother saying that it's not retroactive (duh, it can't fix e-mails on someone else's servers!). But how is a bug in a beta big news?

You may as well report on a Thunderbird bug found in beta. I'm not sure that would be big news. I'm sure bugs are found in Mozilla products during lots of betas.

In fact, the Opera 10.5 beta crashed on me while going to gmail. Twice in a row. I was not surprised. And I wasn't using it for my business.

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[Kral_Blbec]

It wasnt really that big of a bug. It required sending multiple emails with bullets/ordered lists in one session of Outlook. If you dont use bullets/lists then youre safe. If you shut down Outlook occasionally, youre safe. If you rebooted your computer when you went home from work, youre safe. I'd imagine that there were very few people actually effected by this. I've been using the Beta for a while myself and have never heard about it.

Monster email files?

[richdun]

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.

EOUS?

[natehoy]

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]

Re:EOUS?

[Knackered]

[Immediately, an E.O.U.S. attacks him]

Surely the last line should be:

"You've got MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILL!"

Problem

[iamavirus]

This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry.

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.

Re:Email is largely useless anyway

[LostCluster]

E-mail's going away because broadcast messages are better served over RSS, quick person-to-person notes cam travel over IM, SMS, or Twitter, and business documents can be transferred over secured web sites. Whole lot of new ways of doing things...

Re:Mobile?

[LostCluster]

Because mobile data services easily overload when hit with large amounts of data, and this bug is creating e-mails that are much bigger than they're supposed to be. Too many beta users interacting with "production" servers and services could cause an unintentional DDOS on weaker e-mail systems.

Fixed going forward

[neiljt]

Sounds like half a solution to me. When will they fix the problem going backward?

Size Limits on Email

[sanjacguy]

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.)

Bug Creates Monster

[Anonymous Coward]

Tokyo is so screwed!

Re:How did this reach beta?

[bloodhawk]

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.

Really??

[ArcadeNut]

Is /. turning into Fox News now?

Re:Email is largely useless anyway

[hey!]

Sure you can. You use digital signatures. The problem is you need somebody with above room temperature IQ to administer the key signing infrastructure, and those folks are in short supply. That's why it's never caught on.

Re:Outlook 64bit

[MightyMartian]

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 we all know just how much better email is in 64bit.

Beta?

[msauve]

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.

Re:Beta?

[shutdown -p now]

In this case, we're talking several hundred kilobytes for a 10-line message. That's pretty damn annoying, especially when you get a long conversation in a high-volume discussion list - since now every reply will quote the original message, and carry that overhead (even if the responder is using Outlook 2007, or a different email client altogether - so long as it is capable of and is set up to produce HTML email).

What happens there, actually, is that it puts a huge (and 99% unused) CSS stylesheet inline inside the HTML body of the message.

Anyway, it's called a beta for a reason. I'm surprised anyone would even use it in production at this point. We do at MS, for the sake of that "dogfooding" thing (which is where the aforementioned annoyance comes from), but it's precisely so that such things don't slip through to the customers on release.

Re:Beta?

[cgenman]

"That's no bug... it's the Outlook 2010 installer!"

This is what makes it amusing to me. I've made thousands of dollars on Outlook's inability to handle its own PST and OST files as they get above a certain size. Sending out gigantic messages just completes that circle.

That's nothing compared to bugs in Outlook 2007

[tekrat]

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.

Re:That's nothing compared to bugs in Outlook 2007

[Hurricane78]

MS employs the “upside-down pyramid” model of software lifecycle design.

It works like this:
app = code(design(BASIC_ARCHITECTURE)) # original design and intentions are instantly forgotten
bf = marketing.getBlingFactory();
while (sales.sell(app)) {
    f = bf.getNewFeature()
    management.fuckUp(f)
    sales.addLockIn(f)
    hammerIntoSomethingPhysicallyPossible(f,IGNORE_MANAGEMENT)
    try {
        code(f)
    } catch (ManagementExpectsItToBeFinishedAlreadyError) {
        tieTogheterLooseStrings(f,[SPAGHETTI_STYLE,IGNORE_BUG_HAZARDS,MAKE_HASTE])
    }
    try {
        app.add(f)
    } catch (DoesntFitArchitectureAnymoreError) {
        p = code(new Patchwork(NASTY))
        p.add(f)
        app.add(p,USE_BRUTE_FORCE)
    }
}

So instead of doing a proper redesign and rewrite, where everything would fit nicely, they only cram more onto a tiny basis.
Windows ME is the perfect example: A 32-bit extension of a 16-bit graphical shell of an 8-bit operating system coded for a 4-bit processor by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. ;)

Slow Microsoft-Bashing Day?

[DavidD_CA]

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.