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?

[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: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.

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]

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.

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.