Subject: IP: Microsoft breaks Mime specification
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 06:32:04 -0500
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 11:25:45 +0000 (GMT
Standard Time)
From: Frode Greisen <Frode.Greisen@ebone.net>
To: David Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
Dave
Using Pine as my mailer I found Microsoft XP outlook users
could not read my attachments. We found this was due to a
bug in Microsoft's Outlook XP mail user agent. Other non-MS
mailers may have seen similar problems.
As of this writing, Microsoft has acknowledged the bug but
has not added it to the Knowledge Base. We have been told
that there will be a post-SP1 hotfix for Outlook XP. This
particular bug has bug fix number OfficeQFE:4781. The nature
of the bug is that messages with attachments which contain
a Content-ID header (which standard Pine attachments do) do
not show the attachment indicator (a paperclip) when viewed
with Outlook XP. So the user has no indication that the message
contains an attachment.
Pine has produced an option to remove the content-id header
which is part of the Mime specification but which is probably
not much used.
The problem is that due to the Market share of Microsoft
an error in a Microsoft program may force non-Microsoft users
to make changes, and possibly also imply a loss of mail functionality.
Frode |
