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Halloween/Message receipts

1998-11-20 01:29:53
Something that comes close to the accusations made about the recent
Halloween report is the Outlook 98 support for
Message-Disposition-Notification to MIME header.

It seems that a proprietary format message is returned
(application/ms-tnef) with along with well known 'winmail.dat' which of
course not many people can read and plenty has been written about on the
web.  Does anyone know if Outlook can configured to produce
multipart/report MDNs?

Of all the possible implementations of MDN available it does seem that
the most 'hard-for-other' was chosen.

Now there is a choice for gateways/non ms mailers.

* Write something to understand ms-tnef winmail.dat and
  decode/understand whatever the content happens to be.
* Discard all application/ms-tnef bodies with appripriately
  labelled subjects
* Explain to the support organisation how to answer support
  calls saying they can't read their mail item.

None of the above are particularly satisfactory.  MS have plenty of X-
headers to indicate the originating mailer is an MS product so it's
surprising, to say the least, that they return tnef receipts in the
obvious knowledge that they will be meaningless to the receiver.

I suppose there is a fourth option.

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 :)

Rgds
-- 
Antony Bowesman
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