My apologies for getting into this thread so late. (I am not on the mailing
list)
I'm a program manager at Microsoft on the Outlook product.
Outlook 98 was never meant to even try to be compliant with the MDN RFC. In
fact, we
consider it an unfortunate bug that Outlook 98 is even attempting to
understand these
headers as it is very obviously not compliant.
Outlook 2k, the next release of Outlook has fixed this bug, and is compliant
with the
RFC. We no longer send out TNEF'ed receipts in response to the MDN headers.
In fact,
the beta of Outlook 2k that recently was released is compliant to this RFC
and has
fixed this bug.
If you have any questions with regards to Outlook's support of this
protocol, please
feel free to send mail.
Brian Trenbeath
Outlook Program Manager
-----Original Message-----
From: Ned Freed [mailto:Ned(_dot_)Freed(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com]
Sent: Monday, November 23, 1998 2:06 PM
To: Keith Moore
Cc: Pete Resnick; Keith Moore; Ned Freed; Paul Overell;
ietf-822(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Halloween/Message receipts
sounds like a good reason to declare the whole thing Experimental,
or maybe Historic...
Not to me. Just because people can screw it up does not mean that
most will. We have massive experience with people screwing up SMTP,
MIME, etc. The fact that we have plenty of good implementations means
that we shouldn't be moving things to Experimental or Historic; to do
so would just be reactionary.
This has the potential to cause a lot more harm than the typical
screwed-up SMTP.... particularly if a huge portion of the installed
base is polluted by the irresponsibility of a major vendor.
Basically I agree. This is why I didn't reject your (Keith's) call to move
this
mechanism to experimental or historic out of hand.
However, the bottom line is that all we need to do is follow the process.
When
the time comes to review this document with an eye to moving to draft (in,
say,
6-8 months), there is still demonstrable evidence of widely used products
shipping that don't follow the standard, then it will be clear that this
protocol, for whatever reason, does not interoperate satisfactorily. And at
that time a move to historical, not experimental, will be appropriate.
And we will have learned something -- specifically, that the mechanism which
if
memory serves Keith actually proposed, while technically adequate, isn't
practical from an implementation/deployment perspective.
I hope the folks at Microsoft who are responsible for this area of
non-compliance in their products are listening and understand what the
consequences of their continued non-compliance are likely to be.
Ned