On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 07:14:26PM -0600, Justin Gombos wrote:
I also think he should take advantage of this opportunity to bash
Outlook a little more, and state that it's senseless to make MTA
adjustments to cover for inadequite MUAs. I think he implies this,
but since most of the population uses Outlook, and they should be
aware that Outlook specifically is a poor implementation of a mail
client. I believe Outlook is the primary driver behind reply-to
munging mailing lists like Yahoo Groups.
Well, first of all, most of the population does not use Outlook.
Most of the population perhaps uses Outlook Express (if we take
"most" to be the winning plurality). The two are entirely different
programs.
I do use Outlook, and I have since 1997. I have made plenty of
adjustments to cover its inadequacies. (For example, I use a
plug-in that strips out all MIME- or base64-encoded mail and
converts it to text-only.) In general, modern Outlook is NOT
a poor implementation of a mail client. Old Outlook versions
certainly were. The original Outlook 97 even lost the mail if
the pop process was interrupted unexpectedly. But that is
ancient history. You don't say that a modern auto is deficient
because the 1970 Vega's engine holed pistons every 100K or so
or the 1970 Pinto's gas tank mounting-point was unsafely designed.
There are niggling annoyances in modern Outlook, just as there
are niggling annoyances in modern anything. Don't get me started
about Eudora or Pine. There are even niggling annoyances in
mutt, though it's in most every respect a finely crafted MUA
and enjoyable-to-use piece of work. A modern, patched Outlook
is not particularly dangerous, though, is what I am getting to.
Hell, it was "a poor implementation" in SpamAssassin when for
over a year-and-a-half through several versions it insisted on
calling my completely legitimate copy of Outlook "forged" and
blocked some mail of mine to various people. It is a "poor
implementation" of ClamScan that it currently has a known
base64-decode bug that causes it to miss significant numbers
of infected attachments. It is a "poor implementation" of
procmail that known bugs such as the infamous sticky H-flag or
the corrupted From_ line resulting from some filter recipes
under some builds persists in the release version. It is a
"poor implementation" of NetBSD that there are some stubborn NFS
locking problems that rear their heads and bite occasionally.
Nevertheless it's overall a superb OS. As I implied above,
there's no such thing as "bugless" (Stephen's pet moniker
notwithstanding); and some things are overall good, and some
things are overall garbage. And there's a lot of gray in
between. Don't let the excellent be the enemy of the good.
--
dman
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