* Dallman Ross <dman(_at_)nomotek(_dot_)com> [2004-08-10 16:09]:
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.
For the sake of this discussion, they are the same program, simply
because neither one of them comes stock with a reply to list
function. Both tools require address cleanup for a list reply in the
absense of special plugins or mods. And when I said "Outlook," I
meant to include OE. So for this discussion, I will use O[E] to mean
the union of the two.
I do use Outlook, and I have since 1997. I have made plenty of
adjustments to cover its inadequacies.
That makes you an atypical O[E] user in this case, so you're not
representative of the O[E] using population.
(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.
Some issues are gone, some are still there, and some are new. When I
talk about O[E], I'm talking about recent versions of present day
O[E]. I don't care about the old stuff.
And today, O[E] is a poor design. And it's deliberate. Micro$oft
does not want to play nice with other vendors, so they deliberately
build-in features that will cause others difficulty. For example, O
and OE both will take a perfectly standard PDF attachment, and
needlessly wrap it in a proprietary ms-tnef encoded blob so only other
O[E] users can read the attachment. For some O[E] users this is done
by default, and for others, they don't even have to option to turn it
off.
That's just a small example. In the interest of not deviating too
much from reply-to issues, I won't go on with that.
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.
Of course not. But in this case, reply-to-list capability has been
withheld from O[E] from day one and still today.
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.
It's senseless to brand something as a "poor implementation" because
of a few bugs. It's been proven that any software more complex than
"hello world" cannot be bugfree. So to charactorize all of it as poor
implementations defeats the purpose of comparing the different tools.
I might say that an excessive number of bugs, like 64,000 bugs, is a
poor implementation even for a OS that runs on a PC.
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.
You're making my point for me. The idea is not to harp on a few bugs
(especially if they occur in open source software and can easily be
fixed). OE is a poor implementation not just because of bugs, but
because of its deliberate unfriendlyness to other tools.
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