Outlook 2010 Bug Creates Monster Email Files

Julie188 writes with this snippet from Network World "Office 2010 is still in beta and a patch is already out. Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space. The Outlook product team has offered a bug fix for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, although previous emails will remain super-sized. This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry."

Re:Mobile?

[LostCluster]

Because mobile data services easily overload when hit with large amounts of data, and this bug is creating e-mails that are much bigger than they're supposed to be. Too many beta users interacting with "production" servers and services could cause an unintentional DDOS on weaker e-mail systems.

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[CannonballHead]

Uhhh. I could give you an e-mail client that you could use against real servers, too. I still don't see how this is news. It's a beta. If someone is running an important e-mail system and using a beta, they're crazy...

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[StayFrosty]

What happens if I am running an important e-mail system for my company. None of the users of my email system are running any sort of beta client. Now, someone who is not employed at my company (a client or whatever...) starts using the Outlook beta and starts sending oversized messages to users on my email server. I would care about where all of that space went. If my accounts have a limited size, my users may care as well and it's nice that now I would have an answer for them.

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[CannonballHead]

But my question is: how is this any different from any random person sending giant e-mail addresses to your servers? Isn't that fairly easy to do, without a bug in a client?

Yes, it's a bug. Yes, it's a major bug. Yes, it's a major bug in an open beta. Of course, not having read the article, I have no idea HOW MANY people or how many e-mails it affected, how it affects them, etc. I don't know if it's sent e-mails or received e-mails - it sounds like it's sent e-mails, otherwise the ywouldn't bother saying that it's not retroactive (duh, it can't fix e-mails on someone else's servers!). But how is a bug in a beta big news?

You may as well report on a Thunderbird bug found in beta. I'm not sure that would be big news. I'm sure bugs are found in Mozilla products during lots of betas.

In fact, the Opera 10.5 beta crashed on me while going to gmail. Twice in a row. I was not surprised. And I wasn't using it for my business.

Re:You must be new here.

[icebraining]

You mean when they posted just yesterday that Linux Not Quite Ready For New 4K-Sector Drives [slashdot.org]? Or was it when they wrote Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala [slashdot.org]?
Oh, you must mean the story "Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In Firefox Extensions [slashdot.org]". No, no, this is it: Bug In Most Linuxes Can Give Untrusted Users Root [slashdot.org]

You're full of shit.

Slow Microsoft-Bashing Day?

[DavidD_CA]

Not only did Microsoft announce this on their Outlook 2010 blog [msdn.com] back on Jan 22, but they announced the patch for it [technet.com] on Feb 11.

And it's beta software. We kinda expect it to make mistakes. Unlike some companies that keep their products in beta for a decade.

I've been using Office 2010 for a few months now and absolutely love it. It's not very different from 2007. Just refined, like Windows 7 is to Vista. It has a few new features in each application that users will enjoy, especially in Sharepoint environments.

One very cool feature in Outlook is the "People Pane" which appears optionally next to the message you're reading. Expand it and it will show you all of your prior appointments, emails, IMs, attachments, and more that are connected to that person. So when Fred sends you an email and says "what did you think about that other email I sent you?" it's a piece of cake to find it.

But oh noes! A beta has a bug! There must be nothing else to bash Microsoft for today.

Re:Beta?

[shutdown -p now]

In this case, we're talking several hundred kilobytes for a 10-line message. That's pretty damn annoying, especially when you get a long conversation in a high-volume discussion list - since now every reply will quote the original message, and carry that overhead (even if the responder is using Outlook 2007, or a different email client altogether - so long as it is capable of and is set up to produce HTML email).

What happens there, actually, is that it puts a huge (and 99% unused) CSS stylesheet inline inside the HTML body of the message.

Anyway, it's called a beta for a reason. I'm surprised anyone would even use it in production at this point. We do at MS, for the sake of that "dogfooding" thing (which is where the aforementioned annoyance comes from), but it's precisely so that such things don't slip through to the customers on release.