Midnight Son is going to love this. Microsoft switched the Outlook rendering engine from IE6 to Word 2007, but…
The result? HTML e-mail that uses modern HTML 4.01 and CSS formatting is no longer displayed correctly!
Heh, that was the coolest part of the CES pressroom.
All machines we’re running sponsored versions of Vista so nobody could compose mails in their Outlook Webmail (not that any big media corporations uses Outlook…) and the only solution offered by the CES support staff was to call up our IT-department and get them to upgrade the Exchange server - great solution for someone working on a deadline in a completely different timezone.
So offcourse me and the rest of the press kept downloading and installing Firefox (and the staff kept uninstalling).
Fantastic marketing for Vista!
Too bad I ate dinner with my local MS reps after the sunday keynote and only discovered this great topic for dinner conversation monday.
O12 was shipped way too early.
I am currently working on fixing the cockups that this decision caused…
but daamn.
???
We use an older version of Exchange, and I"m able to use Outlook webmail on Vista using IE7. (Didn’t try the press room systems at CES, though.)
I know next to nothing about Exchange servers (or servers generally), but it had something to do with Exchange servers not setup in a certain way. But talking to the support guys and listening to the many other journos going “hey, why can’t I compose a mail”.
It sounded like a pretty general problem and not just a few companies running on obsolete versions of Exchange.
They did have a fix - but it had to be done on the server. And it was a Vista problem and not a IE7 problem, since IE7 on XP works fine with our server.
Edit: Oh and this is probably confusing, because it really isn’t the same problem as in the original post. But I found them related as being Vista-Outlook-webmail problems.
HTML mail is a blight on society.
Probably the only thing there that got a rise out of me in those pics was how much screen space was taken up by the new toolbar and email header view. Now THAT is a blight. We’ve come too far to lose ground to icons that big.
As for HTML email … bleh. 97% (that’s an exact and accurate number by the way) of the email I get in HTML format is spam. The 3% that comes through falls into two categories. One, vendors I have placed on my whitelist that in a sense are spamming but I said okay to it. And two, our own in-office daily news read. Losing the exact formatting of either of those wouldn’t be a crime for me at all.
Sure I feel for the devs left out in the cold here, but for me it’s not a huge issue.
Probably the only thing there that got a rise out of me in those pics was how much screen space was taken up by the new toolbar and email header view. Now THAT is a blight. We’ve come too far to lose ground to icons that big.
As for HTML email … bleh. 97% (that’s an exact and accurate number by the way) of the email I get in HTML format is spam. The 3% that comes through falls into two categories. One, vendors I have placed on my whitelist that in a sense are spamming but I said okay to it. And two, our own in-office daily news read. Losing the exact formatting of either of those wouldn’t be a crime for me at all.
Sure I feel for the devs left out in the cold here, but for me it’s not a huge issue.
The only reason I use an email program instead of gmail exclusively is because work forces it upon me. Fuck anything other than webmail. Oh, and fuck HTML email anyway.
Interesting, lot of webmail fans around here.
I don’t like webmail because as a former sysadmin I don’t trust servers administrated by some of the idiots I met in my admin days. Stuff stored server side is too vulnerable. I trust stuff I’ve downloaded and stored in my desktop PC (with backup copy on my home PC).
So I’m a big believer in email programs and currently use Outlook Express (it was free) at home and Evolution at work.
Webmail is the bane of all sysadmins and corporate security centers.
Worrying about where your email is stored when it’s been copied on thirty machines in between is pretty funny.
If you are truly worried about people reading your email, you encrypt it first.
That’s odd. What’s the official explanation?
I think the issue is that you don’t know if they’re accidentally going to lose something (like gmail did recently for a small # of users)–if everything’s stored locally, you can arrange your own backup scheme.
They’re hoping to cut the security holes that are available through explorer. Arstechnica as a more detailed article.
Except when you’re traveling, and want to access your email anywhere without hassling with VPN.
Whenever I use web mail in an insecure location (press rooms, internet cafes), I always clear the cache, delete cookies and clear history before I leave.
We were using Vista, so nobody could compose mails in their Outlook Webmail
There’s a hotfix for this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911829
Yep, I do all that too. I wasn’t surprised by that, I was more surprised by people asserting webmail was all that they needed and resenting have to use an email client program at all.
It’s not a security thing, it’s a storage safety thing. If I save an email from 2003 I want to know I’ll be able to refer to it in 2007. With local storage and my own backup schemes I’m 99.9% sure I will be. With some of the admins I’ve known, I’d only give them a 30-50% chance of not managing to accidentally lose all stored server data somewhere in that 4 year period.
Ahh. See, I don’t use email for anything important.