Serious investigations into UNIX and Windows

[Kevin Lyons]

David Kelly wrote:
> 

> Google turned out to be a better help system than Microsoft. Of course 
> the examples I found did not look like my version of Outlook. Learned 
> Outlook behaves differently if it has an Exchange Server to talk to, 
> which mine did not.

Oh yes.  Very differently.  Outhouse was made to sell Exchange.  When 
using Outhouse with an RFC compliant IMAP server you will find all kinds 
of intentional mess-ups in Outlook.  For instance,

-Outlook will create a new mailserver imap store but will not create a 
sent items folder in it.  IF you create it manually, there is no easy 
way to tell it to move sent items from the "local profiles" folder to 
the imap sent items store.  There is a microsoft knowledge base on how 
to write a ruleset to do it; but guess what, it doesn't work on all 
systems.  According to microsoft, service pack 2 must be installed but 
again guess what, even on some systems with sp2, the rule still doesnt 
work.  oh well, clean install time. Even netscape will allow you to 
simply select a sent items folder for your imap store.

-It is almost impossible to get  outlook to stop sending attachments in 
their propreity .dat format.  Even in forced plain text mode which the 
knowledgebase says will force mime, the thing still sends in .dat.

-Ironically Outlook Express can't read .dat attachments, nor can many 
mail readers.  So in a typical situation, you send email at work then 
try from home to read a sent item with an attachment and guess what, the 
attachment doesnt show up.  Ironically, Outlook Express does handle sent 
mail properly.  Outlook Express is more standards compliant that Outlook 
proper.   Pathetic.

Bottom line is that Outlook is intentionally crippled by microsoft to 
work with IMAP, which is a serious competitor (superior scalability for 
sure) to Exchange.  And they wonder why they are hated and despised.