How do you file a bug report about Windows Mail?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mickey Segal
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Mickey Segal

Windows Mail is unusual in being a Microsoft program that is used by very
few people at Microsoft. Consequently, it is unclear that Microsoft even
knows about some of the bugs in the program. One of the bugs seems serious
enough that many people would dump Windows Mail if they knew about it - the
loss of hyperlinking when pasting into a message in Windows Mail. Even more
strangely, sometimes Windows Mail leaves in place a hyperlink but precedes
it by a long string beginning with "mhtml" and then a long string of numbers
(I have no idea what information these encode).

In the past there were several ways of reporting a bug to Microsoft.
However, the reporting methods that I knew about don't seem to exist
anymore, at least not at their old URLs.

How do you file a bug report about Windows Mail?
 
Mickey Segal said:
Windows Mail is unusual in being a Microsoft program that is used by very
few people at Microsoft. Consequently, it is unclear that Microsoft even
knows about some of the bugs in the program. One of the bugs seems
serious enough that many people would dump Windows Mail if they knew
about it - the loss of hyperlinking when pasting into a message in Windows
Mail. Even more strangely, sometimes Windows Mail leaves in place a
hyperlink but precedes it by a long string beginning with "mhtml" and then
a long string of numbers (I have no idea what information these encode).

In the past there were several ways of reporting a bug to Microsoft.
However, the reporting methods that I knew about don't seem to exist
anymore, at least not at their old URLs.

How do you file a bug report about Windows Mail?
Click to expand...

If by loss of hyperlinking you mean not having the blue color, that's just
an artifact of the editor. The hyperlink will work in the received message.
Send one to yourself and check.

I've never seen anything that vaguely resembles your second complaint.
 
Here is how to see the simplest form of the hyperlink problem:

1. Use "Create Mail" to open a new message in HTML format.
2. Type http://www.cnn.com
3. Hit the Enter key twice
4. Copy the first line and paste it onto the third line.
5. Send the message to yourself.

Both the first and third lines look hyperlinked (blue), both to the sender
and the recipient, but the hyperlink in the third line goes nowhere (blank).
The HTML in the message source is:

<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=3DContent-Type content=3D"text/html; =
charset=3Diso-8859-1">
<META content=3D"MSHTML 6.00.6000.16397" name=3DGENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff>
<DIV><A href=3D"http://www.cnn.com">http://www.cnn.com</A></DIV>
<DIV>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><A href=3D"">http://www.cnn.com</A></DIV></BODY></HTML>

A similar problem occurs with words hyperlinked to a URL (instead of the
http://www.cnn.com in the example above).

Copying hyperlinked text from a Web page and pasting into an email message
shows this problem if the copying is from Firefox. It seems not to happen
if the copying is from Internet Explorer.

The mhtml problem I've seen only three times and have not figured out a way
to get reproducibly.
 
Mickey Segal said:
Here is how to see the simplest form of the hyperlink problem:

1. Use "Create Mail" to open a new message in HTML format.
2. Type http://www.cnn.com
3. Hit the Enter key twice
4. Copy the first line and paste it onto the third line.
5. Send the message to yourself.

Both the first and third lines look hyperlinked (blue), both to the sender
and the recipient, but the hyperlink in the third line goes nowhere
(blank). The HTML in the message source is:
Click to expand...


Did that.
Both links work.
 
I just tried two other computers and found the empty hyperlink problem,
exactly as I described with the first computer. Assuming that Frank
followed the procedure correctly it seems like some setting controls whether
this problem occurs or not.

Each of the three computers I used had different versions of Vista. All had
Firefox as the default browser, but changing one to IE7 as default didn't
get rid of the problem. It is hard to guess what other settings could cause
this problem.

Do others see the problem or do others have ideas what settings could
trigger the behavior?
 
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