Interoperability with other mail clients - questions

[Colin Leroy]

Hi,

On my free time I help developing an open-source MUA, Sylpheed-Claws.
Since I began working on it (about three years ago), we had
interoperability problems with Outlook Express (and Outlook). The main
problems being:

a) Outlook Express doesn't understand the PGP/Mime standard, which
consists of a multipart MIME message, one part being the actual mail
and the other containing the signature. This format is documented and
standardized by the RFC 3156 (4 years old), which updates rfc 2015
(9 years old).

b) Outlook Express doesn't understand the standard way of encoding
structured header fields, such as MIME attachments filenames (MIME
parameters, in a more general way). This standard is defined by RFC
2231 (8 years old), whereas Outlook Express decodes and encodes
attached filenames using the format described in RFC 2047.
Unfortunately, the RFC 2047 applies to unstructured headers fields,
like Subject or To.

References:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3156.html
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2231.html
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2047.html

I guess my question is: Does Microsoft plan on supporting these RFCs
one day? Any ETA by luck?

Thanks,

 

[Jim Pickering]

There really is not much info about interoperability of Outlook Express with
scripting sources, but you might start looking at this site for some help:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/outlookexpress/oe/oe_entry.asp

 

[Steve Cochran]

MS is largely focusing on the next OS, where they are revising the OE
message store. I think its unlikely you will see any changes before the
next OS is released, and even then they may still not fix it to conform to
those standards. OE has never been much of a priority for MS.

steve

 

[Colin Leroy]

The OE Program Team has indicated that they don't plan on addressing
these or many other such bugs, Colin.

Bah. Thanks anyway for the answers!