CVS, Mailman, and HTML

[Bill McGonigle]

On Oct 25, 2004, at 13:20, Paul Lussier wrote:

> We have several Outlook users, and have not had any complaints from 
> them
> about this setup.  Of course, that could be because most of these users
> can't even figure out how to access their own IMAP folder, never mind a
> centrally shared one :)

There's a wonderful 'feature' to Outlook where it sends a command to 
the server and _then_ sets up something to listen for the response.  If 
you have a very fast server and a slower computer the response comes 
back before the client is ready to listen.  Very useful.  Every other 
mail client in the world seems to handle this correctly.  There's been 
some discussion about it on the cyrus list - some people induce load on 
their servers; I've got a patch that induces a 20ms delay in the 
command response.  It's an ugly hack so you don't want it unless you 
see "The server has dropped the connection" messages from Outlook.

> Oh, and fwiw, we're also using Kerberos for 'single sign on' as well.

Nice.

> (thought the windows side is lacking in this regard, since Outlook
> offers no GSSAPI option for auth)

Clearly every other mail client has it all wrong.  AUTH plain over TLS 
via SASL is sort of OK, except Outlook sometimes drops connections via 
TLS that it won't w/o TLS.  Oh, and its IMAP IDLE implementation is 
broken too.  Yes, that specification that Microsoft promulgated.

I've come to the conclusion that IMAP in Outlook is broken by design.  
There are just too many things wrong, too many specs not followed, and 
too much profit motive to not get it right ("Gee, I don't know... why 
don't you just use Exchange?").

This is not to say that users are not broken as well.

-Bill
----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
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