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Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

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Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#31

Post by duncan_bayne »

Many years ago I worked on the DPOP POP3 server and DList mailing list server, and did a little work on our company's SMTP and IMAP servers too.

My experience was that most clients sucked.

For example, one (Eudora?) would move IMAP messages by copy and delete (which may have been idiomatic, as I say it was a long time ago). But it wouldn't check the success of the copy operation, so a failure to copy would result in a delete, not a move.

Seems they still suck in 2016, for what seem like trivial reasons.

I mean, surely this sort of protocol interaction is very, very amenable to automated testing of some sort. We had a bunch of automated regression tests for our mail servers, written in C, back in the late nineties.

I'm genuinely uncertain whether to blame incompetence or another attempt at the strategies spelled out in the Halloween Documents: http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/faq.html

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#32

Post by narrator »

frik wrote: post #18
chris_wot wrote: post #2

It's POP3. Seriously, one of the easiest to understand mailbox protocols ever. HOW could Microsoft stuff up something like this so badly? Look, I know that mistakes can be made. But in this case, I just can't think of a single excuse that would be satisfactory.

Look what Microsoft did with *.odt (OpenOffice/LibreOffice) compatibility. Now they show bogus security and compatibility warning dialogs if you open or save such a file. Look what they do with IMAP support in Outlook 2016. Pre-loading just the "Subject" (a feature supported since 1990s) got dropped, instead of the whole email incl attachments is downloaded. And now we learn POP3 got crippled too. The common Microsof…

The funny thing about Microsoft is they use people's belief in Hanlon's razor as a competitive advantage.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#33

Post by adrianN »

frik wrote: post #25
AlexTes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use near weekly updates of a custom Android 6.0 ROM and daily use Arch Linux which is a rolling release. My work is on the web with npm keeping us bleeding edge. Other people often ask why my system does this little extra thing that's useful. Usually the answer is found by --version. Life with up to date tools can be real good. So unless I'm simply the only one using good tools, updates can be good.

It depends. With rather new still evolving ecosystems, every update is welcome. Also the security updates are important for OS and browsers. But with stagnating platforms, like Windows where tipping point was Windows XP (or Windows 7), it goes downhill with every update since then, the bubble bursted, now the user is the product, and your files get screened and searched by the platform owners. You can run software fr…

> Almost every developer already moved on to the web or emerging new platforms like the market share dominating Android or the second most popular one, iOS/OSX.

It must be nice in your filter bubble.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#34

Post by xvilka »

keithpeter wrote: post #30
frik wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look what Microsoft did with *.odt (OpenOffice/LibreOffice) compatibility. Now they show bogus security and compatibility warning dialogs if you open or save such a file. Look what they do with IMAP support in Outlook 2016. Pre-loading just the "Subject" (a feature supported since 1990s) got dropped, instead of the whole email incl attachments is downloaded. And now we learn POP3 got crippled too. The common Microsof…

"Look what Microsoft did with .odt (OpenOffice/LibreOffice) compatibility. Now they show bogus security and compatibility warning dialogs if you open or save such a file."* To be fair, oOo and LO always warn you when you want to save a file in MS Office format. Mind you, you can turn the notification off. Food for thought: one of my employers now deploys OpenOffice as well as MS Office after years of resisting that b…

OpenOffice is dead, sadly refusing to accept it, so people still continuing to install it - check the commits count for the 2015 year. While LibreOffice does a very good job improving (including Microsoft formats support).

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#35

Post by keithpeter »

xvilka wrote: post #34
keithpeter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Look what Microsoft did with .odt (OpenOffice/LibreOffice) compatibility. Now they show bogus security and compatibility warning dialogs if you open or save such a file."* To be fair, oOo and LO always warn you when you want to save a file in MS Office format. Mind you, you can turn the notification off. Food for thought: one of my employers now deploys OpenOffice as well as MS Office after years of resisting that b…

OpenOffice is dead, sadly refusing to accept it, so people still continuing to install it - check the commits count for the 2015 year. While LibreOffice does a very good job improving (including Microsoft formats support).

I tend to agree and I use LibreOffice myself. Employer is a Microsoft shop (win10/7 clients, SharePoint, outlook/exchange, active directory &c). I imagine someone just went to the oOo Web site and got the current download.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#36

Post by Aloha »

frik wrote: post #25
AlexTes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use near weekly updates of a custom Android 6.0 ROM and daily use Arch Linux which is a rolling release. My work is on the web with npm keeping us bleeding edge. Other people often ask why my system does this little extra thing that's useful. Usually the answer is found by --version. Life with up to date tools can be real good. So unless I'm simply the only one using good tools, updates can be good.

It depends. With rather new still evolving ecosystems, every update is welcome. Also the security updates are important for OS and browsers. But with stagnating platforms, like Windows where tipping point was Windows XP (or Windows 7), it goes downhill with every update since then, the bubble bursted, now the user is the product, and your files get screened and searched by the platform owners. You can run software fr…

No, its not an arbitrary decision - there are some pretty decent reasons why Microsoft declined to support running 16 bit apps via NTVDM/wowexec - virtual 8086 mode isn't supported in long mode - now certainly, they could have ported the functionality from NT 4 they used to get NTVDM working on non x86 processors (it included an i486 emulator) - but to what end, realistically, how many people are still running 16-bit only software?

Another thing I'd point out - Microsoft almost backed themselves into a corner worshiping at the shrine of backwards compatibility - to the point it was difficult to move their platform or their ecosystems software forward to use more modern, more secure and more reliable methods - so unless you've been very forward looking from the start (see IBM System Z) there is a real, fundamental and painful engineering cost to maintain a line to yesterday without great sacrifices to tomorrow.

I'd argue that the PC (be it Windows, OSX or Linux) is here to stay for the foreseeable future - it may not be the platform for everyone - but for many workloads and applications the web, or mobile simply will not do.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#37

Post by Aloha »

my5thaccount wrote: post #20
sk5t wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is horrifying indeed. I cannot imagine any reason to go on using VSS other than a very, very robust aversion to learning anything new. And yes, VSS is very buggy, although the bugs might not show up for a single-user environment always following the happy path.

I've used git on several hosts and subversion back in the day. I have no problem learning new things. Tortoise, bitbucket, github, beanstalk to name a few. I think your reaction is more horrifying than me not having a compelling reason to change the way I've been doing things without flaw for decades.

So long as it works for you, thats great - I just hope you have a migration path if/when it stops working.

I do however get the objection to newer is better, I keep getting besieged to move my projects from svn to git - to which I usually respond "Why, tell me what feature we need in git, that svn doesn't do?" I've yet to get an answer.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#38

Post by Aloha »

sixothree wrote: post #11
chris_wot wrote: post #2

It's POP3. Seriously, one of the easiest to understand mailbox protocols ever. HOW could Microsoft stuff up something like this so badly? Look, I know that mistakes can be made. But in this case, I just can't think of a single excuse that would be satisfactory.

You should see what outlook did to my IMAP folders.

I'm convinced outlook bar none is the worlds worst IMAP Client. (though I'm certain if Novell GroupWise supports IMAP, its somehow worse)

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#40

Post by cft »

microtonal wrote: post #23
raverbashing wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who recently had Android 6.0 available for their phone and decided to upgrade, exactly this Some genius at Google decided to make the phone vibrate and beep every time there is an open WiFi spot, or you need to sign up to a known one Really This kind of crap (not the only one) almost justifies the extra price for iOS

I (Moto X 2014) got a different set of bugs on M. Mostly problems with basic functionality: - When I get called, half of the time I don't see the name of the person when they are in my address book. - Music controls (which were already very basic) usually stopped working a certain amount of time after the last restart. - Music randomly pauses when browsing the web at the same time (as in, I have to open up the music…

Now that you need to bring your own phone to most carriers, there is no reason not to stick with Nexus/pure Android. The updates work there for the most part.
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