Back when Eventum was still a commercial product of mine, I tried to create some banner ads to try to promote the product. I just found some old copies lying around on my web server:
And some vertical banners that I would use on my weblog:
Isn’t that adorable? :)
So here’s the deal: Outlook 2003 doesn’t include the Message-ID header if you are sending email through a mail server other than Microsoft Exchange. There are other rants about this:
And they both point to this priceless news bulletin, which contains this gem:
According to Mark, Microsoft apparently had a few complaints from people using Outlook that their machine name was “leaked” in the Message-ID header. Instead of ignoring the complaint or making the host name used in the Message-ID header configurable, Microsoft chose to remove the Message-ID header.
Technically, Outlook 2003 is still RFC-compliant, if Microsoft accepts the fact that messages sent from Outlook 2003 may be marked as spam. Most spam filters that look at Message-ID use that as only one of many factors weighted to determine if a particular message is likely to be spam. Administrators may want to check the weighting for that particular factor and lower it to avoid having too many incoming Outlook 2003 messages marked as spam by mistake.
Mark says that, as he understands it, Microsoft’s position that they expect all mail servers to whitelist outgoing mail from Outlook 2003 users and add a Message-ID header to fill in the one that Outlook omits. To me, that seems a bit much to ask. Why couldn’t Outlook itself add its own Message-ID header that doesn’t reveal personal or computer information?
Stay tuned. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this issue.
No, that was really the last of this issue. Microsoft did indeed change the behavior in Outlook 2003, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Well, besides add yet another level of hatred here, of course.
So what does one need to do to uniquely identify messages if this is happening? Eventum uses the value on the Message-ID header to decide whether it should download a message from a POP3/IMAP server or not, so if there’s no value on that header, all hell breaks loose.
All I can think of right now is to generate some sort of checksum for each message and check the database when downloading messages to see if we already have a copy or not.
But deep down, I personally blame Peter W. Resnick (the editor of RFC2822) for using SHOULD instead of MUST for the Message-ID header. Here’s some love, Pete.
I had no idea about this, until I noticed a new section on our Wiki page that describes the installation notes for FreeBSD:
You can alternatively take the easy way and install Eventum from FreeBSD’s ports collection. At first, you need to update your ports collection using cvsup (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html). Once you updated your ports directory, use: cd /usr/ports/www/eventum && make install clean
Pretty cool :)
