Bug in Outlook 2003

E

Elof

I've found a bug in Outlook 2003.

Application: Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 (11.8010.6568) SP2 (English),
part of Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003)
OS: Windows 2000 5.00.2195 SP4 (Swedish)

Ok, so I send a mail to my own external email address using Outlook 2003.
In the "Rules and Alerts" I have created a rule:
* Apply this rule after I send the message
* on this machine only
* move a copy to the "sent-mail" folder
....where "sent-mail" is a folder on my external IMAP server.
(I like to keep my sent mail on the mailserver, not on my local harddrive)

When browsing the "sent-mail" folder, everything looks good in Outlook 2003.
If I use some other mail clients to browse the same folder they can't parse
the messages created by Outlook 2003.
Messages created with Outlook 2000 are parsed just fine. The same thing with
messages created with Pine, Mutt and Firefox.

The problem is reproduceable. When a user upgrade from Outlook 2000 to
Outlook 2003 their sent-mail get "corrupt" (unparsable).

So what is wrong? Well, it seems like the structure of the mail put in the
sent-mail folder by Outlook 2003 does not conform with RFC standards.

This is the mail-header of such message:

From: "Martin Olsson"
Sender: "Martin Olsson" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?B?VGVzdCDl5PY=?=
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2006 14:09:29 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <001e01c65a3c$1f5a7f80$3200c80a@nikka>
Content-Type: multipart/signed;
protocol="application/x-pkcs7-signature";
micalg=SHA1;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0018_01C65A4C.DFCBAF40"
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11
Thread-Index: AcZaPBw5bfLwKGbfQei8uq99EkHkmg==
X-OlkEid: 8CE42B2060C339E52A619C4C9EE6BFF1F5964117
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1506
Parts/Attachments:
1 Shown ~2 lines Text
2 3.2 KB Application
----------------------------------------

The problem seem to be this line: From: "Martin Olsson"
The SMTP standard state that the "From:" field must contain an email address.
When other mail clients view this message, they find a "From:"-line, but it
doesn't conform to the standards, so they show garbage or broken messages.
This is VERY annoying, especially since my sent-mail folder is shared by my
various mail clients (all using IMAP). So the list of messages stored in my
sent-mail show both correct and broken messages, depending on which email
client I was using to send that particular email and what client is browsing
the folder.


Using Outlook 2000 with the same "move a copy to sent-mail"-rule give the
following headers (who are compatible with Pine, Mutt, Firefox, Outlook 2000
and Outlook 2003):

To: "Martin Olsson" <[email protected]>
Subject: test
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 11:33:47 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <006201c6595d$34d4cdf0$3200c80a@nikka>
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.6604 (9.0.2911.0)
Content-Type: multipart/signed;
protocol="application/x-pkcs7-signature";
micalg=SHA1;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_005B_01C6596D.F6B7DD30"
Importance: Normal
X-OlkEid: 2AE4EC20A4A8D8FF65E07240A9DCF13786420001
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1506
Parts/Attachments:
1 Shown 137 lines Text
2 3 KB Application
----------------------------------------

Apparently Outlook 2000 doesn't add any "From:"-header and therefore doesn't
screw things up. The mail clients just use the information from the
From-field in the mail body and everything looks fine.


So, why does Outlook 2003 suddenly add a broken header?
Can you fix this with a patch?

/Martin

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