My Outlook is sending spam!! (But not really)
I was working at home late one evening this week and I was about to finish up the project I was working on and decided to make one more pass through my e-mail before going to bed. I launched Outlook to check my several accounts and, shortly after startup, I received a bunch of Delivery Status Notifications (DSNs) for messages I hadn’t sent.
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MobileMe – what a bust (but getting better)
Wow. I’ve seen some pretty dismal web launches but I must say Apple and their MobileMe launch has become the colossus of debacles. After spending several hours (and I mean, literally, eight+ hours of off and on efforts) of trying to get my Outlook 2007 data to properly sync to MobileMe and to my iPhone, I am close to giving up.
Updated at 2008-07-17 @ 4:05 pm: It appears that it is working now! Wahoo! Resetting the sync history from the MobileMe control panel never worked, but I tried to reset my sync history from iTunes (Edit->Preferences->Syncing->Reset Sync History.) I then let the next automatically scheduled sync occur and it prompted me to choose what and how to sync. I told it to take my contacts on my PC and overwrite MobileMe and told the calendar to merge. When that finished, I logged into me.com and all my contacts were there! Next, I reset sync history again from iTunes and the next sync, I selected merge for my contacts and to overwrite MobileMe’s calendar with the one on my PC. That finished, and my calendar was updated, too. Keeping my fingers crossed!
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Outlook 2007 rendering engine time warp
In the most recent version of Office, Microsoft changed the rendering engine for HTML e-mail. As an HTML e-mail publisher, we worked for weeks designing the newsletter for Arkansas Online to adhere to XHTML 1.1 strict standards. It looks beautiful when viewed using nearly any current mail application — even across platforms — Thunderbird (Firefox) on Windows, Thunderbird (Firefox) on OS X, Apple Mail on OS X, Entourage on OS X, even Outlook 2003 on Windows, all display the message nearly exactly the same. It is an excellent example of cross-platform, cross-browser beauty.
Enter Outlook 2007. Microsoft decided to use the crippled rendering engine that was built into Word instead of using Internet Explorer for their mail application. This is apparently so that messages that are created in Word (using the crippled rendering engine to compose it) will look the same when rendered by the recipient (provided they are running Outlook 2007 with the same crippled rendering engine!) The biggest problem with this thinking is that they are now using a rendering engine that wasn’t even complete back in the mid 1990s!
Well, here is my example of an e-mail mis-rendered … please listen to the developers, Microsoft! This is a bad, bad idea. /wp-content/uploads/2007/06/outlook2007.html
