Create a new mail in Outlook. Look at its message ID. (You’ll need Outlook Redemption for this.) Then send it. Get the recipient to look at the message ID of the message they receive. (You can even send it to yourself, and check yourself.) Now, they’re the same message, yes? So they have the same message ID, yes?
Nope. They’re different.
Why? Why in Christ’s name would you do this? They’re the same bloody message! Why have they got different message IDs? For God’s sake!
I am very annoyed by this. That means that Outlook hands off the message to Exchange, with a message ID in it, and Exchange throws away that message ID and puts a different one on it. Why the hell would that ever be a good idea? Bloody hell!
One day I’m going to find the guy who wrote Outlook and I’m going to scream at him for things like this.
And this is Message IDs in Outlook, written , and concerning Uncategorized
Comments
Phil Wilson
pascal
what’s so bad about this?
(no irony, I really do not understand…)
sil
The bad thing is: imagine you were writing something which saved emails on request in some sort of external store. You obviously don’t want to save the same message twice in the store, even if it’s saved by different people; that would be wasteful and confusing. So you set the thing that does the saving to check if the message you’re trying to save is already saved, and disallow saving if so. The way you do this is by seeing if a message with the same message ID as this one is in the store. That’s what message IDs are for—they’re a unique key for a message, wherever it goes. Since Outlook makes two versions of the same message (my saved copy of the version I sent, and your copy that you received) have different message IDs, there’s no way of reconciling them.
That’s why it’s shit: they provide message IDs on messages, but they’ve totally defeated the point of them. More lip-service to the standards to convince you to abandon them and do everything The Microsoft Way™, which will incidentally be incompatible with everything else and make it that little bit more difficult for you to move away in the future.
Rdk
FYI - Outlook 2003 doesn’t apply a msg id, now all the workarounds implemented in support of the numerous prior version of OL need to be modified!
AAAACH!
Only scream? Jesus, the team deserve much, much worse than that.