Outlook insanity
Aaron Toponce
probably 4-5 years ago, when I discovered the difference between the IMAP
and POP protocols. Following that, I learned server-side filtering, content
encoding, MIME types, and a bazillion other things about electronic mail.
At any rate, someone on the mutt-users mailing list raised an interesting
question, and I thought I would share that with you here:
http://marc.info/?l=mutt-users&m=130454329313402&w=2
Essentially, Outlook 2007 (and probably previous versions) is using the
following format to structure their paragraphs:
<p>Lorem ipsum<o:p></o:p></p>
In case you're curious, and don't know what the "<o:p></o:p>" tags are,
you're in good company. They're Microsoft Office namespace tags. I'm not
entirely clear of what they're function is, but it's common for Word,
Outlook, and other Microsoft Office products to use them when composing
HTML.
What this means for Mutt users is extra line breaks. Rather than one line
break, there are two, and I believe the "<o:p></o:p>" tags are the culprit
for adding the extra line break (seeing as though properly formatted
paragraphs wrapped in <p> tags shouldn't do doing so).
However, here's the real kicker- I sent myself a test email that had the
Lorem Ipsum content, just to troubleshoot the issue a bit. The plain text
of the mail, including headers, is roughly 4 KB. However, the HTML of the
message is about 16 KB! The message grew 4 times!!
Call me a fanboy, call me stupid, call me late for dinner, but growing a
message 4 times, just to wrap it in HTML? Really? It seems that Outlook is
sending both the plain text and the HTML-wrapped mail together, not to
mention the extra header and boundary information.
If I digitally sign, not encrypt, but sign the message with my PKI key that
my employer has allowed me to setup, the message grows to 29 KB! The
message has almost doubled, just my adding my SSL signature. The signature
alone that is attached to the mail is 1/5 the size of my entire public
GnuPG key!
Anyway, I was blown away when I saw this. I've heard of Exchange
administrators hating their jobs, because of the constant battles with it.
I would imagine that Outlook isn't helping any by composing emails on these
orders of magnitudes.
Just thought I would share. Oh, and if you have a solution to stripping out
the "<o:p></o:p>" tags in Mutt, I'm all eyes.
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