From: Lee Fisher <leefi@microsoft.com>
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 20:12:37 +0800
To: "cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: Re: "Microsoft.com" added to my KILL file
Message-ID: <c=US%a=_%p=msft%l=RED-09-MSG960106235119SI006300@red-02-imc.itg.microsoft.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


| After getting another batch of bounce messages from Microsoft's 
Postmaster,
| I have reluctantly decided to filter out all messages from Microsoft.com
| until they fix this problem with Microsoft Exchange.

I'm not in the Exchange group, not the internal operations group responsible 
for this last error, but I'll try to clarify the two issues raised by this 
thread. (But perhaps this message was pointless, as the folks I'm attempting 
to explain to have already this filtered out by their KILL file?)

MSMail and Exchange started before MIME started. They wanted to have 
"richer" email (as with MIME), and started some efforts, which put data in a 
uuencoded WINMAIL.DAT file. Exchange switched from TNEF (Transport Neutral 
something or another) to MIME. Originally the default was to send "rich" 
email but after beta feedback came in, it was changed to NOT be the default. 
So, these winmail.dat and MIME (and some TNEF) data included in some 
messages are from MSMail and Exchange clients. And while I expect that there 
are some things that our MS Mail and Exchange groups could have done better 
to introduce support for more than just ASCII messages, there is also some 
user education needed (that some forums -- such as mailing lists and 
newsgroups) often aren't the right place to post non-ASCII text like MIME 
attachments and older winmail.dat files.

Another issue (the one mentioned in the above message). Last week the mail 
server operations group on Microsoft campus experienced a few "growing 
pains" switching over to later builds of Exchange server, switching over 
from MS Mail. Apparently there were some brief problems, causing some bounce 
messages, which would have manifested from a few users @microsoft.com. I 
don't know if it due to humans (operations group error) or computers 
(Exchange server bug) that caused it. The flurry of bounces was [hopefully] 
a one-time problem.  

Lee Fisher, leefi@microsoft.com