Standards Implementation Scorecard

So far we have discussed what the various products do in terms of helping to send messages. Before we move on to talk about the future, we should first consider the past and how well these products have fared in terms of implementing the various standards mentioned earlier.

Why is this important? Failure to properly implement standards is perhaps the biggest reason why e-mail doesn't get reliably delivered: We have all seen attachments that wouldn't attach (or detach, depending on which end we are on), garbled messages and mail that was refused to be delivered. The way each product implements Internet standards has a direct bearing on this behavior.

Let's take Microsoft Outlook Express as an example. Outlook Express was developed with several subtle quirks. For instance, it always uses the iso-8859-1 character set, even if the message you compose is entirely in ASCII text. As you may recall from our discussion on standards, the program should choose the more restrictive character set when appropriate. Outlook Express doesn't. Adding insult to injury, Outlook Express also encodes text messages in Base64 MIME encoding when it is invoked from another program. As we mentioned in our section on MAPI, this can be done from the Windows desktop with a simple right-mouse click.

And the beta version of Outlook 98 has another problem, too. Outlook 98 includes both the Sender: and From: addresses in its replies to messages when these two addresses are different. This doesn't sound like much of a problem, except that many mailing list programs put something different in the Sender: address. Again, the standards state quite carefully that the Sender: address isn't to be used for assembling replies.

We're quick to point out that Microsoft isn't the only culprit -- every product we discuss is guilty of various infractions. The trick is minimizing the number of errors prior to mass distribution of the software. Sadly, we suspect that many companies in the Internet space do not differentiate between alpha, beta and first customer ship.