Got a meeting request that borked Outlook, so I started a-googlin'. Here's the easily found Microsoft support article:

The "not supported calendar message.ics" attachment is created when the original .ics file cannot be converted to an Outlook or Microsoft Exchange meeting type. The conversion fails if one or more of the following conditions are true:

1. The meeting contains a recurrence pattern that is available to a third-party email client, such as Lotus Notes. However, this recurrence pattern is not supported by Outlook:
2. Monthly by Date: Every month on the nth day and the nth day. Outlook only supports one nth day of the month.
3. Monthly by Day: Every month on the nth day of the week and the nth day of the week. Outlook only supports one nth day of the week in any month.
4. Custom recurrence: Outlook does not support custom recurrence patterns that are available in some third-party email clients, such as Lotus Notes.
5. The meeting contains a recurrence pattern that is defined by the RDATE property. However, the meeting does not include a corresponding RRULE property. In this case, Outlook does not open the item, even if the RDATE property specifies a supported recurrence pattern

How do you fix problem 1? Oh, so glad you asked! It's easy!

To work around this issue, have the meeting organizer create a meeting that uses a recurring pattern that Outlook supports.

Or, if it's problem 2., it's even more fun! You can go read an RFC.

For more information about the RDATE and RRULE properties, visit the following page on The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) website: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445

Wow. The worst part of this is the date of the last update to this support article.

Article ID: 2643084 - Last Review: November 9, 2011 - Revision: 2.0

These don't seem like particularly difficult thing to kludge around. How is it that such an easily definable set of edge cases can't be kludged into Outlook 2010 at some point in the last three and a half years? Are there really that many more important issues? Sounds like this could be fixed in a good weekend of work, plus a few hours of QA. Release it as an unsupported script or translation utility, for heaven's sake.

/sigh

Outlook fail.

Update: ExQuilla imported the ics file, no problems.

Labels: outlook fail

Warning: Messages you compose won't be sent using S/MIME when this option is selected.

I have no idea why that matters. Does that mean you can see *and edit* the From line? That would be a little wacky, but even then, you just couldn't S/MIME if you edited it to an address that didn't match your key, right? That doesn't seem like a particularly difficult programming exercise.

I haven't been impressed with OWA yet. I have two accounts with it at work, and for the one that'll let me, I'm using ExQuilla and Thunderbird instead. OWA's web client is still entirely too rough around the edges.

Labels: outlook fail

Note: Whether message alerts are on or off is controlled in Outlook. However, to change the sound played for message alerts, you must close Outlook and use Control Panel in Windows.

Labels: outlook fail

Is there any way to "paste as quotation" in Outlook 2011 for Mac?

Labels: email, microsoft, outlook, outlook fail

Microsoft’s launch of the Outlook.com email platform, designed to replace Hotmail over a period of time, will help the company fend off Google’s challenge for its business in the enterprise.

1. Anyone who has used Hotmail & Gmail knows Hotmail's interface doesn't just stink0rz, but stink0rz hard relative to Gmail (if nobody was better, you couldn't really complain as loudly).
2. Outlook.com will be able to sync to Exchange servers like Outlook the client.

Labels: email, gmail, hats of money, hotmail, microsoft, outlook fail

Three items:

1.) Need to have Outlook stop stripping out spaces when I paste. Two spaces in a row become one, and indented text, like code, is left justified after a paste. That's simply incorrect behavior.

2.) Need an option to stop wrapping text by default. I don't necessarily want a fixed width message when editing in plain-text format. Same issue described here.

3.) Need to have autocorrect stop inserting non-ASCII characters in plain text edit mode. For instance, an ASCII "..." becomes an ellipses single-character, which isn't expected behavior for "plain text".

div.ii.gt {
 font-family: monospace;
 font-size: 90%;
}

Labels: outlook fail