Outlook Express Not following RFC Spec

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

During my development of the NNTP plugin for NewsGator, I've come across a problem when viewing replied messages in Outlook Express. Per the RFC850 spec., if replying to a message in a newsgroup, you should add a new header named "References" that points to the Message-ID of the message being replied to. This header is then used to group messages within groups so its easier to keep track of threads.

This is all fine and dandy, except for the fact that Outlook Express doesn't recognize the References header, or even want to use it. I realize that this header is optional, but for OE to ignore it completely and chunk the rest of the headers into the body of the message when displaying, is just crazy. Due to my assumptions that OE wasn't implementing the spec entirely, I decided to play around with it some more....and it turns out that when OE replies to messages, it never appends the "References" header. Furthermore, it seems that OE groups messages based on subject only. I've found this to be the case, as I've posted several new messages with the same header, and whatta ya know, they get grouped together.

So, just to make sure that I wasn't crazy, I set out to find a few USENET readers. Well, all that I tested implemented the sepc properly, and grouped them based on the "References" header, and not on the subject. To me, this is a bug or an oversight by the team building Outlook Express...and I wouldn't mind if it got fixed (as well as many other people out there).

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