Outlook Header Annoyance

Posted by cwage @ 02/10/2006

One of the worst thing Microsoft Outlook ever did for the Internet was decide that when someone forwards a message, they don't need to include any of the SMTP headers along with it.

This, of course, renders the message useless to any poor administrator trying to track down a problem that a user is reporting. When someone, for example, forwards a message and says "Hey, I keep getting this spam message -- can you do something about it?", this is what it looks like from Outlook:

-----Original Message-----
From: Michelle Spitzer [mailto:Michelle.Spitzer@ptassoc.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 10:00 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Live webcast: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for
Associations

Can anything be done based on this? Nope. There is approximately zero information of value for any troubleshooting in this. The result is that helpdesks have to resort to convoluted instructions, for example here, where they have a simple 7 step process for the user to dig up the headers from the bowels of the Outlook menus, copy them, and manually paste into a message to report.

It was really a silly decision on behalf of Microsoft. There was no reason to remove the headers -- they could have at least merely hidden them. But hey, I guess Microsoft figured we'd all be using MAPI by now rather than that pesky open standard, SMTP, anyway, right?

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Comments

Or...if they haven't

Submitted by Blake (not verified) on Tue, 02/14/2006 - 14:16.

Or...if they haven't completely flushed the message, an administrator with full mailbox priveledges can go in and open up the email directly and pull out the headers they need.

Still an annoyance though...I agree.