Microsoft Outlook Is Crashing When Reading Uber Receipt Emails (bleepingcomputer.com) 45
Microsoft says the Outlook email client will crash when opening and reading emails with tables such as Uber receipt emails. BleepingComputer reports: "When opening, replying, or forwarding some emails that include complex tables, Outlook stops responding," the company explains in a support document. To make matters worse, emails with the same table contents will also cause the Microsoft Word app to stop responding. While the known issue affects Microsoft 365 customers in the Current Channel Version 2206 Build 15330.20196 and higher, it can also trigger freezes in current Beta and Current Channel Preview builds. The Microsoft Word team has already developed a fix that will be released to Beta channel customers soon, after undergoing verification. Microsoft added that customers using Outlook versions in the Current Channel would receive the fix as part of this month's Patch Tuesday, on August 9, 2022. For those unable to wait for the fix, Microsoft has provided a workaround that requires users to revert to an older build.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Doesn't CSS work on Thunderbird?
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Yes, it does. And I've found recently (last couple of months, mainly) that a lot of emails present as a totally unreadable mess of CSS and raw code in Windows Mail (which has a family resemblance to Outlook including using the Outlook Communications service in the background) but which present as intended in Thunderbird. The mess is bad enough that I have added Tbird to a couple of computers that got along fine with just Windows Mail for quite a while. Funny, though, the emails display fine in Gmail and And
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Plain text works just fine. If plain text won't cut it for your receipt some stupid reason, attach a PDF.
it's about 25 years too late for that unfortunately.
It's never too late. I've been screaming about it since the 90's, but with the changing role of email, it may finally be a fight we can win. Take to your keyboards! Demand plain-text email! It's leaner, greener, and cleaner!
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Let's not forget about incompetent email engines, as Outlook literally uses Word as its HTML editing engine.
Tables are necessary for email for a lot of stupid reasons, some of which are claimed to be for "security" despite there not being a security risk when used in the browser itself.
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A table in email for security? I'm legitimately curious. What was the "reasoning" behind that?
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It crashes insecure clients, for one.
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Because using DIV tags requires CSS for formatting and email clients support almost none. Again, for "security." Because webmail, for one, had to be able to contain the email to the bounds of the viewing pane so an email can't break out and spoof the UI. By now, this could have been worked out a little more but nobody tried.
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Ah, I see. I completely misinterpreted your comment.
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occasionally HTML tables are used to hold tabular data.
Good old MicroCrap (Score:3)
Always keeping it fresh by screwing up in yet another unexpected way...
HTML Email is Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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HTML email breaks dark mode and burns out my retina. It's actually quite rude.
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I tried to watch The Simpsons in dark mode. The characters were still yellow.
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That's a very good point. I'll bet there are other accessibility issues as well.
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Life hack: E-mails clients by default reply in the same mode as was originally sent. If you configure a client (even the Microsoft cloud thing) to send by default in text only, people will reply in text only, so all your conversations convert to text only. Most people on the other side will not know how to change back.
Downside is some clients (Microsoft) will mangle the Usenet quoting, so you have extra work of reformatting if you care about old-style pretty-printing (and the work increases at each reply).
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Right! If emacs and mailx was good enough for our parents, it's good enough for us!
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We've been faxing memes at work for decades without needing animated GIFs or CSS style sheets.
I'm confused (Score:1)
Microsoft Outlook Is Crashing When Reading Uber Receipt Emails
Is this a bug or a feature? :-)
How can they tell? (Score:2, Troll)
What's the difference between these crashes and the regular crashes Outlook has?
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They are more predictable and consistent.
Plaintext or GTFO (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are generating HTML emails with regularity, you should already know that Outlook is a completely different "browser" that has to be specifically targeted, so you should be testing any new email layouts there before going live.
Re:Plaintext or GTFO (Score:5, Informative)
Creating HTML emails is a very dark art. Every email client (from Outlook to Gmail on Android) is broken, but in different ways. Each has their own acceptable CSS and formatting. And often no fonts or external CSS.
Coding emails is 10x harder than webpages. And you have to make emails work even if images aren't downloaded.
It's a mess. Services like litmus.com make it somewhat easy to test across a variety of clients, but still hard.
As much as I like plain text, marketers like fancy formatted emails.
Code like it's 2000!
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Even plain text formats can be messy. Outlook loves to mess up my plain text formattings. :(
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Maybe it's Outlook that is messy and nothing to do with the format of the emails?
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As much as I like plain text, marketers like fancy formatted emails.
This is a very strong argument in favor of plain text email.
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Maybe someone can explain to me, but I've never understand why email clients don't just integrate a normal browser rendering engine. Microsoft uses Chromium for Edge now- so why can't they use it in Outlook/Word as well? Then we could finally be closer to having "standard" HTML/CSS in emails. (JavaScript obviously shouldn't ever be supported for emails)
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I haven't tried it lately, but you used to be able to break Outlook with plain text. All you had to do was start a line with the word "begin" and two spaces.
It caused havoc on mailing lists if you configured your email client to reply with "begin quoting ".
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Most of us just want to be able to use basic formatting, like bold and italics or bullet points. HTML email works pretty well for that use case.
Bring back Outlook Express! (Score:2)
The current overcomplicated Outlook and Windows Mail don't hold a candle to Outlook Express. Also, I really miss the viruses that OE was extremely susceptible to letting in.
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I think Klez was the first major virus that automatically ran from Outlook Express.
Outlook is not an Email Client (Score:2)
It's a calendar app with a vestigial email client plugin, which is shit.
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Its calendar app functionality is pretty awful so that's saying something. It's barely improved in 20+ years. You still can't even sort/filter the list of attendees in the useless Scheduling Assistant grid.
On the other hand, there are probably thousands of administrative assistants who are employed solely as human supplements to Outlook's incompetence- eg, looking at the calendars of several people and booking meetings in the shared free spaces.
Good ole Microsoft screw-up (Score:2)
Outlook 2016!!! (Score:2)
Don't upgrade if you don't need to upgrade. Sometimes, good enough is good enough.
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if email wasn't a solved problem in 2016 then it's not solved today either.