I'm not volunteering to write requirements to Microsoft.  I had my
fill of that at SHARE.  But here's my list of how Microsoft Exchange
could be madr a better Internet citizen.


Problems with Micrsoft Exchange on the Internet
January 29, 1999

(1) Messages containing text received from the Internet or imported
from a file and then sent back out to the Internet are often word
wrapped at inappropriate places.

(2) Exchange bounce messages aren't in the Internet standard Delivery
Status Notification (DSN) format (RFCs 1891-4).  This means that
Exchange bounces can't be automatically processed by mailing list
servers.

(3) Users seeing messages from Internet mailing lists in their inbox
see who sent the message, but not what mailing list the message came
from.  The value of the Sender header, if present, should also be
displayed.

(4) The prefixing of quoted text in a reply does not work the way it
should.  It's not controllable on a per-client basis as with MS Mail.
The user does not see the text of the reply as with will actually be
sent on the Internet.  Unwanted >s get inserted invisibly when
responding to messages from automated mail servers.  This has been
addressed to some degree in the Outlook client.

(5) The infamous MS-TNEF files still appear occasionally, hopefully
from old versions of Exchange.  Sometimes the MS-TNEF file will contain
some sort of receipt request and the owner of a mailing list will get a
receipt from every Exchange user on the mailing list.

(6) The IMS does not add a Return-Path header when incoming messages
are delivered, as required by RFC 821.  This makes it more difficult to
solve certain problems, as the SMTP MAIL FROM address is lost.

(7) There's no way to send a message with an Internet Mail Reply-To
header.  This means that a user sending to a mailing list cannot
override the mailing list's default for Reply-To.  Fixed in Outlook 98,
but well hidden.

(8) The IMS needs better spam protection:  (1) the option of checking
that the SMTP MAIL FROM address is in the DNS and not accepting the
message if it is not, and (3) the option to prevent the IMS from being
used as a relay (with exceptions by domain name).

(9) Exchange should implement MDNs (Message Disposition Notifications)
for receipts, instead of using Return-Receipt-To.  The MDN document has
been approved as an Internet Proposed Standard and has been published
as RFC 2298.

(10) If a message is composed in HTML mode, URLs and email addresses
get doubled in the message body.