I certainly take SIGNIFICANT offense at Ken's comment; I'd love for him to give a real-world example of a WILLFUL misinterpretation of the specifications from Microsoft, as he implied by his comment. I've seen lots of instances of stupidity/ignorance, but none of WILLFUL misinterpretations. His comment is a slap at the integrity of the developers of Exchange/SMTP (at least in E2K, the SMTP service used by Exchange was a deliverable of the NT group, not Exchange).
Larry, I apologize for the tone and implication of the comment. This response was certainly stronger than intended and was borne out of frustration of repeatedly answering the same questions about Outlook and Cyrus "incompatibility". I especially didn't mean of offend you, as you are known as one of the more helpful and active member of the lists.
I have no knowledge or examples of Microsoft programmers *willfully* ignoring specs. But given the number of protocol bugs that we have seen (and remain unfixed), I would question whether the specs are consulted regularly or interop testing is done with non-Microsoft products. There are plenty of ways that the SMTP GSSPI bug could have been avoided.
I'll be the first to say that Microsoft hasn't been NEARLY as forthcoming with it's specifications (I've been trying to get a NTLM SASL profile published for 7 years now, only to be rebuffed at every turn)
Rebuffed because Microsoft doesn't want it documented? Would I have any legal problem if I wrote up an informational RFC? All of the relevent information is already out there, its just not in the form of an RFC.
-- Kenneth Murchison Oceana Matrix Ltd. Software Engineer 21 Princeton Place 716-662-8973 x26 Orchard Park, NY 14127 --PGP Public Key-- http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp
