Are You Having Problems With the Outlook 2010 Beta?

I have been using the beta of Office 2010 for quite a while now, going back to before the public release! I am really happy with Office 2010, use it on my all my boxes and am also in the process of updating my PowerPoint 2007 book to be PowerPoint 2010.

Tim even wrote a post on Office 2010 a few months ago.

In early January I started noticing that some of my emails that I was sending were very large in size, sometimes over 1MB, even though I only wrote a few lines. I then started getting people contacting me and saying that I was sending them blank emails. This was especially true of users of Hotmail and other web clients using portable devices like iPhones.

After doing lots of testing I finally found out that Hotmail and other services wont display a message if it is over a certain size, and by that I mean the message itself, not a message with an attachment,

After doing more digging around online, I found that a lot of people were also having the same problems!

Then about a month ago, Microsoft published a blog post about this problem. This is part of what they said:

We have heard from some of you that you are running into an issue with large e-mail message sizes in the Outlook 2010 Beta. We want to update you on the status of this issue. There is a known bug in the Outlook 2010 Beta where the usage of number and bullet lists causes redundant CSS definitions to be included in each outgoing message.  The outgoing message might not display correctly in a mail service where there is a limit to message size, such as Gmail, BlackBerry e-mail, or Craigslist.

Restarting Outlook removes all the extra CSS for new outgoing messages, although you might see remnants of this bug when responding to a message that was already inflated.

If you use number and bullet lists, close Outlook at the end of each day, and your new outgoing messages will return to their normal size. This bug has been fixed in later Outlook 2010 builds.

Now at the time, a lot of people, myself included were not very happy with the response. I know it is a beta, but this is quite a serious problem, and for my personally it was becoming a real issue when I was sending a one line email that was coming out over 1MB in size and people just getting a blank email from me because they couldn’t read it.

What was annoying was Microsoft’s stance that it was fixed in later builds and that most people were not actually going to get access to those builds, so people were either just going to have to live with it or stop using Outlook 2010 until it came out officially.

Well I am really happy to see today that Microsoft have actually released a fix for this – I guess they got some much negative feedback about this issue that they decided to do something about it. Well done!

What they say about the fix is:

This fix prevents future messages from consuming unnecessary space, but doesn’t resize existing messages. If you reply or forward an existing message that is affected by this bug, it remains enlarged.

Well at least it’s a solution, one I am using right now! If you are running Outlook 2010 you should go download this fix now so that you don’t run into this problem.

To read about the fix, and to download either the 32 bit, 64 bit, or both versions, click here.