14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made available for download a fix designed to resolve issues related to message sizes in the Beta development milestone of Office 2010 Outlook. Essentially, the resolve offered by the Redmond company is set up to deal with a problem in which messages sent from the Beta Builds of the Office 2010 email client would be increased in size artificially. The software giant first made public details of the glitch in the second half of January 2010, and has been hard at work on a fix since then.
A member of the Office 2010 Outlook team revealed that early adopters test driving the next iteration of the email client could download and implement the fixes immediately from Microsoft. Two downloads are available Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 32-bit Office 2010 and Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 64-bit Office 2010.
“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. To help reduce the impact of large messages on your Inbox and mailbox storage quota, you can also run Conversation Cleanup (new feature in Outlook 2010) on large folders. On the Home tab, in the Delete group, click Clean Up. Also, consider starting new message conversations or threads when possible,” the Outlook 2010 team representative stated.
The Outlook 2010 Beta bug which the updates are designed to fix is related to the usage of number and bullet lists. Apparently, in the Beta development milestone of the Office 2010 email client, the integration of number and bullet lists in a message can cause redundant CSS definitions to also become a part of the outgoing message, increasing its size.
“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,” explained Jenny Liu, Outlook program manager in January 2010. “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.”
Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 is available for download here.