Steve's Blog

A lot of places have carried stories lately about issues in Excel 2007 where it fails at simple maths. The original newsgroups report is here. Microsoft has published a bit of an explanation, but I don’t think they have yet grasped the root cause of the problem. Some posts are showing clearly conflicting information with what Microsoft is stating with issues such as the following in Excel:

A1 =850*77.1 –> 100000
B1 =A1+1 –> 100001 (really a display bug???)
C1 =A1-1 –> 65534
D1 =B1-C1 –> 2

This could have quite a number of effects in people who rely on Excel to do business. No fix is currently available. Excel 2003 and earlier are not affected, nor is OpenOffice.

I’ve been playing a lot with Office 2007 lately in my bid to get familiar with it for offering technical support, and as everything communication wise for me revolves around email I have been giving Outlook 2007 a pounding – especially since Outlook has a very poor track record when it comes to large IMAP mailboxes. In doing so, there are a number of issues I have encountered, however the biggest would be that any SMTP auth that uses MD5 will fail. It seems that Outlook 2007 is only successful when using LOGIN or PLAIN auth attempts when trying to send mail.

If you disable LOGIN and PLAIN authentication steps in your SMTP server, you will no longer be able to send mail – even though MD5 auth is available. In fact, to make things even more annoying, Outlook 2007 will attempt to use MD5 auth – and fail. I have used MD5 SMTP auth for years with various mail clients (mainly Mail on OSX) without any issues, so it took me a number of hours using ethereal to find out what was going on.

So what happens? Read on for my diagnosis and workaround for the issue.

Continue reading ‘Outlook 2007 MD5 SMTP auth broken’ »