Microsoft dumped after India PM's emails go AWOL
Ushers in open-source era
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The office of the Indian Prime Minister has reportedly ditched Microsoft's Outlook for open-source email following a computer virus that caused a massive breakdown in communications.
The PMO has dumped Outlook Express for SquirrelMail, it has emerged, following an outage that saw emails go missing and unanswered during a three-month period last year.
Among the lost emails sent to India's PM were those of a retired air commodore.
In a hearing of the Indian Central Information Commission, the PMO's office admitted: "Many mails reportedly sent were not received in the Outlook Express and subsequently the Outlook Express was discontinued and the SquirrelMail was used."
SquirrelMail is a PHP program that renders in HTML 4.0 and supports IMAP and SMTP. Started in 1999, SquirrelMail is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
While the migration from Outlook Express to open-source is a black eye for Microsoft, it does beg the question why it took so long for the problem to be detected - unless, of course, the Indian PM isn't actually using email and the account is for show.
As one observer put it: "WTF and WTS (What the Satyam!). It took the Government techies so much time to realize that the email system of the most powerful man in India was not working properly for 3 months!"
Thanks to friend of the Reg Techgoss for flagging this one up. ®
COMMENTS
Don't Understand
I have been personally assured by many H1-B engineers that everything Indian is better, faster and most important of all cheaper than anything that could be found in the states. Further that all of our security concerns are unfounded and that not even physical access control is necessary. This is therefore an end-user issue and who needs all that old email anyway?
Nowt wrong with OE
Why is everyone bashing Outlook Express? I've used it for the past seven years, is perfect for my needs - a simple and sturdy email client - and I've never had a problem with it. Never had a email virus either, but the email server is mostly to thank for that as it uses blacklists, whitelists, and greylisting, as well as virus scanning all emails before they are released for download to OE. I presently have just under 1Gb of emails stored in my OE .dbx folders (which are backed up daily), and OE shows no sign of slowing down.
It's not what you use that's important, it's how you use it and the security measures you take to safeguard your data.
As others have said, If the Indian PMO has lost emails, then they need to find out why, and not just blame OE. I very much doubt that the problem lies with OE.
@kain preacher
Why do you think we outsource to India? Because they're cheap! Sod the training and experience of the home grown lot, they cost too much. <sarcasm> As long as they can answer the phone and can say "Which version of Internet Explorer are you using", what's the beef? </sarcasm>
Seriously! I called up to report a fault in a dial-up server and they ask me which version of IE I am using*! My answer? Unbroadcastable.
*Especially as I was using RISC OS at the time!!!
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