Satisfied from swallowing the official Microsoft Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2? Better loosen your belt.

Microsoft spokesman Dave Mills admitted today that, until you update your Outlook clients, you may be a victim of foo poisoning. At least that’s how we heard it.

When conditions are just right… like when an offline Outlook client suddenly goes online and dumps a six gigabyte file into Exchange’s cooker… Exchange will slow down like a super-sized man slurping his seventh slab of pie.

Unhappy network managers responded quickly, complaining that for Exchange 2003 SP2 to work, you must deploy Outlook 2003, along with its SP2. And despite all your efforts, they say, Exchange will still attach the oversize file when it replies with its Non-Delivery Report (NDR).

This, of course, doubles that bloated feeling your server, bandwidth and Outlook client felt the first time they tried to digest the message. Not good.

Sure, there are workarounds. One exasperated admin says he already took care of it:

We have implemented the same functionality on Exchange 2003 SP1 with Outlook XP by implementing the size restriction on the SMTP Virtual server.

Indeed, WindowsITPro described a fix before SP2 was released.

But if you’re really lazy… and every good network manager is… you’ll do the upgrades and avoid the heartburn.

By the way… What kind of moron uses SMTP for transferring 6GB files? Ever heard of FTP?

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