Microsoft's own format breakage

The following message is shown on a standard 80x25 xterm screen by mutt, exactly as I received it from Microsoft. It illustrates some of the points I have been making.

This shows the headers expanded. There are a number of points to notice:

• The message is of the MIME type text/plain (with ISO 8859-1 encoding, which doesn't seem to have been necessary). text/plain requires that messages be displayed exactly as shown, which is what mutt is doing here.
• The message was originally in quoted-printable format, and my mailer changed it. I can't see any good reason for quoted-printable nowadays, but Microsoft seems to use it frequently. It's not strictly an error, but it confuses a lot of mail readers. Look for lines ending with a = sign.
• The From: line shows another Microsoft specialty: all the names are enclosed in quotes ("Microsoft" instead of the more natural Microsoft. RFC 822 requires quotes if the name contains punctuation (so they're not optional in "Fred X. Bloggs", but Microsoft uses them all the time. Sometimes it manages to send names like "'Bloggs, Fred'". This seems invisible to “Outlook” users.
• The news purports to come from Australia (time zone presumably +1000), but the time zone of the message is -0700, the US West Coast. This observation is borderline, since it looks as if that's where the message really originated, but it's interesting to note that Microsoft mailers don't seem to understand time zones.

The following text is mainly uninteresting, but Microsoft's reproduction agreement requires that I include everything.

The long line in the middle of the page is 575 characters long.

Of course, I never registered with Microsoft. I once left a message on one of their web pages reporting severe problems with “Outlook”'s formatting (and never got a reply), so I assume that's what they mean.

The shouted disclaimer on the second half of the screen is interesting. It looks very much like part of the Berkeley License (which also shouts), but includes an extra clause AND FREEDOM FROM INFRINGEMENT. In view of the litigation current against Microsoft at the time this message was written, I find this noteworthy.

It's interesting that they write all text must be copied without modification. I suppose they would implicitly allow reformatting to make it legible, but that's not what I wanted to do here.

I copied all pages of this document, exactly as required, but I couldn't find a Microsoft copyright notice in there. I replied to Microsoft asking for advice, but after three months I no longer expect a reply. I suspect that this was an omission on their part.