Re: [EAI] The value of simplified downgrade

[Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>]

> By comparison, in 3a, EAI recipients will see all the people that 
> received the email and Reply All will reach everyone. However, non-EAI 
> recipients will not see any of the EAI recipients, and their Reply All 
> will only reach the non-EAI recipients and the sender.

This summarizes my concerns with "partial" downgrade solutions.  Things that appear to work stop working in edge cases, and it may be difficult for the sender to predict or understand the behavior.  If it fails completely I know I need to get fixed addresses or get an updated mail client or whine at my network admin or something.  If it fails "randomly" (many users won't recognize the pattern) then they have no recourse (but to whine at the network admin, which won't help but will cost the support people a lot of money.)

In short: If it always works for me, great.  If it's always broken, then I'll do something to fix it, but if it works sometimes but not others I just get confused and it gets expensive to support.

- Shawn

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http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste