IE9 - Problem Viewing e-mail...

[Newman]

Here is an interesting problem...

I just migrated our Office Manager onto a new machine runing Win7 x64.
Everything went very well.

Until...

IE9 came out!

Here is the problem. We are currently using GoldMine V6.7 for our
e-mail client (as well as other things). When an e-mail comes in which
is HTML, it invokes IE for viewing of the e-mail.

Goldmine is a NETWORK based program and is NOT installed on the local
machine - it is run from the server, and accesses data on the server.

On a machine with IE8 installed, HTML e-mails can be viewed just fine.
On a machine where IE9 is installed, HTML e-mails appear blank.

The Office Manager uninstalled IE9 and she can see all her e-mails
again!

Any ideas what is going on here and how to correct it???

Thanks!

 

[Nil]

Any ideas what is going on here and how to correct it???

No, but it sounds like more of a Goldmine issue than a Windows 7 issue.
Have you contacted Goldmine? If there is a general problem with their
product and Microsoft's latest browser they must surely be aware of it
and have or are working on a solution.

 

[Newman]

As a test, I had the Office Manager uninstall and re-install IE9.

When IE9 is installed, HTML e-mails cannot be viewed, and when IE8 is
installed, HTML e-mails CAN be viewed.

Clearly, the problem lies with IE9.

Goldmine V6.7 is no longer officially supported, so that is a dead
end.

Goldmine had an issue years ago where two versions of Adbobe Acrobat
were installed on the same system, and the wrong one was invoked to
try and view e-mail attachements. Eventually this was discovered, and
an edit to a registry entry rectified the problem.

I suspect this is a similar problem - There is a registry entry
somewhere which is not passing all the parameters to IE9 - but I
cannot confirm this.

 

[Seth]

As a test, I had the Office Manager uninstall and re-install IE9.

When IE9 is installed, HTML e-mails cannot be viewed, and when IE8 is
installed, HTML e-mails CAN be viewed.

Clearly, the problem lies with IE9.

No, clearly the problem is an incompatibility between Goldmine and IE9.

Goldmine V6.7 is no longer officially supported, so that is a dead
end.

That should actually be a tell as to where the fault probably lies...

Goldmine had an issue years ago where two versions of Adbobe Acrobat
were installed on the same system, and the wrong one was invoked to
try and view e-mail attachements. Eventually this was discovered, and
an edit to a registry entry rectified the problem.

I suspect this is a similar problem - There is a registry entry
somewhere which is not passing all the parameters to IE9 - but I
cannot confirm this.

So if the program isn't passing all the required parameters to IE9, how is
that an IE9 issue?

Anyway, try this... In IE9 hit the <F12> button to bring up the developer
menu. Under Browser mode, what it is in? Whatever level it is in, dial it
back a notch. You may have to drop as far back as IE7 mode.

If you are using a Windows domain with Win7 machines that are domain joined
you can set IE compatibility modes per website and push those settings down
to all machines via GPOs.

 

[Nil]

As a test, I had the Office Manager uninstall and re-install IE9.

When IE9 is installed, HTML e-mails cannot be viewed, and when IE8
is installed, HTML e-mails CAN be viewed.

Clearly, the problem lies with IE9.

Not clear to me. Internet Explorer is a web browser. It does what it's
programmed to do. It's not designed to interoperate with Goldmine. If
Goldmine to latch onto it, it has to be programmed to do so. In other
words, it's Goldmine's programmer's responsibility to make it work, not
IE's.

I do hope you can find a solution, but if you have to stick with IE8 I
don't think that's such a terrible thing. In most corporate
environments they don't want people upgrading important OS components
on their own, anyway, because that can break important business
applications.

 

[VanguardLH]

As a test, I had the Office Manager uninstall and re-install IE9.

When IE9 is installed, HTML e-mails cannot be viewed, and when IE8 is
installed, HTML e-mails CAN be viewed.

Clearly, the problem lies with IE9.

Not necessarily. It could be an incompatibility with settings for IE
that changed from version 8 to 9. For example, the DEP option (Internet
Options -> Advanced tab -> Enable memory protection to help mitigate
online attacks) became available in IE7 but it was left disabled due to
concerns that many apps that had poor memory management would fail when
IE7 was used, so Microsoft gave developers more time to fix their
add-ons to IE by leaving DEP disabled in IE7. It was available but just
not enabled by default. Then in IE8, the DEP option was still there but
now it got enabled by default. Lots of add-ons started to puke because
DEP was turned on because of their poor code which its authors never
fixed (until now when they got forced to or otherwise convinced their
users to reduce stability and security of IE by disabling the DEP
option). So IE7 introduced the option but it was disabled by default so
add-ons continued running as before. In IE8, the option got enabled by
default which exposed all the poorly coded add-ons.

So it could be a setting used by IE9 that changes from the defaults for
prior versions that Goldmine doesn't like. With IE9 installed, have you
tried resetting it (Internet Options -> Advanced tab -> Reset)? If that
doesn't help, you might want to start investigating the settings under
the Security or Advanced tabs. You might also want to reset all the
security zones to their default settings.

Goldmine V6.7 is no longer officially supported, so that is a dead
end.

That's for sure. Read:

http://wizard-systems.typepad.com/goldmine/2011/03/goldmine-and-internet-explorer-9-latest-news.html

Apparently it's up to version 9 and *may* support IE9 but the next
version (10?) will add IE9 support. So you are using an really old
version of Goldmine. Since this is for business use, it is considered a
normal business expense to maintain software at a *supported* version.

If your company is unwilling to migrate to a supported version of
Goldmine then it also has deemed it mandatory that none of its servers
and workstations be updated beyond the software that was supported by
THAT old version of Goldmine. Stop updating your hosts! That is YOUR
decision to stick with the old version of Goldmine so it is also YOUR
decision that you must get stuck back on versions of other old software,
including Internet Explorer (and probably Windows and any other
dependencies on other software). You don't move forward in software
versions if your critical applications won't be supported.

 

[Newman]

Hi Seth!

No, clearly the problem is an incompatibility between Goldmine and IE9.

Agreed


That should actually be a tell as to where the fault probably lies...


So if the program isn't passing all the required parameters to IE9, how is
that an IE9 issue?

Well it just means that IE8 and IE9 operate differently.

Anyway, try this... In IE9 hit the <F12> button to bring up the developer
menu. Under Browser mode, what it is in? Whatever level it is in, dial it
back a notch. You may have to drop as far back as IE7 mode.

I'll check that.

If you are using a Windows domain with Win7 machines that are domain joined
you can set IE compatibility modes per website and push those settings down
to all machines via GPOs.

We are indeed in that setting, and this is good to know. However
Goldmine does an internal call to IE to use it as an HTML e-mail
viewed. We are not actually browsing a site, so I am not sure this
would help with the existing problem.

 

[Seth]

Hi Seth!



Agreed

Well that's different than your previous statement of this being a problem
with IE9.

Well it just means that IE8 and IE9 operate differently.

Well yeah. If they operated the same, what would be the point of a new
version?

I'll check that.


We are indeed in that setting, and this is good to know. However
Goldmine does an internal call to IE to use it as an HTML e-mail
viewed. We are not actually browsing a site, so I am not sure this
would help with the existing problem.

When viewing an email, is there an address bar present? What does it show?
See, even if viewing a locally hosted HTML file (like if Goldmine dumps it
down to the user TEMP folder and launches IE to view the local file from
there, that could possibly be added to the compat mode list.

Or, see if in Goldmine there is a way to set a custom HTML tag within the
top of the HTML file that will tell the browser what compatibility mode to
switch to.

Either way, honestly, this is a Goldmine issue and not IE. This would be
like blaming a Crysis2 for not running on a P4. If you want to run the
latest and greatest, the old crap has to keep up. Crysis2 won't lower
itself to run on a P4, you need a better machine to run it.

If Goldmine isn't ready to run with a more modern browser, then either dump
Goldmine, get them to keep up with technology or make sure your users don't
upgrade till Goldmine is ready.