Bugs cause Indian PMO to dump MS Outlook: report

BANGALORE, INDIA: The office of the Indian Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, has reportedly dumped Microsoft Outlook Express for open-source email SquirrelMail following a computer virus that caused a massive breakdown in communications, said media reports on Tuesday.

According to a report in www.theregister.co.uk, the decision to go for open source was taken 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, it said.

"Many mails reportedly sent were not received in the Outlook Express and subsequently the Outlook Express was discontinued and the SquirrelMail was used," the report quoted the PMO as admitting in a hearing of the Indian Central Information Commission.

SquirrelMail is an email application written in the PHP scripting language and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.