Developer support limitations for public protocols

Microsoft Customer Service and Support does not support custom solutions that use open standards for mail and calendaring, such as vCalendar, iCalendar, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, and MIME.

Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook implement various open standards. However, Microsoft does not provide developer support for those standards unless a Microsoft API implements the standard that is being used. For example, Microsoft supports sending Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) messages by using the System.Net.Mail namespace in Microsoft .NET Framework. However, Microsoft does not support customers who are trying to interpret an RFC to add an iCalendar body part by using System.Net.Mail.

If you encounter problems when you use a third-party API or an open standard, contact the API vendor for support, or refer to the documentation for the open standards. If interoperability problems occur, you should inform the API vendor that in order to operate successfully with Microsoft products, the API vendor’s products must follow the applicable interoperability specifications. If you believe that a Microsoft product is not following an open specification correctly, Microsoft Customer Service and Support provides support for those scenarios.