As Bob Hallissy wrote on Unicode List <unicode@unicode.org>
Dates: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 11:47:58 +0000

On 04-02-2002 11:15:25 John Cowan wrote:

>Outlook Express, at least the version you are using, has a bug;
>it is failing to set the overall directionality to RTL even
>though the first character is strongly RTL.  The fact that
>some implementations are buggy is hardly an argument against
>either the use of bidi or Unicode.

Of course the bidi algorithm permits using a higher-level protocol to set
the paragraph direction (see note under rule P3, TUS 3.0 page 61). Thus one
could argue that this isn't necessarily a bug in Outlook Express -- at
least it isn't a violation of the standard.