Personally...  I don:t understand why there's a need to know exactly where
I'm living - seems to be an invasion of privacy.  I don' have a fax, I don't
have a modem, and I don't have a telephone exchange, therefore the
information being asked for is ... irrelevant.

Given today's security threats though things exposed by Internet
Explorer,etc I would wonder if persons who wished to obtain details that
information could more easily do so with such requirements. You can identify
which town a person lives in and therefore which bank they're likely to have
an account at. Given the  "constant-on" internet connections that most
people have, this could be an issue for some ..... having privacy means
being secure to data theft, and in some organisations this actually is taken
seriously. Probably why they use dummy information for those types of
settings anyway.

If Micosoft has honestly adopted the settings described below, then they
would appear to be simply shooting themselves in the foot. So much for
having a common standard within the OS and having their own software
intergate with it.... Outlook needs to obtain your personal city/town
location in order to support a dialing number format ?! Huh ? Whatever
happened to the International dialing standard :

   + [country code] - [(local suffix)] telephone number

I'm not really aware of the way telephone numbers are formatted differently
within a country... perhaps someone could give an example - I've asked for
that before.

If you've got a modem, and with auto-dial setup, then I'd agree with Russ
but that's a feature of the autodialer... not of a mail program that's not
got anything to auto-dial.

As for the masking of the numbers I enter... there's never any question
about whether I have an autodial facility ? So what's the point of asking
for my own dial-out details....  seems pointless.

Furthermore, the bug I raised is being avoided without being mentioned....

the message box explicity says press cancel to stop further request for the
information, yet when you hit cancel it asks for the information again... if
that's not a bug then what is ? If they system really needs the
information.... which in all reality it doesn't since it's of pointless
value why should it offer the wrong text message within the dialogue box ?

Anyways, this isn't a big deal - the thing that really is annoying is the
defend the "100% we're correct approach" which smacks of dishonesty - if
there's a problem, don't be ashamed of admitting it - maybe it'll be looked
at later on.