Outlook 2003 AutoPreview and viruses

[Charley Kyd]

I receive nearly 200 spams per day. Roughly 10% of these are spoofed
messages from Microsoft, with a virus attached. I've never been infected by
a virus because I seldom open messages from people I don't recognize; and I
never open their attachments.

As a consequence, my virus checker rarely needs to tell me that I'm trying
to open an attachment containing a virus.

Today I installed Outlook 2003. With the first download, my virus-checker
gave me three warnings that I had opened email containing a virus.
Apparently, Outlook 2003 automatically opens all messages so that it can
display their content in the AutoPreview window.

In short, Outlook now *appears* to act like an automatic virus launcher.
Therefore, I promptly turned the AutoPreview window off. This is no great
loss because I never used the preview pane in earlier versions of Outlook,
because of similar concerns.

Questions:

1. Will the AutoPreview window launch a virus that would not have been
launched if the AutoPreview window had been turned off? If not, why not?

2. When I add spoofed messages from Microsoft to my Blocked Senders List, is
Outlook smart enough to know the difference between fake messages from
Microsoft and *real* messages?

Thanks.

Charley Kyd

 

[Charley Kyd]

Even with AutoPreview turned off, I've just discovered that an Outlook 2003
event causes my virus checker to launch a virus warning dialog whenever a
new virus arrives.

That's not a good thing.

We need a very clear explanation about how Outlook 2003 interacts with
messages that contain viruses.

Is the spam blocker the source of the problem?

Charley