Mike Lambert said:
Someone once told me that you shouldn't use the preview pane. He said
that if there was a virus attached to an e-mail and the preview pane
was displaying the message that the virus could infect the computer.
Any truth to this? I have about 5 users that have asked me this
question and I just want to make sure of the answer. We have virus
protection on all the computers that is updated automatically from our
server. It seems to me that the virus software would take care of it.
What do you think?
Thanks,
Mike
Next time remember to note WHICH version of Outlook that you use. The
reason for new versions is that each has a different feature set.
Make sure Outlook's security options are configured to use the
Restricted Sites security zone (and that this security zone is set to
its High level). This will castrate all the HTML nasties that can be
used to proliferate viruses - except for attachments but then YOU are
responsible for *not* saving and running those infected attachments. If
it isn't an e-mail from your friend (and you've checked with your friend
regarding the attachment) then you don't accept the attachment.
Regardless of where the e-mail originates, you always use anti-virus
software.
The only spam trick that the security zones won't protect you from are
web bugs or beacons. The are images, usually tiny or invisible, that
requires your e-mail client to connect back to a server to retrieve the
image file (i.e., they are linked images). The server knows that the
image got retrieved. If the image was unique to your e-mail then it is
known by the server when the image got yanked that you opened the
e-mail. For OL2002, you'll need to do a registry edit to make it always
read e-mails in plain-text mode, or get Attachment Options which is a
plug-in that has an option to do that for you (see
http://www.slipstick.com where I found a link to this plug-in).
Web bugs only work for HTML-formatted e-mails, so if you configure
Outlook to read only in text mode than this ploy doesn't work; however,
you then lose all the nice formatting of HTML formatted e-mails. I
believe OL2003 has added an option to block linked images to eliminate
web bugs. OE6 has it. If you are using OL2002, you could using
something like SpamPal (free) which is an anti-spam proxy and has an
HTML-Modify plug-in (also free) that has an option to castrate linked
images. Rather than blocking them, it renames the <IMG> tag to <XMG>
which is an invalid HTML tag so the image won't appear in the rendered
version of the HTML-formatted e-mail but you can still look at the
source code to find the URL to the image file in case you really want to
retrieve it.
Alternatively, you can close the Preview pane and instead enable the
AutoPreview mode option. This will show each e-mail item following by a
few lines of the message but only as plain text. This way, you can get
an idea of what the e-mail is about before you open it in its own window
(by double-clicking it).
