Virtual Card contained emails that I had sent myself.

  • Thread starter Thread starter heavymetalbloke
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heavymetalbloke

Hi

Can anyone shed some light on this problem.

Someone in my company created a virtual card of my details (.vcf file)
using my Outlook contact profile allowing people to download it via our
web-site. However I discovered (to my horror) that when I went and
downloaded it on a friends computer at home, we found that under the
'activities' tab it contained about 20 or so personal emails of mine!

The only common link that I can think of that associates these
particular emails is that I had previously forwarded them onto my home
email address (and some had been recieved from this address).

The emails are spread out over about 5 months and certainly does not
contain EVERY email I ever forwarded to my home address.

Does anyone know how this could have happened and how I can avoid it
happening in the future??

I am using Outlook 2000 or 2003.

Many thanks in advance

HeavyMetalBloke
 
You can stop being paranoid about this. No one is monitoring the activities in your Outlook folders. A vCard is a text file that contains information about a contact. You can see this for yourself by opening it in Notepad. It contains no information about activities. It contains no information about mail messages.

The Activities page builds a list *on the fly* of items related to the current contact. It builds that list from the *current user's* Outlook folders. If someone has activities related to you, they'll see them when they open the vCard you sent, because Outlook creates one of its own contacts from the vCard. If you open that vCard yourself, Outlook creates a contact with your information on it, and that contact's Activities page will show all the activities in your folders involving you.

If you still don't believe me, save the vCard to your hard drive and open it in Notepad.
 
Hi Sue,

Thanks very much for your response. Yes I can see now that the size of
the VCF file (500 bytes) is no-where near big enough to contain 20 or
so emails with attachments.

I tried it on another friends computer and he could not see any of my
emails, although Outlook was trying to connect to something over the
internet every time he clicked on the activities tag, not sure why
there is network activity required??

Anyway thanks very much

HeavyMetalBloke
 
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