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Viruses & Hoaxes Info main | Prevention Tips for Everyone
Virus Prevention: About Outlook and Outlook Express(Windows)
You are free to use the email application you prefer- but Outlook Express is NOT supported at Colby. EUDORA is our supported standard. Why is this?
Outlook and Outlook Express are vulnerable to attack from viruses and hackers through multiple security holes. Microsoft provides patches, but their performance is less than optimum even when they are properly installed.
Case in
Point: the Preview Pane
This is the split screen that shows you the content of an email message
when you run the cursor over the message's name in the list of
messages. What you DON'T realize is that simply PREVIEWING an email
in Outlook can cause a virus infection on your computer if that email
has a virus-infected attachment. THAT BEARS REPEATING...if you
use Outlook and have the Preview Pane on you can be infected with a
virus without even opening the infected message!!!
What happens then? The viral payload is activated, unbeknownst to you. The virus looks into your email address book and starts spewing out infected messages to everyone in it. The virus could also grab random data from your hard drive- including things you'd prefer to keep private- and include that information in the messages it sends out over the Internet.
Other Issues: patches and fixes applied to Outlook tend to have negative effects on other installed software, particularly Word, Excel and Powerpoint. You can find a (long) list of advisories on this at http://search.microsoft.com - just type in "outlook known issues" in the "search for" box.
IF YOU
STILL USE OUTLOOK, PLEASE TURN OFF THE PREVIEW PANE
and DO NOT OPEN ANY ATTACHMENTS YOU'RE NOT EXPECTING!!! Go to the
View menu | Layout |uncheck View Preview Pane.(Different versions of Outlook
might have slightly different instructions- refer to the application's
Help files if unclear.)
FYI- You can see Microsoft's Outlook FAQ & support documents here:
Outlook
2000 | 2002
| Express
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