Ms Office Tune Up

As I mentioned in the previous section, most viruses are now transmitted via email. It’s sobering to contemplate the billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man hours lost because of major virus outbreaks over the past few years. It’s saddening to realize that almost all those outbreaks were started and escalated by a simple action repeated thousands of times: opening an email attachment. For Microsoft, it was no doubt frightening to real­ize that most of the damage was caused by Outlook users because, in most cases, these viruses took advantage of security holes to not only infect each user’s PC, but also to pass along copies of the virus to other users.

Chastened by all of this, Microsoft designed Outlook 2003 with a grim determination to avoid similar problems. Most drastically, Microsoft identified around 70 file types that might potentially cause problems as attachments and then simply did not allow users to open those files. Note that Microsoft didn’t merely make it inconvenient to open these file types; no, they made it impossible without high-level tweaks (I show you this later). If some­one sends you, for instance, a file with the .exe extension (an executable file), Outlook dis­plays the following message in the Information pane:

Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments: filename

Here, filename is the name of the blocked file. If you select the File, Save Attachments command, the blocked file does not display in the submenu. There is, in short, no way to view, open, or save the attachment.

Microsoft has continued this hard-line approach in Outlook 2007. Table 12.1 runs through the file types and their associated extensions that Outlook 2007 blocks.

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