making Outlook "more" secure ?

[foxyloxley]

Got this from a cousin, I would appreciate feedback as to the validity of the method.


These hints will help you stop the spamers harvesting e-mail addresses from your e-mail and prevent you from getting "auto infected" with the Outlook Express preview pane.

When you send e-mail it feels normal to put the address of the person you are sending the mail to in the "to" box and any others to be coppied in the "cc" box.
However, this means, everyone who gets a copy of the joke you just sent also gets the whole list of recipients and this is one place spammers harvest addreses from. The way to fight back is to enable the "bcc" (Blank Carbon Copy) address header and put ALL recipients in that field leaving the "to"and "cc" totally blank. To show this "bcc" address header do the following:-

Start Outlook Express, and click to create a new e-mail. At the top of the e-mail compose page select View, then check the "Show all headers" option.

The letest viruses are now able to infect file types such as gif and jpg pictures. Java executable code can also be embedded into the e-mail page (eg: those moving emoticons some people like to use) Because of this, the default settings in Outlook Express are dangerous and in particular the preview pane (The box at the bottom which shows the content of the curently highlighted e-mail) Because of this you should disable the preview pane in Outlook Express as follows:-

Start Outlook Express, and select "View" then remove the check from "Show Preview Pane"

[Soda_Popinsky]

Jpg and Gif viruses do not exist, at least as far as I know. That is a common hoax. Java applets can only be used if HTML is enabled in your emails, and if Java and Javascript is enabled as well. Moving emoticons are .gifs.

As for the preview pane, I guess it would help, but disabling HTML in the emails would take care of that as well, as any scripts would not be executed. HTML tags and Jscript would only show up as text.

Corrections welcome
Soda

[allenb1963]

The only way to secure Outlook is to uninstall it.

[MrLinus]

You can also disable HTML in Outlook Express using noHTML. I've been using it lately and it's quite nice. This should help deal with some of the issues of phishing problems.

[slarty]

The main thing is to prevent any HTML-related features from being enabled (as mittens says).

The main problem is people who send you HTML email without an acceptable text part. As far as I'm aware there is no way to tell Outlook / OE of saying

"Open HTML emails, if I ask you to on a per-message basis, but don't load images from external sites because I like my privacy"

The traditional problem was, even viewing a message in the preview pane causes it to fetch images (which may cause information to be sent to web servers).

Now I use Kmail, Kmail has the feature of being able to selectively enable HTML viewing without loading images.

As far as I'm aware, the only way of doing it in Outlook is to turn images off in IE. Unfortunately, this also affects HTML help, which is exceptionally annoying (even if you don't use IE as a standalone browser).

Slarty

[Relyt]

Yep Soda,

We don't read to much about gif & jpg virus's yet. But I would imagine it's just a matter of time. We can already hide a multitude of files and stuff inside the gifs with programs like EZ Stego and Gif Shuffle etc. EZ Stego hids the data in the least significant bits of the gif image and Shuffle tweaks the color table of the gif. So how long before we start seeing those critters as well?

cheers

[sumdumguy]

we've had this discussion before about viruses in gifs and jpegs..
sure you can hide one inside a picture..but unless the picture viewer is compromised first by some other means, it can't happen.

edit :
there's some discussion going on at another forum about this that's pretty recent with some interesting comments.. you can view that thread here.

[Info Tech Geek]

Originally posted here by allenb1963
The only way to secure Outlook is to uninstall it.

The only secure Windows Program is an UnInstalled Program..

Are you trying to figure out if the article is any good or are you asking for help securing your mail box?

[foxyloxley]

to ITG,
I received the mail from a cousin, they were just passing it through the family as a way to help. I posted it here for a second, more critical look. I have been the recipiant of more virii than I care for, and as such, if this little letter is a quick + easy way to
A) stop spammers getting addresses
B) stop trouble just by shutting the preview pane
Then I am for it, if, however the 'cure' is just a placebo ? then I will carry on as before.
Except, now I have an image to help in the re-install of my sys WHEN it gets compromised again ??

[problemchild]

As far as I'm aware there is no way to tell Outlook / OE of saying

"Open HTML emails, if I ask you to on a per-message basis, but don't load images from external sites because I like my privacy"

...which is where a good proxy/personal firewall would come into play. My company requires me to use Outlook for e-mail at work, so I use the many-years-old-but-still-the-best AtGuard to permit Outlook to connect to my POP mail server on port 110, and block all other outbound connections from Outlook. Allows you to preview the HTML message, but stops web bugs dead in their tracks.