Outlook blocking attaches!!!

[zm2002]

Good Day,

I need some help ... my outlook is blocking access to some attachements of my emails ... for example when I receive exe or scr files, the clip simbol of attachment is present, but I cannot see the file itself, and cannot save the attechment to disk ...

All I see is a info tip, above the "from" field, which says:
"Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments: att.scr."

My version of Outlook (on Help -> About):
"Microsoft Outlook 2000 SR-1 (9.0.0.4527)"


Thank you for your attention.
ZM

 

[c0rv1d43]

Well, it sounds as though you have the e-mail security update for Outlook 2000 installed. You could just have people who send attachments to you rename the files with the ".txt" or ".zip" extension, then rename the files to the original extensions to access them after you've saved them to your hard drive. Or you could have those people actually compress the files as .zip or .ace or .rar files and then uncompress them with the same compression utility after saving them to the hard drive. I hope that you will be very careful with these attachments. Don't even think of accessing one of these executable files unless you absolutely know the person(s) who sent it to you and know precisely what the attached file is for. Even then, you should at the very least scan it with an up-to-date anti-virus scanner BEFORE you execute it! Remember that you are more likely to get malicious code from someone who knows you than from a stranger. You're not likely to be in a stranger's address book. That's how these things propagate so rapidly, through address books that have nice, long lists of e-mail addresses -- and that's why this security patch was created in the first place.

Remember that, if the system you're talking about is at your job, you can be held accountable by your company for any damage that results from accessing one of these files. That includes liability for damages done to other companies by bots or trojans running on your own systems. If this is on a company LAN, talk with your IT department about this. Don't just take these steps on your own. Your job could be at stake.

I'm sorry if the warning seems melodramatic, but it seems like you're not terribly familiar with security issues. I didn't want to just tell you how to get around the patch without making sure that you realized that doing so can be dangerous.

- Collin

 

[zm2002]

I know how this things work ... I'm on my office LAN, but my work team often shares some exe files ... so I'm the only one with these problems ...

Is there a way of disable that feature from outlook 2000?

 

[c0rv1d43]

Okay, understood. I would check at the Slipstick Systems Web site. If anyone has a utility for changing the security settings in Outlook 2000 it would probably be them. But I would think that using the file extension changing method or archiving the files would work, too. I never used Outlook until version 2002, so I wouldn't know. My only exposure to this has been to help a few people who have approached me with issues like this. This method has always worked for them, but I can see why you might want a more elegant solution if you're going to be doing a lot of file exchanging by this method.

- Collin