Office 2003 SP1 and enhanced junk e-mail filtering for Outlook 2003 released

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last week, Microsoft released Office 2003 Service Pack 1. The service pack includes the many public updates and hotfixes that have been released since Office 2003 debuted in autumn 2003 and adds fixes to several other problems that Microsoft hadn’t previously documented. It also offers some new security functionality including the addition of several file types to the list of those that Outlook blocks (noteably: .asp; .tmp; .vsmacros; .vss; .vst; .vsw; and .ws).

Along with the main service pack, equivalent service packs for OneNote 2003, Project 2003 and Visio 2003 were released, as well as an update for Outlook 2003’s junk e-mail filter allowing it to automatically update the safe senders list with outgoing messages’ recipients. This update replaces the outlfltr.dat file that controls the behaviour of the filter and provides a more current definition of which messages should be considered junk, based on Microsoft’s most recent analysis of mail patterns from the massive volumes of spam that Hotmail servers receive.

What you should know about spyware

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Microsoft have published an interesting article to give a heads up on spyware. Simple it may be, but practical advice nonetheless.

Even experienced administrators need to beware – whilst researching some security issues this week, out of necessity I hit on some of the more unsavoury sites on the ‘net and before I knew it, my PC was infested with all sorts of pop-ups (and probably more).

If you do need to perform a quick clean up, I can fully recommend Spybot Search and Destroy and Lavasoft Ad-Aware.

Bill Gates’ view on solving the spam problem

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve just read an interesting executive e-mail from Bill Gates in which he discusses preserving and enhancing the benefits of e-mail, whilst curbing the epidemic of junk e-mail. Not surprisingly, this includes a plug for Microsoft’s Sender ID proposed standard.

Suffering from my fair share of domain spoofing, I think that Sender ID sounds a reasonable approach to take, although doubtlessly there will be those from the open source and Macintosh communities who will take offence at any technology (co-)developed by Microsoft (even as part of the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance, whose members include AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, Comcast and BT).

One point of particular interest, was the comment around the possibility of charging for e-mail. I’ve read various articles which have suggested this (although I had guessed this was non-technical journalists failing to appreciate the idea of charging computing time to “qualify” e-mails and slow down spammers), but according to Microsoft:

    “We firmly believe that monetary charges would be inappropriate and contrary to the fundamental purpose of the Internet as an extremely efficient and inexpensive medium for communications.”

Gates also discusses third-party e-mail accreditation services.

It all makes interesting reading, and the full article is available on the Microsoft website.