Office 2003 SP2 and anti-phishing protection for Outlook 2003 released

Yesterday, Microsoft released Office 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2).

SP2 is basically a rollup of fixes for Office (full technical details can be found in Microsoft knowledge base article 887616) but it also includes enhancements to Outlook 2003’s Junk E-mail Filter to provide protection against phishing attacks, automatically evaluating any incoming message to see if it might be suspicious, potentially fraudulent, and part of a phishing scheme. For added security, messages that are moved to the Junk E-mail folder will now have their links disabled and message format converted to Plain Text format (any message later moved out of the Junk E-mail folder will have its links enabled and the original message format restored, unless the message is considered by the Junk E-mail Filter to contain suspicious links in which case the links will remain disabled).

In the same manner as the Office 2003 Service Pack 1 release, along with the main service pack, equivalent service packs for OneNote 2003, Project 2003 and Visio 2003 were released.

Further details can be found at Microsoft Office Update.