In a way you could say it is a configuration problem. Starting in
Outlook 2000,
I think, MS decided to protect users by disabling their ability to read
or access
commonly sent files. "We're from the government^w^wMicrosoft, we're
here to protect you." They show up as blank attachments. The only way
to read them
is to use a non microsoft product like Opera or Mozilla. They can be
set to
warn you that a type is hazardous, but still allow you to access or save it.
It's weird -- you can send HTML, but not a link to HTML. It does a fine
job of
protecting us from all viruses (as you can tell from the latest MSCRASH
virus).
Their security patches often do more harm (as I'm discovering among others).
This forces you to buy their new products to escape the spagetti-patched
version
that you get by installing their suggested 'critical security' patches.
You end up with a product that is slower than molassas, crashes
regularly, is totally unsupported
(because MS won't support you past installation because none of their
patches are
are supported -- supplied on a 'as is' basis (because they really don't
know what
they are doing and whether or not their patches will make the problem
worse).
Who...me bitter? My outlook '02 has been hanging 90% of the time -- I can't
even get it to display my IMAP folders most of the time. All since I made
my system more secure by adding the patches. Of course it's more -- can't
connect to a crashed system. Might was well encase it in concrete while
you are at it....
This is the central flaw of closed source -- no one can review the
patches to find
out if they will fix what they are supposed to and won't make the
problem worse.
We have MS's word for it, but given their track record, it's about
50/50. They
don't seem to have enough continuity on their products in the
development teams
to keep track of products that are laden with patches. Their only hope
is whatt
they are doing now and rewriting large pieces of softwaref from scratch
-- but
that will be slow and expensive and depend greatly on a different mind set
the software industry has been griling software 'monkey's (not engineers
really) to have -- that more features is better and bugs are bugs unless
they are found by customers and the customers are wlling to pay to have them
fixed. :-(.
Somewhere buried in the MS website is a place to place the hard coded
disabled prefixes into a medium security zone, but I think this only works
for Otlk'02..
Good luck...
-l
