For safety's sake, read your email before you read it! Courtesy of http://www.GeerCom.com.
Geer Communications - your on time technology writer!

Welcome!

You know how when you're not sure if you want an email you either don't open it and perhaps lose something you want or you open it and get a virus from a spammer? Well, now all that can be avoided in Outlook Express 6.

Attachments are usually safe until you open them as are HTML mail and mail objects like images and graphics. By the time you open the email, you usually have enough information to know whether the attachment is safe; if the body of the email looks suspicious, the attachment certainly is.

But, if you are reading mail in HTML, you won't know what you've really got in the body of the message until it's too late. Here's what to do about that. Read the message in safe, text only format, then quickly convert it to HTML!

Here are all the settings you need to change and how to use them.

Open Outlook Express, then go to Tools>Options>Security tab. Check "Block images and other external content in HTML email". You will have a chance to accept them later if you like. Click Apply and OK.

Now cruise on over to the Read tab. Check the box next to "Read all messages in plain text". Click Apply and OK.

Now, read your email. When you open a message, it will all be in plain text. If something doesn't look OK, delete it. If it looks OK, go to View>Message in HTML inside the message you are reading. The HTML will appear except for any dangerous images.

Below the "Subject"line in your message header, you will see a line that says "Some pictures have been blocked to help prevent the sender from identifying your computer. Click here to download pictures". Click there if you must, but at your own peril!

Best,
David Geer - your on time technology writer!
Geer Communications  ¶ 3:59 PM 0 commentslinks to this post