MTOW
8th Oct 2003, 15:35
Recently, after surviving yet another of the almost daily virus-infected unsolicited emails I receive, I disabled the preview pane in Outlook Express on the advice I read here on Pprune that said the PP could let certain viruses into my system even if I didn't open he offending email. (I'm assuming that this means the virus in question wouldn't be in the attachment any such email may or may not contain, but would be within the body of the email itself.)
I've struggled on for a few weeks now without the preview pane, but have to admit that I miss it, if only because I've deleted at least a dozen emails that look dodgy without even seeing what they are.
My question is: knowing that no one who uses a Microsoft product can ever consider themselves totally protected from the latest virus, just how dangerous is it to run OE with the preview pane active? I run Win2000, OE6 with AVG6 anti-virus, which I keep up to date.
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Second question: I've had a succession of emails over the last few weeks (many, but not all, being the dodgy ones I've dumped without reading) that cause OE to lock up when you try to open the Deleted Items folder. I've got around this by shutting down OE via the Task Manager (which shows it to be 'not responding') and then re-opening it and selecting the 'Empty Deleted Items folder on shutdown' option, or, more usually, selecting SHIFT/DELETE when I delete the offending email do it bypasses the Deleted Items folder on its way to cyber oblivion.
Is it a particular virus that causes this? AVG doesn't pick anything up in these emails, but I've usually not opened the attachments in them. However, the last message to cause the lock up was an email (with an attachment) from someone we knew that we did open and AVG did not find a virus in it.
I've struggled on for a few weeks now without the preview pane, but have to admit that I miss it, if only because I've deleted at least a dozen emails that look dodgy without even seeing what they are.
My question is: knowing that no one who uses a Microsoft product can ever consider themselves totally protected from the latest virus, just how dangerous is it to run OE with the preview pane active? I run Win2000, OE6 with AVG6 anti-virus, which I keep up to date.
****
Second question: I've had a succession of emails over the last few weeks (many, but not all, being the dodgy ones I've dumped without reading) that cause OE to lock up when you try to open the Deleted Items folder. I've got around this by shutting down OE via the Task Manager (which shows it to be 'not responding') and then re-opening it and selecting the 'Empty Deleted Items folder on shutdown' option, or, more usually, selecting SHIFT/DELETE when I delete the offending email do it bypasses the Deleted Items folder on its way to cyber oblivion.
Is it a particular virus that causes this? AVG doesn't pick anything up in these emails, but I've usually not opened the attachments in them. However, the last message to cause the lock up was an email (with an attachment) from someone we knew that we did open and AVG did not find a virus in it.