Exchange Messaging Outlook
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Greetings! Welcome to Vol. 6, No. 7, of Exchange Messaging Outlook, a biweekly newsletter about Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook. The next issue of EMO will appear 4 weeks from today, on August 8, as we take a break from our usual biweekly schedule. Today's highlights:
Regular features:
Outlook View Control Vulnerability My vacation last month was interrupted by news of yet another HTML-related vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook, this one tied to the Outlook View Control (OVC). The OVC, which is integrated into Outlook 2002 and can be added to Outlook 2000, is an ActiveX control to display any Outlook folder. The vulnerability makes it possible for allow malicious code to do almost anything with your Outlook data, including deleting items and harvesting e-mail addresses from messages. A patch is expected shortly. Whether or not you need to worry about this depends in part on your version of Outlook. The security features in Outlook 2002 protect against malicious code exploiting the Outlook View Control in an HTML-format mail message. However, Outlook 2002 users still are vulnerable to the use of the control in a web page. Therefore, for safety's sake, you should disable the ability of ActiveX controls to run in pages in the Internet zone in Microsoft Internet Explorer by following the instructions in the article "OL2002: The Outlook View Control Exposes Unsafe Functionality" at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q303/8/35.asp. Outlook 2000 does not include the Outlook View Control as an integrated feature, but many organizations have deployed Team Folders or digital dashboards that include the OVC. If the file Outlctlx.dll is present on your system, then you are vulnerable. For protection, you should adjust the security zone settings for Outlook as described at http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/antivirus.htm#zones, unless you have already installed the Outlook E-mail Security Update or Office 2000 Service Pack 2 (which adjust the zones settings automatically). You should also disable the ability of ActiveX controls to run in pages in the Internet zone by following the instructions in the article "OL2000: The Outlook View Control Exposes Unsafe Functionality" at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q303/8/33.asp. Managing extra mailboxes in Exchange From time to time, I want to highlight solutions developers who really seem to understand what people want from Outlook. One such developer is Victor Ivanidze, whom I met while I was living in Moscow and whose web site at http://victori.hypermart.net/ features COM add-ins for Outlook 2000 and 2002, sample forms to add header fields to Internet messages, and various other tips. Lately, Victor has focused on one of the stickier issues in Outlook in an Exchange environment -- working with a secondary mailbox. As you probably know, with proper permissions, you can open another mailbox and see all its folders, respond to messages in its Inbox, etc. A typical example is a Support mailbox that help desk staffers access in addition to their own mailboxes. The hard part comes when you want to ensure that messages sent from the other mailbox have the right From address and are stored in the other mailbox's Sent Items folder. I wrote an article a few years ago (http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=4855) on various ways to meet those goals and concluded that it was easier to abandon the shared group mailbox approach and use a public folder instead. Victor has breathed new life into the group mailbox approach, however, by offering two COM add-ins that together make it possible to handle a secondary mailbox's messages seamlessly. RightFrom is a utility that automatically fills in the correct From address when you reply to or forward a message in the other mailbox. The second utility, UniSent, ensures that those replies and forwards are stored in the Sent Items folder of the other mailbox, not in your own mailbox. It also puts items that you delete from the group mailbox into the group mailbox's Deleted Items folder. Remember that, if you're implementing a group mailbox, there are two different ways to set permissions to allow other users to send on behalf of the mailbox. If the Exchange administrator grants Send on Behalf Of permission to the Support mailbox, outgoing messages will show both the actual sender and the Support mailbox. If you want to hide the actual sender's name and address, you need to grant Send As permission to the user's Windows account. MEC Awards 2001 Once again, Microsoft is seeking the best applications for Exchange and best solutions that leverage Exchange features. You can nominate your company or your favorite tool in any of 10 categories at http://www.microsoft.com/corpevents/mec2001/awards.asp. Winners will be announced at MEC in Orlando in October. MEC registration open Registration is now open for MEC 2001 in Orlando, Florida, Sept. 30 - Oct. 4. Exhibits open Sept. 30, with conference sessions beginning Oct. 1. Microsoft is now billing MEC as the "premier Exchange, Windows, and .NET Enterprise Servers event." Register at http://www.microsoft.com/MSCorp/corpevents/mec2001/reg.asp by August 24 to get a discount. MEC Europe will take place in Nice, France, Nov. 6-9. The web site at http://www.microsoft.com/europe/mec/ is expected to have registration details at the end of June. MEC Japan will be in Tokyo, Oct. 29-30 (a change from the August date that Microsoft gave earlier). No registration site yet. Office Developer Connections Conference I will be speaking on Outlook development at the Office Developer Connections conference Oct. 4-5 in Scottsdale, Arizona -- covering Outlook security, Outlook reports, and what's new for developers in Outlook 2002. One of the sample applications that I'll be showing adds "merge to HTML e-mail" capability to Office XP, without raising the Outlook security prompts. Register at http://www.msofficeconnections.com by August 15 to get a discount. |
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New Utilities |
ACT-TO-OUTLOOK PROFESSIONAL http://www.personalcrm.com/act-to-outlook-pro.htm Tool to transfer ACT! 2000 contacts to Outlook contacts, preserving custom fields, converting to-do's and calls to Outlook tasks, converting meetings and appointments to Outlook appointments, converting history into Outlook journal entries. Supports import to non-default Outlook folders and duplicate record handling. BABELFISH FOR OUTLOOK DETACHXP ECONVERT FOR EXCHANGE EMAILER FOR OUTLOOK 2000 GAZNET ANTI-SPAM PROTECTION FILE OUT2UNIX OUTBACK PLUS PROFILER TODI WORKSMART |
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Updated utilities |
CLIPFORM FOR MICROSOFT OUTLOOK http://www.ivitar.com/clipform/ Version 1.2 of this tool for extracting or exporting Outlook data allows you to apply a filter to the data. MAIL ESSENTIALS FOR EXCHANGE/SMTP ONSIGN POCKETKNIFE SIMPLESYNC |
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Other new resources |
EXCHANGE 2000 SERVER OPERATIONS GUIDE http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/maintain/operate/opsguide/default.asp Step-by-step instructions for regular maintenance of Exchange 2000, drawing on the experiences of Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft's support team, and the Exchange developers. Covers server monitoring, backup, verification of scheduled events, protection against attack, and user support. MALFORMED RPC REQUEST PATCH MODIFYING PROPERTIES OF A DIRECTORY OBJECT VIA MAPI INTERFACES |
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More Information |
ISSN 1523-7990 |
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Updated Apr 07 2008
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