Microsoft has admitted a security breach which allowed hackers to access the accounts and data of customers. The admission from Microsoft isn’t complete and the hackers say it’s worse than the company is saying. Who is affected? Some people with a free Microsoft accounts like Outlook.com, Msn.com Hotmail.com etc. Microsoft says that a ‘limited’ number […]
The May 2019 update to Windows 10 includes a long-awaited and important addition, an updated Emoji Panel. What a pity that it totally sucks and is incredibly dumb. Emoji Panel is better than what we had before (nothing) but not by a lot. We’re talking about the Emoji Panel or ‘keyboard’ which appears in Windows […]
One of the first major Word viruses, the Melissa virus, is 20 years old. It’s amazing to see how much and how little has changed over two decades. Office viruses today follow much the same pattern as they did back in the 20th Century. Melissa was a Word macro virus which infected computers then spread […]
What can you do when Outlook won’t connect to a new mailbox no matter what you try? Long time Office Watch reader, Phil, found himself with an especially stubborn Outlook which would not connect to his new mailbox. He’s changed Office 365 mail servers so had to reconnect Outlook to the new mailboxes for him […]
Many new emoji are now in the official Unicode list but we’ll have to wait for them to appear in Word or Outlook emails. After the Unicode Consortium ratifies additions to the vast character list, it takes some time for Microsoft, Apple and others to add the emoji to their fonts. The 2019 Emoji list […]
Web based email is very common these days but it’s not the best way to handle your email. At worse, webmail can leave you stranded and out-of-touch. A lot of people now use webmail as the only way to access email on their computer, not realising, until it’s too late, that there’s a better way. […]
How can you tell if you’re reading email in a web browser or using email software like Outlook for Windows or Mac? This might seem obvious to some but many people use ’email’ without understanding the important difference between webmail and email programs. There are two ways to read and send emails: use software/apps like […]
The latest ebook from Office-Watch.com is a little different, it’s a heartfelt ‘Thank You’ to our Office Watch donors. Peter Deegan has been quite astonished and humbled by the generosity of readers to our first ever reader appeal. Both the money and kind remarks have been a considerable morale boost quite beyond the practical help […]
Icons are a relatively new part of Office 365 for Windows/Mac but can they be used in emails that go to people not using Office 365? SVG graphics are widely supported in web browsers but not all email programs know what to do with these new images. What do they see if you’ve used an […]
Meeting or party invitations don’t have to be plain, old white background emails, go for something a little more fancy or useful. Officially, Microsoft suggests using their Stationery themes to change the look of an email. But that’s not available for invitation emails. There are some formatting choices also missing from invitation emails. Whenever formatting […]
Sending out party and other non-business invitations is quite possible in Outlook. While the system is primarily intended for meetings in companies, individuals can use it too. All that’s in our article Easy Invitations with Outlook still applies today. Microsoft has tinkered with the look of Outlook but the fundamentals remain the same. Using Outlook […]
Looking for some Christmas images, pictures or graphics? Microsoft Office has some in-built options for the festive tide of Yule. Add these images into Word documents, Outlook emails, PowerPoint slides or even Excel worksheets. Unsubtle Hint: Christmas Cheer with Office has a collection of festive cards, letters, gift tags, emails ready to open, edit and […]
Cyber Monday at Microsoft wasn’t a sales event so much as an embarrassment. Their Office 365 Exchange Server hosting went down, disconnecting Outlook software from the server. On this occasion, The Register reports that users could continue working via the web browser interface. Only the ActiveSync connection used by Outlook software was affected. Back in […]
A new email trick to fool people into clicking a link from Outlook. It’s a ‘warning’ that your mailbox is near it’s size limit. The message was a little sophisticated by pretending to come from the real company that handles the domain. It was sent to an address with a domain managed by GoDaddy (the […]
Adding email, calendar and contacts Live Tiles to the Windows Start Menu would seem like an obvious thing to do. Here’s how you can workaround to do it. On the Windows 8 and 10 large Start Menu are ‘Live Tiles’ which are updated to show the latest information. Some of them are setup to show […]
After a lot of talk and promises, Office Insiders are getting a look at the proposed Outlook for Windows single-line or Simplified Ribbon for Office 365 customers. As usual, there’s good news and bad news in the interface change. Though it’s early days and there’s still time for changes. Don’t Panic There’s no reason to […]
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has some help adding your Fringe bookings into Outlook with some tricks and traps they don’t mention. Overall The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has an excellent site and apps with an online calendar for each customer and a feature to download booked events into Outlook. It would be fantastic except that there’s […]
A recent news story about the Australian airline, Qantas, caught our eye because of the email signature block. “We work flexibility at Qantas. I’m sending this message at a time that suits me. Please feel comfortable know that I don’t expect you to read, respond to or action it outside of regular working hours.”
The so-called ‘Efail’ security bug affects Microsoft Outlook for Windows (among others) but only if you’re using a PGP encryption plug in like Gpg4Win and S/MIME. The bug means that messages that should be encrypted can, instead, be viewed in plain text. The current advice is to uninstall Gpg4Win. The EFF has instructions for disabling […]
There’s an amazingly simple but effective way to bypass some security scans used by Office 365 hosting and possibly infect a computer. Called BaseStriker, this trick is so simple. It’s amazing that any professional security software doesn’t check for it already. It hides a dangerous link from Microsoft’s own and other security scans, which allows […]
An infected email supposedly from the UK government appeared in our Outlook Inbox. It’s a good example of what to be careful of in emails and how some Outlook settings protect you from harm. Here’s the message that got through our mail hosts checks and Outlook’s. Many things in this email are a ‘Red Flag’ […]
A KPMG team in Florida, USA are embarrassed and lost an important client all because of a slip of the keyboard and Outlook’s email AutoComplete feature. Miami Today has the story of the proposed new Miami-Dade courthouse and a mistake by the courthouse consultant’s KPMG. A confidential proposal and evaluation was mistakenly sent by KPMG […]
In the UK there’s been a lot of laughs and some red faces about a money raising letter ‘signed’ by the Conservative Prime Minister to a ” Mr Youmustbe F*ckingjoking ” and sent to a pensioner. It’s easy to laugh but anyone who has done large mailings knows that it’s a case of “There but […]
Microsoft’s half-hearted attitude to security matters is demonstrated yet again with a new patch for Outlook. The patch has taken over a year to be released and doesn’t properly block the security lapse. It all started back in November 2016 when Microsoft was informed of a problem with RTF documents with an external link to […]
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times … ignore or delete any .DOC .XLS .PPT files you get via email or shared. The main carrier of virus infection is Microsoft Office documents, a fact that Microsoft doesn’t like to talk about. What Microsoft doesn’t say is that the major source of […]
One thing we can rely on a Office-Watch.com is the regular flow of emails asking about Winmail.dat attachments to emails. What they are and what to do about them. Winmail.dat is part of Microsoft’s own Rich Text Format for emails. RTF has been mostly superseded by the more open HTML based email format but RTF […]
Microsoft has announced that the long standing Outlook Mobile App is being dumped from 15 May 2018. A thinly-disguised attempt to get more people using their insecure Outlook App. Naming of Microsoft’s email services is (deliberately) confusing so here’s a quick primer Outlook Mobile App (OMA) is a app/application to connect with Exchange Server mailboxes. […]
Politico EU is reporting that Microsoft Outlook was used to trigger a hack on the German government’s computer network. There’s the horrible possibility of an email attachment opening in Outlook without human intervention. The article and the original source at Süddeutsche Zeitung are light on details but the attack seems a bit different from the usual. […]
Every mail host has a spam filter, but how they work and the options depend on each company. We’ve given specifics for Office Watch received at Outlook.com, Exchange Server and Gmail. The same principles apply to any other place you get your email like mail hosted at an Internet Service Provider (ISP). More than one […]
Here’s how to stop Office Watch, or other newsletters, from being moved from the Gmail Inbox to the ‘Spam’ folder or their ‘Promotions’ tab. At the moment neither Office Watch nor our friends at Popbitch are considered ‘spam’ by Gmail, but that can change. Any changes you make to Gmail’s settings have to be made […]
Here’s how to stop Outlook.com/Hotmail from wrongly marking email as spam. These are messages that end up in the Junk Email folder. We’ve already explained how to move messages from the Junk Email folder to your Inbox. But that doesn’t stop future messages from the same sender going to the Junk Email folder. The option […]
Microsoft’s mail service Outlook.com moves Office Watch to Junk Email. Here’s how to stop it doing that. The same advice applies to other newsletters and emails that are wrongly marked as Spam / Junk Email. The famous UK newsletter, Popbitch, is treated the same way. Spam filters aren’t perfect No spam filter is perfect, they […]
You might be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft Office isn’t so much software as a ‘trojan horse’ allowing hackers the opportunity to destroy, copy or ransom your valuable information. That’s overkill, of course, but each week there’s yet another new attack on millions of computers relying on Microsoft Office. If it’s not a newly found […]
When you update your Outlook rules with Exchange Server, why does it take so damn long and you have to wait? Each time you change your email processing rules, Outlook for Windows/Mac has to update the server. But it takes an unreasonably long time, even when there’s only a few rules being updated across a […]
How can you filter the Outlook contacts list to show just the Contact Groups or not? You can’t … amazingly there’s no direct or easy way to separate out the two types of contacts: individual or groups. Look along the Search tab for Contacts and there’s many options but not all. The ‘More’ pull down […]
Outlook can setup an Out of Office response, depending on the type of email connection but there’s a better way that works for everyone. ‘Out of Office’ or ‘Vacation’ autoresponses will automatically reply to incoming messages. Clever systems have options like different messages for people inside or outside an organization or only those in your […]
Microsoft’s mail hosting Outlook.com now comes with extras for Office 365 Home and Personal subscribers, as we foretold a while ago. In short, the ‘Premium’ $50/$20 a year Outlook.com is dead. The Premium benefits are now available to all Office 365 Home and Personal users. If you’re one of the five people linked to an […]
Apple has introduced a new image and video format for iPhone and iPad, here’s how to handle it in Microsoft Office documents. .HEIC image files are made by default in some Apple devices with iOS 11. Microsoft Office and Windows don’t support the new format yet but there’s workarounds available in the meantime. Automatic HEIC […]
There’s an interesting New York Times piece on the Unicode standard that’s used by Office, Windows, Mac and other computer systems. Unicode is the global standard for identifying letters, symbols and characters across many computer systems. It’s how very different devices can identify the letter A, Euro currency symbol or even a Recycling symbol in […]
Here’s how to control what Outlook does when it gets a Read Receipt request with an incoming email. The setting is at File | Options | Mail | Tracking, just below where you set the options for outgoing Read Receipts. That’s Outlook for Windows, see below about Outlook for Mac. The choices are: Always send […]
