Put World Cup fixtures in your Outlook calendar
Looking for 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar calendar info? … click here The upcoming Football World Cup (soccer) is a little more complicated than usual. There are 64 matches playing across three time zones in Russia which makes it hard to figure out what time the live broadcast will be for you. Outlook for Windows […]
What the ‘Efail’ email breach is all about and what you need to do
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 […]
Outlook for Mac gets Quick Reply and Time Zones
Microsoft Outlook 2016 for Mac (Office 365) is getting some ‘new’ features or, at least, features that other Office users already have. Quick Reply The Reply/Reply all options in the reading/preview pane are promised ‘later this summer’. Time Zone support Outlook for Mac finally gets time zone support but, unfortunately it’s the same lame and […]
Fake UK government email can show up in Outlook and should be deleted
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’ […]
Outlook’s AutoComplete strikes again
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 […]
Checking a Word mail merge for bad names or test strings
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 […]
Outlook patch leaves security hole exposed
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 […]
European Office 365 outage stops customers cold
Last Friday, Office 365 customers in Europe and especially the UK had to stop working as the Microsoft hosting servers stopped working. When trying to use email online, users only saw an ‘AADSTS90033’ error, and the message: “Service is temporarily unavailable. Please retry later.” As usual, Microsoft’s communications were mixed. The company doesn’t want to […]
Why you should delete .doc .xls or .ppt files
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 […]
What can you do about Winmail.dat email attachments?
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 […]
What is the cloud and what does it have to do with Microsoft Office
You’ve all heard about “The Cloud” as if everyone knows what it is. It’s clear from recent reader messages that not everyone knows about The Cloud. Or they think they know. Or they don’t realize how much the cloud can and will do. Office-Watch.com explains the cloud and how it applies to Microsoft Office. What […]
Outlook’s appointment location annoyance
Outlook has a really annoying and inconsistent physical address glitch that Microsoft has ignored for years while it’s rival at Google got it right from the start. The problem comes when you paste an address into the Location field of an appointment. Very often, addresses are formatted across two or more lines like this: As […]
Microsoft drops Outlook Mobile to force people to their Outlook app
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. […]
Can Outlook open infected attachments without you? The German government thinks so
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. […]
Automatically marking Office Watch etc as ‘not spam’ at your mail host
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 […]
Automatically marking newsletters as ‘not spam’ at Gmail
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 […]