Everyone is talking about ransomware now that the WannaCrypt has spread like crazy across the world. These nasty viruses target your documents and precious files including Microsoft Office files and Windows backups. This is a little embarrassing for us because Office-Watch.com has just released a new book that’s suddenly become
Microsoft has moved quickly to block a security hole in their own anti-virus software, Windows Defender. We’re used to seeing email or instant messaging used to infect a computer when opening a document in Word or Excel, maybe an email in Outlook. But this is quite different and very worrying.
At last the cries of eager Signal supporters have been heard – the latest releases allow secure transfer of Office documents, PDF and more. Signal is a well-respected, very secure and private messaging system. The makers of Signal licence their open-source encryption to other messengers like Google, Facebook and WhatsApp.
Sensepost has revealed an interesting way to hack your computer via Outlook. Microsoft’s public response has been to deny there’s a problem and put the responsibility on customers. The method hasn’t been used ‘in the wild’ and it’s not easy to infect Outlook. But we’ve heard that before (especially from
If you send an email to an invalid email address, that address will ‘stick’ in Outlook via the AutoComplete list. Here’s how to fix that. Let’s say you send an email to fence@fred.daggcom (misplaced period/fullstop). The email will ‘bounce’ with an error message. Despite that, the wrong email address still
The cheap, introductory pricing for Outlook.com Premium is now available until 30 June at us$19.99 instead of $49.99 but there’s some hidden ‘gotchas’ in Microsoft’s offer. The discount offer was to expire at the end of March but has been extended. Officially it’s because Outlook.com has been ‘so popular’ but
Proton Mail is a secure email service run from Switzerland. How does it compare with standard email using Microsoft Outlook for Windows? Proton Mail is an option to consider if you’re looking for secure email messaging but it’s not as easy to use as some instant messaging services available. Proton
It seems that every day there are more suggestions on how to reduce ’email overload’, here’s some that caught our eye. Bain & Company analyzed their staffs use of Microsoft Outlook and similar applications: Senior executives receive more than 200 emails each day A typical frontline supervisor spends about eight hours a
Outlook for Windows can set reminders to follow up on incoming emails but what’s less well known are the two options for follow up on emails you send out. Attaching a flag to an email you sent means Outlook will pop-up to remind you. For outgoing emails it’s a great
When you send an email, Outlook can add a ‘Follow up’ reminder to appear later. This is a reminder for you, the sender. There’s a separate option to send a reminder to the email recipients. From an open email message go to Home | Tags | Follow Up For a
Outlook for Windows (not Mac) can send an automatic reminder with an email. Ideally, this means the recipient will get a ‘pop-up’ reminder to do whatever you’re talking about in the email itself. In this article, we’ll show how to send a reminder with your email. We’ll look at how
TeenVogue magazine is making quite a name for itself beyond the stereotype of makeup tips and boy-band gossip. Nicole Kobie has an excellent explanation of the considerations when choosing a messaging app. The article explains ‘threat model’ or who might be interested in your messages. If you’re only worried about
Amazingly, Microsoft has at least three programs that are called ‘Outlook 2016’. It’s not a trivial point, knowing which ‘Outlook 2016’ you have is important if you ask for help or tech support. Confused? Join the club. When Microsoft talks about ‘Outlook’ they probably mean ‘Outlook for Windows’. ‘Outlook 2016’
Microsoft makes it hard for people to move from their Entourage program data to modern Outlook for Mac. Entourage was the email/calendar/contacts part of Office for Mac. Office 2011 replaced it with Outlook 2011 for Mac. Outlook 2011 had a conversion option that let former Entourage users move to the
From the crazy bureaucracy department is the news that IBM has been granted a patent for Out of Office emails! That’s right, those automatic emails that go out when you’re poolside are now the property of IBM. From the patent application: “When the out of office agent is enabled, it
It’s not just politicians who get into trouble using public email services. They are just the headline-worthy tip of a much larger email problem. AOL has a way to secure a AOL mail account but too few people (and politicians <g>) use it. We’ve talked before about Two Factor Authentication
CyberX Labs has identified Operation BugDrop, which uses Word document to attack targeted businesses and steal corporate information. They send emails to the business they want to raid that trick people into enabling macros. Opening the hacked document displays the Security Warning and ‘Enable Content’ button are real; created by
You’ve chosen an image, now you have to get it into your Office document. You’d hope there was a single way to do that but, as usual, there’s plenty of options. Outlook has its own special needs, different from Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There’s also privacy and image size issues
Check out this video from SciShow which goes some way to explaining how an email gets from your computer to another. Emails get routed through a series of computers to reach it’s destination. It’s not a direct connection from your computer to another. That’s important to all email users because
The popular messaging system, WhatsApp supports sending documents between users. It’s a fast, simple and reasonably secure way to get a file from ‘A to B’. It’s an lesser known feature of some secure messaging apps, in addition to their main use for texting, sending pictures and make free voice
Microsoft has announced that they’ll stop updating the Outlook spam filter (“Smartscreen”) at the end of this month – on 1st Nov 2016. This might be a worry, but not a disaster, for most Outlook users and we’ll explain why. What’s Happening From 1st Nov 2016 there will be no
Sometimes we wonder what happens in Microsoft development meetings because the software we get from those discussions seems so out of touch with reality or even sense. Today’s example comes from Outlook for Windows and it’s curious ‘one way’ translation feature. Office for Windows has good language translation options, though
Here’s a strange little trap for people using Outlook Contact Groups. A message from Outlook to a group of people was marked as spam by one mail system. The reason given is something we’ve not seen before: 2.5 SORTED_RECIPS Recipient list is sorted by address This comes from Spam Assassin, a
As we mentioned recently, one way to safely and securely send Office documents around is to use one of the new messaging apps that are available. The many apps vary in features and quality. Any of them have more and better features than standard mobile phone texting. In fact, these
