In the era of transnational corporations stretched across multiple time zones and various bring-your-own-device initiatives gaining popularity among companies that want to enhance efficiency and availability of their workforce, it is very common to use your home computer or personal mobile device for business correspondence. Modern data security solutions enable to maintain certain safety standards and protect corporate accounts even when they are accessed from outside the company.
outlook attachments
Duplicated attachments in Outlook: How to avoid it?
The mail flow in a company often contains a lot of email duplicates: messages from external and internal senders are forwarded to colleagues, bosses and relevant departments. When you receive a letter and realize that it should have been addressed to a different employee of the company, you usually press Forward without any further delay. As soon as you have done so, there are at least two copies of the same message in your email database. This would not present a slightest problem, were it not about email attachments. Unless commanded otherwise, attached files are just dragged along with their messages, regardless of their size, file type and general relevance.
Send password-protected attachments in Outlook
Given that business-critical information forms an important part of a company assets, and its leakage can lead to financial loss, damage or even legal action against the company, data loss protection solutions, and tools are essential to a corporate IT-environment. Although bulky and powerful DLP-suites from leaders of IT-security claim to protect from almost any risk, there is still much to be done on user-level, because there’s no other factor as powerful as human factor.
What to do when Outlook blocks attachment?
Your colleague sent you a script file or HTML Help (.chm) document or even link (.lnk) to the file stored in the file server but Outlook blocks access to the file. What to do? Outlook blocks certain attachments or, rather, blocks access to certain types of received files, because of potential risks associated with these file types. The file type, indicated in the extension, a few letters following the dot at the end of filename, determines whether the file may or may not present a potential threat to the user’s security. For this, Outlook has a blacklist of potentially hazardous file types including a few dozens of items, such as .exe, .bat, and .cmd. (full list of blocked attachments can be viewed here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/blocked-attachments-in-outlook-434752e1-02d3-4e90-9124-8b81e49a8519). As you may have noticed, the key word of the paragraph is ‘potential’, and that is to say, unlike your anti-virus, Outlook can’t tell whether the file is really dangerous or not. As a result, it blocks a lot of useful files, even if they come from highly trusted senders, just to be on the safe side. The question is, why does it happen?
Outlook 2013 Attachments Reminder under the hood
Since the 2013 version, Microsoft Outlook users have had the option to activate automatic reminders concerning message where attachments may have been forgotten.
