June 9th, 2009

Mixed messages from the IT department regarding email safety

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

TipTalk wrote some time ago about the urban legend of the Reading Pane. In the conclusion, the article mentions the “read all standard mail in plain text” setting. And that reminded me of a story.

Some time ago, the IT department sent out a message to all users on the subject of email safety. The gist of the message was that for increased safety, everybody should go to that options dialog and check the box to set Outlook to read email in plain text mode.

It’s not clear whether they expected anybody to take their message seriously, though: They sent the message in HTML format.

Category
Old New Thing
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Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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