CDO & MAPI Programming with Visual Basic:

Appendix C. The Outlook E-mail Security Update

The Outlook E-mail Security Update is a downloadable patch from Microsoft that is intended to help protect users against most viruses that spread via attachments in email. The patch was released in the wake of the infamous ILOVEYOU virus. It works by limiting certain functionality within Outlook and within the Outlook object model. In particular, functionality related to attachments and to accessing email addresses programmatically is significantly restricted. Microsoft has announced that similar limitations will be placed on CDO, but as of press time did not have the CDO changes ready for distribution.

The update is available for both Outlook 98 and Outlook 2000. The version for Outlook 98 disables CDO completely. That’s right—all CDO applications fail on any machine on which the Outlook E-mail Security Update for Outlook 98 is installed. The version for Outlook 2000 leaves CDO intact. Presumably Microsoft will announce a new update when changes to CDO have been completed. If changes are made to CDO that affect the information in this book, O’Reilly will note them on the book’s web site. Go to http://vb.oreilly.com/ and follow the link for this book.

The Outlook E-mail Security Update provides the following security features:

• Outlook users are prevented from accessing email attachments having filename extensions that indicate that the attachments contain executable code or a link to executable code.

• When a program attempts to use the ...