The speed of email communication is normally a blessing, but when it's a vector for virus infection that speed becomes a curse. The good news is that there are some email-specific measures you can take to help limit, or even eliminate, the spread of macro virii in your organization. The chief measure is the Outlook Security Update. There are separate updates for Outlook 2000 and Outlook 98 . This prevents you from opening them directly from within Outlook.
Administrators can modify the file types associated with each category.
In addition, Outlook's behavior for handling attachments changes. For example, if you forward a message that has an unsafe attachment, the attachment isn't included when you forward the message. It changes the way Outlook works when scripts drive it. For example, you'll get a warning dialog that alerts you when a script tries to access your contacts, send a message, or do a number of other things. This update is strong medicine, but like many other types of strong medicine it has some undesirable side effects, detailed here , plus some things you need to know before installing it.