It seems that the more you try to keep someone out of your life or your house the more they want in. It’s the same with unauthorized access to your corporate email accounts. But what’s worse than someone trying to gain unauthorized access to your email accounts is some “thing” trying to gain access to your email accounts. The “something” that I am talking about is the following warning message:

“A program is trying to access e-mail addresses stored in Outlook. Do you want to allow this?”

If you have Outlook 2002 deployed in your environment then you can implement some security features that will prompt a user or notify an administrator of attempted unauthorized access to email.

Some security features will notify you if an application attempts to access the Outlook address book. Such security features can also be configured so that access must be granted by a user or an administrator’s role. Logging of such events can also be turned on for historical purposes.

Some applications can be added as a trusted source and will require the Outlook Email Security Administrator Package from Microsoft. Other applications may need to be configured as trusted COM add-ins. Administrator assistance will most likely be needed as some changes will need to be performed on the Exchange server.

If you still have users who are running Outlook 2000 then there was an Outlook Email Security Update that came out to address most of the issues surrounding access to email by software applications.

That particular Email Security Update affected how email attachments were handled by Outlook. It also impacted how applications were allowed access to email. Always a scary thought that you’re opening up access to email components by software applications. The good news is that warnings and popup messages would result in more immediate notifications about attempts to gain access to your email. Some of the software components affected by the Security Update include: email attachments, the Outlook object model and the Simple Messaging Application Programming Interface (Simple MAPI).

Upon an attempt to access email a warning message will appear that will ask a user for confirmation. They then must confirm the action to allow email access or access to an email component. It is possible for an administrator to override the default settings. Some users may experience multiple popups asking for confirmation more than once depending on how the incoming application was written.

You may find that after having implemented the security update and after a couple of months that some users will become annoyed with what will seem to them the many interruptions of their work day by having to constantly click through these multiple warning popup windows.

Email components and features that may be affected by the Security Update include: Mail Merge, Mail Merge to Email or Fax, Team Folders, Digital Dashboards, New Folder Invitations, and “Unsafe” attachment forwarding.

You will probably hear from users who notice that blank spaces in some of their email messages. This can be caused by the fact that attachments to email messages using the rich text format are filled by a blank space where the attachments would normally be prior to the security update being implemented.

If you find that storage space is a concern then you can advise your users to forward any emails which contained unsafe attachments to themselves. You, the administrator, or the user can delete the original message once it has been forwarded so that you can free up your storage space. The reason why this works is because the forwarded message does not contain the unsafe attachment.

There are other areas affected by the security update that you will run into. For instance, warning messages may not be observed that are at the top of journal items or custom Outlook forms. So if Outlook has blocked access to an attachment you may not be able to see the visual warning message.

You should note that there are some drawbacks to the standard security system. One of those drawbacks is that it doesn’t you the ability to determine the source of the threat. Another drawback already mentioned is that some earlier applications can inadvertently cause multiple confirmation windows to popup. All of this can result in a user who manages to disable these security features – which is not what any administrator wants to happen in an environment that they are trying to keep secure.

To help out in this situation there are add-in products available in the marketplace that will allow you to identify and categorize potential email access violations. After an application has been identified then its status can be preset so that on future occasions the application can have its access either blocked or allowed. It could even have the default Outlook handler set to run for future access attempts. All of these handling actions can be set to run automatically. Just remember that you are overriding security features set by a Security Update.