By Woody Leonhard
The three changes Office 2003 SP2 makes to Outlook, which I describe in part 1, operate quite independently. The overall effect is really weird, to me anyway.
For example, pictures and hot links are turned off for messages in your junk folder. But if you drag a message from your junk folder to any other folder, suddenly the pictures and links work (with one exception: see below).
Contrariwise, if you drag any message into your junk folder, Outlook 2003 won’t show you its pictures and won’t let you click through on the links. The pic-and-link-nixing operation depends entirely on the location of the message. Doesn’t matter one whit what’s inside the message, or how high the message’s PCL or SCL score.
Messages with a high PCL number are identified in your Inbox (they’re branded “Click here to turn on links…”) but they aren’t identified in your junk folder. Thus, there’s no way to tell if a specific message in your junk folder flunked the Phishing Confidence Level test, short of dragging that message to your Inbox, and looking for the Click here to turn on links… stripe at the top of the message.
Working with the changes
You can prevent Outlook from blocking links on PCL-censored messages by clicking Tools, Options and clicking the Junk E-Mail button on the Preferences tab. This brings up the Junk E-Mail Options dialog box. There, one option says, "Don’t turn on links in messages that might connect to unsafe or fraudulent sites. To help protect your security, we recommend that you leave this check box selected.”
If you uncheck that box, any message that’s been flagged Click here to turn on links… because of its high PCL number will look and act just like any other message. Specifically, with this box unchecked, any message in your junk folder will get its pictures and links snipped. But any message outside your junk folder will have pictures and links, and the Click here to turn on links… stripe doesn’t appear, regardless of whether or not the message passed muster with the PCL filter.
Perhaps the most confusing of all: Outlook doesn’t go back and re-scan your old messages to assign them a PCL number. So while the pic-and-link-nixing behavior for the Junk E-mail folder applies to any message, old or new, the Click here to turn on links… stripe only appears on new messages. That’s only the ones that have gone through the PCL gauntlet after you upgraded to SP2 for Office 2003.
Therefore, that check box in the Junk E-Mail Options dialog, in addition to being very puzzling, only applies to messages received after you performed the upgrade.
Confused? I am.
Implications for you and me
At first glance, the new antiphishing feature is just silly. It prevents you from clicking through on links inside messages that are in your junk folder. As if you were going to randomly click on links in spam.
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