Attachments Corrupted?

[Hennapanda]

I will compose a simple letter in Word (Office 2004 for MAC), and save it to
the desktop.

I will then start a new email using Entourage, and attach this new document
by way of an attachment.

When I try to send the document, it says it contains a virus and cannot be
sent. If I am to open this same document in Pages, then export it out as a
..doc file (using Pages), I can then attach and make it all work.

What is going on? Should I uninstall and reinstall the entire Office Suite?

Thanks in advance,

john C.

 

[litttle.creature.inc]

Then according to my opinion, that might suggest a macro virus in the
word document, try tu run
Yes, there are viruses for macs as well, mostly they are written for
PCs so the Mac do not understand them and they can thus not harm them,
but there is kind of application called VBA (part of office) which is
same both to MAC and PC. Seem to me that some friend, send you a
document with VBA macro. But do not worry, antivirus SW can clean it.

Do not reinstall office that will hardly solve anything. I would also
wait for others contribution before taking any actions

 

[CyberTaz]

Although I'm not sure about the current situation I am sure that reinstaling
Office isn't the way to handle it... rarely is that the appropriate approach
for correcting issues on a Mac.

It would help if you supplied the exact wording of the message you receive,
but for starters it doesn't necessarily mean that a virus is involved.
Secondly, Entourage - AFAIK - doesn't scan for viruses in the documents you
attach, so I suspect that message is being triggered by something else... do
you have Norton or some other virus software installed?

One thing you might try is to remove the Normal template from your MUD (if
you need reference to finding it see this link:
http://word.mvps.org/mac/MacWordNormal.html

Make sure no Office apps are running at the time, then launch Word - it will
create a new Normal when you do. Then make a new file & see if it attaches
without incident. If so, it indicates that your original Normal was corrupt
in some way & you can then dispose of it.

If you ahven't been in the habit of doing so when updating OS X & most
other software it might also be a good idea to run Disk Utility - Repair
Disk Permissions. Should that not correct the problem - or if it recurs -
post back with the details requested above.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi John:

This problem cannot be caused within the Office program code, so
uninstalling and re-installing will simply keep the original problem, and
give you an additional problem.

Now: Entourage can't detect viruses any better than Word can (i.e. Not at
all) so I have to assume that the warning is coming from your company or ISP
mail scanner. And if it is, we should assume that the file almost certainly
does contain a virus.

As Little Creature mentions, this is likely to be a VBA macro. If it is,
then it is likely to be in your Normal template.

The procedure here will tell you how to find and replace your normal
template: http://word.mvps.org/mac/MacWordNormal.html

Once you have done this, you need to copy the text from your old document
and paste it into a freshly-created document (any documents created before
you replaced the normal template potentially will also contain the virus).

If you still get the warning after having done all of that, then please get
back to us with full details of the error that you get (we need the exact
text, especially any numbers) and details of how you connect to the
Internet.

For example, last week AT&T Spam Filters were having a melt-down and warning
people they had a virus, because they thought that the email being sent was
spam. They thus decided that since home users rarely send spam, and most
home computers are Windows computers, that the home user's computer must
have a spam-generating trojan virus One of my friends received such a
warning, and she's on a Mac.

What had happened is that she had sent an email containing formatted text
(colours and fonts) plus an attachment, to a large number of BCC users, with
her own address in the "To" field. That kind of format is exactly what the
spams generated by a virus-infected PC look like.

To avoid this, set your email to plain text only, put an email address other
than the originating address in the To field, and make sure the Word file is
a "Document" that has an extension of .doc.
..
Ideally, paste the contents of the document into the email, and send the
whole thing in plain text, without any formatting or attachments (especially
pictures).

The Internet is currently awash with spam generated by home users' computers
that have not been maintained properly, but left permanently attached to
broadband internet connections, so that they are now so full of viruses they
barely run The problem is now so bad that the average mail server has
to be nine times larger than is needed, simply to handle the spam. And
thus, companies and ISPs are installing aggressive spam filters which can
catch you out like this.

Hope this helps

I will compose a simple letter in Word (Office 2004 for MAC), and save it to
the desktop.

I will then start a new email using Entourage, and attach this new document
by way of an attachment.

When I try to send the document, it says it contains a virus and cannot be
sent. If I am to open this same document in Pages, then export it out as a
.doc file (using Pages), I can then attach and make it all work.


What is going on? Should I uninstall and reinstall the entire Office Suite?

Thanks in advance,

john C.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[monijohn]

Hi John:

This problem cannot be caused within the Office program code, so
uninstalling and re-installing will simply keep the original problem, and
give you an additional problem.

Now: Entourage can't detect viruses any better than Word can (i.e. Not at
all) so I have to assume that the warning is coming from your company or ISP
mail scanner. And if it is, we should assume that the file almost certainly
does contain a virus.

As Little Creature mentions, this is likely to be a VBA macro. If it is,
then it is likely to be in your Normal template.

The procedure here will tell you how to find and replace your normal
template: http://word.mvps.org/mac/MacWordNormal.html

Once you have done this, you need to copy the text from your old document
and paste it into a freshly-created document (any documents created before
you replaced the normal template potentially will also contain the virus).

If you still get the warning after having done all of that, then please get
back to us with full details of the error that you get (we need the exact
text, especially any numbers) and details of how you connect to the
Internet.

For example, last week AT&T Spam Filters were having a melt-down and warning
people they had a virus, because they thought that the email being sent was
spam. They thus decided that since home users rarely send spam, and most
home computers are Windows computers, that the home user's computer must
have a spam-generating trojan virus One of my friends received such a
warning, and she's on a Mac.

What had happened is that she had sent an email containing formatted text
(colours and fonts) plus an attachment, to a large number of BCC users, with
her own address in the "To" field. That kind of format is exactly what the
spams generated by a virus-infected PC look like.

To avoid this, set your email to plain text only, put an email address other
than the originating address in the To field, and make sure the Word file is
a "Document" that has an extension of .doc.
..
Ideally, paste the contents of the document into the email, and send the
whole thing in plain text, without any formatting or attachments (especially
pictures).

The Internet is currently awash with spam generated by home users' computers
that have not been maintained properly, but left permanently attached to
broadband internet connections, so that they are now so full of viruses they
barely run The problem is now so bad that the average mail server has
to be nine times larger than is needed, simply to handle the spam. And
thus, companies and ISPs are installing aggressive spam filters which can
catch you out like this.

Hope this helps



--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]