A lot of modern Antivirus products will scan your e-mail for you as it's
received (and sometimes sent too). On the surface of it this seems like a
good idea but in practice it often causes problems with Outlook such as
blank messages, missing attachments, stalls and hangs and other performance
issues. And, it's not even really necessary. If your antivirus software is
"running resident" (which means sitting in memory and scanning every file
you open/run in real-time) anyhow then any malware that comes into your
e-mail won't be able to infect your machine. As soon as you tried to open
it your anti-malware software will detect the problem and stop it.
My recommendation is to turn off the e-mail scanning module of your
anti-malware software. Outlook will run better without it.
( Troubleshooting Outlook -
http://www.officeforlawyers.com/outlook/tsol.htm )
Norton can be particularly bad and you'll probably have to uninstall it and
reinstall it minus the e-mail scanning to really get it disabled. Or you
could uninstall it and then download/install Microsoft Security Essentials
instead.
--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP
Roland Schorr & Tower
http://www.rolandschorr.com
http://www.officeforlawyers.com/outlook.html
Author: The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007:
http://tinyurl.com/ol4law-amazon
