Outlook 2003 without Anti-Virus Tool

[Heinz Wehner]

How safe is Outlook 2003 without having a separate e-mail anti-virus
checker (Symantec, McAfee, etc.) installed? Let's say an e-mail that
carries the Swen worm is opened in the Outlook preview pane. Is there
any danger to get infected? Which virus/worm/trojan/etc. threats exist
that require more than what is provided by Outlook out-of-the-box?

Heinz Wehner
(Karlsruhe, Germany)

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

Since you didn't mention it, is it safe to assume that Internet Explorer is
up to date? I'm thinking that if IE is and the item arrives as an *.exe
attachment, Outlook 2003 is not going to let the user get at it by default.
(Outlook 2003 reading pane doesn't allow script to run in the message since
the security is set to the restricted zone. If someone tampers the
restricted zone or the user switches it over to Internet Zone, then you
never know what may happen.)

However it is absolutely silly to run w/out any up-to-date antivirus
software. There are just too many unpatched bugs in all applications that
can be taken advantage of to deliver dangerous content to the machine.