Outlook Express... get me current.

Well, I've joined the modern age of broadband and, as part of the fresh start, reinstalled XP from scratch (it had developed a bizarre fault by which continual hard-drive activity caused any active network connection to drop out... annoying on dial-up and a hideous blight against ADSL). So I'm sitting here thinking: Is Outlook Express secure these days? Do I really need to nix it and dig out another client?

Your opinions please, gents, because I haven't kept up on this one. I would've projectile vomited at the thought of using OE a few years ago, but times must have changed. Right? :/

I guess OE is just fine, if you don't view your mails in html format (use "view as text", or something like that, on the settings)..
This is especially important of you use the preview pane..

1. disable preview-window
2. view mails as text
3. dont open unknown attachments

and everything is honky dory. this applies to all other mail clients as well...

thunderbird from mozilla.org is better than OLexpress.

Thanks chaps. Can you define "better", Dan?

It's more secure, has a built in spam filter (requires training but is pretty good), and gets updated reasonably regularly.

I use thunderbird.

it's spiffy,smells nice and tastes much better than OE.

they are about the same I suppose but Thunderbird tries harder.

Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is really excellent. However, I'm using Outlook 2007 at the moment (best not to ask!).

Another vouch for ThunderBird here, and I gotta love the spam filter, took a week or two to train, but it's nailed every single junk-mail correctly for the last two months now.

And I find it faster, and you can download "Only Headers" to e-mails (the Outlook Express I had I couldn't find an alternative for) so you don't have to download the entire damn thing to see if you want to open it or not......not to mention a preview panel as to which you have to click to activate, which prevents said issue above with Outlook Express.

Not to mention a crapload easier to back-up all your e-mails with in comparison.

So, what's wrong with using the preview pane, exactly? What damage can I do by simply having an email displayed in it?

If you run an unsecure/exploited browser (Hi to you, Outlook), all it takes it clicking on an e-mail header that is infected for it to execute whatever the heck is on it and give you trouble.

I still don't get it. What do you mean by "clicking on an e-mail header"?

Unsure if it's the actual term for it, but I refer to header as the listing of the e-mails in a vertical order, which lists the e-mail name, date received, attachment, sender, etc..., where you double-click them (or single-click to open in preview-panel) to read.

OK, I see what you mean, now. However, I still don't see how clicking on a header can cause trouble. Doesn't doing so simply cause the message to display in the preview pane. How can this be potentially hazardous?

I understand how attachments can be dodgy but this issue with the preview pane doesn't make sense to me. And, how can viewing the message in the preview pane be bad, but viewing the message in a separate window be ok?

I'm interested in this because I've always used OE, complete with preview pane, and have never had a problem.

Some junk-mail use exploits of the Outlook browser to execute their files without permission, and to delete said junk-mail usually requires selecting it and hitting the delete key, thing is though, just clicking on it once brings it up in the preview pane, which, if it does indeed contain an exploit (disabling HTML is one thing, but there are always other exploits, like the jpg buffer overflow that was patched quite awhile ago), will shoot off and infect yer PC right off the bat.

[EDIT] You know, I suck at explaining crap, maybe someone else with a better grasp of the english dictionary can clarify things.

Because scripts can be inserted into HTML messages that run nasty things on your computer.



It's not, the scripts still run, but if you have the preview pane off then you can at least delete the dodgy looking ones (usually from your old friends, Doris Thorne, Rico Story or Conception T Beck).

Meanwhile I've been using Outlook 2000 and higher for 6 years, with the preview pane displaying HTML messages and never had any problems. Those days are over people, stop whining.

I've recently decided I no longer need Office and have switched to free alternatives - that being Windows Mail (Outlook Express in Vista) and OpenOffice... Having no problems with Windows Mail but it's probably a different kettle of fish to OE6, so I can't really help.

There have been plenty of security exploits through embedded vbs scripts and other windows vulnerabilities.

Don't forget that Outlook's message window is essentially Internet Explorer, except people can purposfully email/spam *you* with the equivalent of an unsafe website.

If you 'preview' it still gets rendered in full, can run embedded scripts, and is surceptible to all the same security holes that internet explorer is.

The main problem with the preview pane is that it usually shows pictures (which are downloaded from an URL specified in the HTML). If a spammer is testing 20,000 e-mail addresses, and gives each e-mail a unique URL to download, he can see which one's are actually valid (or if the e-mail has been read) by seeing if the picture at the corresponding URL has been downloaded (from web hosting stats etc.).

Yeah - you can suffer from script exploits but this happens with all browsers (both web-based and clients) and aren't that frequent.

In Windows Vista, Windows Mail (the equivalent to Outlook Express) stop images from being shown in the preview pane so solved this problem. I don't know if Outlook Express in XP does the same but I assume it should as it's a pretty basic feature.

I use Thunderbird too. Its free and much less complicated than Outlook.

It didn't do it originally, but the current version does. It gives you a little yellow pop-up bar explaining that the message contains remote images, which have been blocked to prevent the remote party from identifying your computer. You can then choose to allow it on a message-per-message base.

(Which is definitely a big improvement over the older versions)

My favourite mail client for Windows still is Ritlabs The Bat! (www.ritlabs.com), even though it will cost you some bucks. I think it has the best support for handling multiple email accounts, and for me that used to be the killer argument for The Bat. It is also safe to use.

Mozilla Thunderbird looks a lot like The Bat, but somehow it just doesn't feel right for me.

Actually Outlook's message windows are actually Word, Word being a power unto itself. That's why web formatted or html pages don't load correctly in word, because it never received the attention IE did. It's also why some exploits remained in Outlook/Express despite IE seeing patches early. I think it's more or less caught up in the security department now, especially since XPSP2, but Outlook 2007's display output is horribly broken for html messages, because they yoinked out the IE hooks at the last moment and replaced the viewer with the old Word one. <sighs>

OK, thanks for the info. Sorry for the Hi-jack, Sledge. :)

Don't mention it - I've been using Eudora for the last few years and hadn't even considered the question of embedded images. I think I'll give Thunderbird a go. Many thanks, all.

More secure, good spam filter, works on any OS, sanitizes html messages, easy to back up & find mail files+address book, is free* and open source.

*outlook exp. isn't free as it falls under the windows licence. Ie, youre not supposed to run it if you dont own windows (eg. on linux/mac with an emulator (not that you'd ever want to :)

Embarrassingly, I couldn't get Thunder-boid to connect to the mail server (partially my new ISP's fault for providing account names that were very helpfully incorrect, but even when I realised still no dice) so pane-less txt-fied Outlook Express it is!

Needing to refer to archived mail is so rare that it's welcome to be a bit obscure [scrolls through old .mbx file with Notepad]. Hmmmm.

I used Eudora 2.2 Pro from 1995 until 2006...

Blazingly fast, but in the end its inability to view HTML mail and the 32K max text size finally made me switch.

Thats either your firewall or you entered something very wrongly (check pop3, smtp and authentication settings if req.)

It all looked fine and it still couldn't connect. Too much faffing and nonsense -- I was sorted with OE in no time. T-boid is history, man.

Except that pop3 and smtp account details are persistent between installations and it wouldn't let me remove the latter, so it's left some residual crap somewhere on my machine. This is a wonderful program.