Outlook is part of MS Office and is the most popular email client in corporate environments, mainly because it’s more than just an email client. It is also a calendar, scheduler, PIM, ToDo list, and a lot more, and offers syncing with PDA’s through ActiveSync.

And since it is part of Office, it is well integrated into other Office applications, like Word, and allows you to share a single addressbook with those applications. That can be really handy when you want to mail a letter to a number of people in your Outlook addressbook and print out the envelopes with the names & addresses on them, easily.

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It’s not just Outlook/Outlook Express that can cause an issue. Email clients like Thunderbird and The Bat! can, as well.

That is only one way people get malware on their computers through email. The usual problems with email attachments is when people get files from unknown sources or other infected people that look like fun little games or flash files. They don’t think and download them and run them and get infected.

Also, many have the settings in Windows set to hide known file extensions and don’t know they are clicking an EXE. They see “picture.jpg” in Explorer and don’t know the real file extension is hidden and the file is really “picture.jpg.exe” or some other type of malware file. Never hide your file extensions!

Today there is an increasing problem with malware getting on PC’s through flash ads. That’s right…your favorite site could be delivering you malware and not even know it. There has been at least one ad appearing on sites that use Adsense that has been responsible for infecting people. The ads on MySpace have infected millions.

As a webmaster, do your site’s visitors a favor, if you can, and only use text based ads in Adsense, and never agree to any type of flash ads on your site.

As a PC owner, use some sort of flash blocker when surfing the web and only activate flash files if you positive that they are safe. From what I understand, there is no flash blockers for IE, so using IE can be pretty dangerous, in this respect.

Also, make sure your Java is up to date and uninstall the older versions in Add/Remove Programs. Old versions of Java can be dangerous. And Java doesn’t remove old versions automatically, when you upgrade. You have to do this yourself.

There is a vulnerability in an older version of Java that lets malware be installed on your PC. This is how Winfixer, Virtumundo, Vundo gets on computers, mostly through ads on sites. If you have ever had that, you know how nasty it can be and how hard it can be to remove (not all antiviruses can detect it and very few can remove it)…and now you know how it got on your computer and what you have to do to prevent it from happening again.

apps last blog post..When Grandma died, she took her Christmas cookies with her