Blocking outbound Office documents

I got a message in the quarantine this week due to a wmz
attachment. A bit 
of research indicates that it's a "Windows Media
Skin", apparently some 
"active" gizmo inserted by Office when it sends
email. In researching it I 
once again visited Jeff Goldberg's Netrants and re-read his
rant on Office 
documents as email:

<http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html>


Section 1.6 on prior version information is particularly
worrisome.

How do company admins here feel about letting Office
documents escape one's 
company boundaries? Have you encountered undesirable
"leakage" as a result 
of users using Word as an email program?

My company does contract assembly (among other things) for a
partner and 
that includes updating and correcting assembly
documentation, and 
exchanging schedule information, so we share a lot of these
documents 
between companies. Are there best practices for doing this
kind of exchange?
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** Notes

It seems you are talking about two very different things:

1: Using MS Word as an email editor.

2: Exchanging MS Office documents with others.

I'll adress them as such.

** Using MS Word as an email editor.

 > A bit of research indicates that it's a
 > "Windows Media Skin", apparently some
"active" gizmo
 > inserted by Office when it sends email.

So MS hase come up with yet another great contribution to
the 
world of email... :-(

 > using Word as an email program?

Don't. Just don't. Word is a word processor.

When Outlook uses Word for editing email the result is
bloated, 
ugly, idiotic HTML code.

That said, we do let such mail through here, subjected to
the 
same HTML cleaning as all mail passing our gateway.
According to 
my mail reports, mail edited with Word regularly has
portions 
removed by the filter. Noone has complained though, so I
guess 
the portions removed are just unneeded dirt.

** Exchanging MS Office documents with others,

 > How do company admins here feel about letting
 > Office documents escape one's company boundaries?

This is not really an email issue. Most of the problems are
there 
no matter how the files are transported.

Users here exchange Word and Excel documents all the time.
As 
attached files, CDs etc. I (as an admin) have no problems
with this.

We had have situations where all the edits done to a word 
document showed up as some kind of strange notes when others

viewed the document that was supposed to be finished. This
has 
been unfortunate and sligtly embarrasing, but not a really
big deal.

It's (fortunately) not my responsibility (as an admin)
though.
Since I never use Word myself, I have no idea how one avoids
that 
kind of thing.

Of course, when sending thourgh email, the same 
security/privacy/integrity issues exist for Word documents
as for 
any files and content.

Regards
/Jonas
-- 
Jonas Eckerman, FSDB & Fruktträdet
http://whatever.frukt.org/

http://www.fsdb.org/
http://www.frukt.org/

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Jonas Eckerman wrote:
> 
> When Outlook uses Word for editing email the result is
bloated, ugly, 
> idiotic HTML code.

A long time ago I sent my resume (hand written .HTML) to a
VP friend for
review. He looked at it in Word.. made a couple of minor
wording changes
and sent it back. (in .HTML)

It went from 7K to 38K or so in size just from the
conversion.

Nice.

 -Ben


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On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 12:29 -0800, John Rudd wrote:
> Does anyone have a "BadHTML to GoodHTML"
filter?  One that cleans up all 
> of the useless crap that Word and Netscape (and
probably other html 
> editing apps, I'm sure) throw into an html file when
they edit it?

HTML Tidy is your friend. It may be useful in your use case.
If not, it
still rocks in others! ;)

Richard

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On Friday, February 16, 2007 8:08 PM +0100 Jonas Eckerman 
<jonas_listsfrukt.org> wrote:

> That said, we do let such mail through here, subjected
to the same HTML
> cleaning as all mail passing our gateway. According to
my mail reports,
> mail edited with Word regularly has portions removed by
the filter. Noone
> has complained though, so I guess the portions removed
are just unneeded
> dirt.

Is your filter publicly available? (I saw HTML Tidy
mentioned later in the 
thread, just checking if you're doing something different.)


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