[Mimedefang] Blocking outbound Office documents

[Jonas Eckerman]

** 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/