Setting Up Secure E-Mail | Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Step by Step (Step By Step (Microsoft))

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Your e-mail messages are vulnerable to interception by hackers and others who are intent on viewing them as they travel from server to server en route to you or your recipients. You can use Outlook to send e-mail securely by encrypting and digitally signing your messages. Encryption ensures that only the intended recipients can read the messages you send, and a digital signature provides your recipients with proof that a message is really from you. To use either of these features, you must have a digital ID stored on your computer.

You can encrypt an individual e-mail message or instruct Outlook to encrypt all your outgoing messages. To encrypt a single message, click the message’s Options button, click the Security Settings button, and then select the “Encrypt message contents and attachments” check box. To encrypt all outgoing messages, on the Tools menu, click Options, and on the Security tab, select the “Encrypt contents and attachments for out going messages” check box.

To digitally sign an individual e-mail message, click the message’s Options button, click the Security Settings button, and then select the “Add digital signature to this message” check box. If all your message recipients don’t have Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail extensions (S/MIME) security, select the “Send this message as clear text signed” check box. To receive verification when your message arrives, select the “Request S/MIME receipt for this message” check box.

Digitally signed messages contain a Signed By status line, which displays the digital signature name and either a Valid Signature icon or an Invalid Signature icon. An invalid signature is also indicated by a red underline. Click either button to see more information about the signature.

For additional security, you can use security zones to control whether scripts (a list of commands executed without user interaction) or other active content can be run in HTML messages you send and receive. Microsoft Internet Explorer uses security zones to categorize Web sites so that you can set a suitable security level for them. When visiting a Web site, you can tell which zone it is in by looking at the right end of the Internet Explorer status bar. There are four zones—Internet, Local intranet, Trusted sites, and Restricted sites. You can select from four pre-defined security levels—High, Medium, Medium-Low, and Low—for each security zone. Each level is described in the Security dialog box. You can also customize security levels for any zone.

New in Office 2003—Information Rights Management If you don’t want the recipient to forward, copy, or print your message, you can send it with restricted permissions. You can use Information Rights Management, a new feature in Microsoft Office 2003, to control who can read your messages and what they can do with them.

You can only send a message with restricted permissions from an Exchange Server account, and you must have a digital ID for that account. To read a message with restricted permissions, recipients must have Outlook 2003 or the Rights Management Add-on for Internet Explorer. If recipients have Internet Explorer but not the add-on, they will be prompted to download the add-on for free when they open a message with restricted permissions.

To send a message with restricted permissions:

On the message form’s Standard toolbar, click the Permissions button.

Obtaining a Digital ID

If you want to digitally sign messages, you must obtain a digital ID. If your organization is running Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 or earlier, you can obtain an Exchange Digital ID from the server itself. Your Exchange server administrator can provide the information you need.

To send digitally signed messages over the Internet, you must obtain a digital ID from an external company that provides certification services, such as VeriSign, Inc., GlobalSign, British Telecommunications, or Thawte Certification.

To obtain a digital ID to send messages over the Internet:

On the Tools menu, click Options.
In the Options dialog box, click the Security tab, and then click the Get a Digital ID button.

The Microsoft Office Assistance Center Web page opens in your default Web browser.
Click the name of one of the available providers. If a message appears warning you about viewing pages over a secure connection, click OK.

Follow the instructions on the Web page to register for a digital ID. Most certifying authorities charge a small fee for IDs, but some offer free IDs or a free trial period.

You can have more than one digital ID on your computer, and you can select which one to use for each message. For example, you might have one ID for business use and one for personal use. You can also copy digital IDs from one computer to another by importing and exporting ID files.

To export or import a digital ID:

On the Tools menu, click Options.
In the Options dialog box, click the Security tab, and then click the Import/Export button.
In the Import/Export Digital ID dialog box, select the option you want, fill in the information, and then click OK.

Protecting Your Privacy

E-mail is increasingly being used as a means of delivering marketing information to customers and potential customers. Many companies include pictures in their marketing messages to help explain their product or to make the message more attractive and noticeable, but these pictures can make e-mail messages large. To avoid this problem, some companies include links to pictures that are hosted on their server. When you preview or open the message, you can see the pictures, but they aren’t actually part of the message.

Some junk mail senders have utilized this new technology to include Web beacons in their messages. Web beacons are small programs that notify the sender when you read or preview the e-mail message. This confirms that your e-mail address is valid, and might result in more junk e-mail being sent to you.

New in Office 2003—Enhanced privacy features To help protect your privacy, Outlook 2003 includes new features that block external content such as pictures, sounds, and Web beacons. In addition to helping ensure your privacy, this provides the opportunity to save bandwidth resources, as you can choose to view images when you want.

By default, Outlook 2003 blocks external content to and from all sources except those defined in the Safe Senders and Safe Recipients lists, and from Web sites in your Trusted Zone.

To change the way Outlook handles external content:

On the Tools menu, click Options.
In the Options dialog box, on the Security tab, click Change Automatic Download Settings.
In the Automatic Picture Download Settings dialog box, select the check boxes for the options you want.
Click OK in each of the open dialog boxes to save your settings.

To view the blocked content in an individual e-mail message:

In the message, click the InfoBar.
On the shortcut menu, click Show Blocked Content.

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