Re: Abiword files blocked by Microsoft Outlook Web Access

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Court farr wrote:

> Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 12:47:24 -0500
> From: Court farr <courtneyfarr@gmail.com>
> To: abiword-user@abisource.com
> Subject: Abiword files blocked by Microsoft Outlook Web Access
>
>
> I am a student at the University of Kansas and a writer for the
> student newspaper, the University Daily Kansan. I recently
> experienced a problem associated with Abiword and the university's
> e-mail client. I'm researching this problem out of my own curiosity
> and potentially as a piece for the newspaper depending on what I
> learn. I'm communicating with the university's Information Services
> department about this subject and wanted to gather information and
> thoughts from the Abiword community. As information could be used for
> an article, I may follow up on any replies and use applicable
> information.
>
> Now that the formalities are out of the way, onto the description of
> what happened.
>
> I use both Abiword and Microsoft Word for school, depending on what
> computer I am using. Last week, I emailed four documents to myself
> through the school email system, which uses Microsoft Outlook Web
> Access as its primary portal for email access. There were two Word
> documents (.doc) and two Abiword documents (.abw). I am using Abiword
> 2.4.2 downloaded from abisource.com. Later, when I went to claim the
> files from the email, I discovered that while the .doc files could be
> downloaded, the following message was displayed for the .abw files:
>
> "Access to the following potentially unsafe attachments has been
> blocked: Cyprus.abw, History - Bilio.abw"

Conspiracy! Microsoft are out to get us :(
... but seriously, the answer is probably far simpler.

Some universities block files for "security reasons" or to discourage
excessive use of bandwidth. This might be the case in your University,
and the .abw files might be blocked simply because they are unknown.

These policies are almost always absurd and poorly thought out and quickly
circumvented by anyone who knows about computers. Ignorance or
misconfigured software is more likely to be the problem than malice.
Microsott Word documents are as likely as any other file - if not more so
- to contain viruses and that you are allowed to use Microsoft Outlook
makes a mockery of any security or antivirus policies. Despite it being a
crude ugly thing to do you can embed huge movie files inside Word
documents to sneak them past the blocking policies. It seems unlikely
that any such deliberate blocking policy is in place.

It is vaguely possible that another program such as Norton or McAfee was
actually responsible for blocking your messages, incorrectly identifying
them as viruses.

> there also. So it is only Microsoft Outlook Web Access that blocked
> the files.

If you are using Gzipped abiword documents the software might be
blindingly blocking the files simply because they are compressed. It
might also be an over zealous pattern match incorrectly identifying the
abiword documents as dangerous.

> I am awaiting information from my college to determine why these
> Abiword files are blocked. Has anyone else experienced anything
> similar to this? Can anyone explain why these files would have been
> blocked in this one program? Has Abiword been identified as "unsafe"
> by other programs?

As Ryan mentioned this is the first time we have encountered such a
problem and it was probably an unfortunately fluke, I doubt it will be
newsworthy unfortunately.

> All comments will be appreciated. Feel free to ask for more information.

Thanks for using Abiword.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

-----------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
abiword-user-request@abisource.com with the word
unsubscribe in the message body.
Received on Tue Apr 11 20:19:00 2006