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OneCare Chews Up Outlook Email
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-03-12
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Users of Microsoft's antivirus product OneCare have reported on its support forums that it has deleted the email stores in Outlook and Outlook Express on some machines.
 | | OneCare Chews Up Outlook Email |  |
A few years ago, when attending a security conference, an instructor in a computer security class asked the group where the most secure computer network in the world could be found. After a few guesses, he told us it was Chernobyl, site of a major nuclear accident where the computer network was now buried under several feet of concrete.
The news making the rounds about Microsoft OneCare reminded me of this. OneCare has been taking the dramatic course of action of either quarantining or deleting email stores, the .PST file, when finding a virus on some machines.
People discussing the problems on OneCare forums seem to indicate Outlook stores get quarantined, while Outlook Express files have been deleted when an infected attachment arrived at inboxes.
This isn't a new problem. Forum posts just on one particular forum began in January. One moderator on the forum wrote that the problem had been first reported over a year ago, and fixed in the 1.0 release of OneCare. It reappeared with the release of 1.5.
Although I'm no software development expert, I have seen this kind of thing happen before at one sizable e-commerce development house that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty. Their upgrades would commonly unfix problems that had been fixed in previous releases.
It happened over and over, with no clear explanation ever emerging. It was either poor communication, poor quality assurance, poor source control, or some combination of those. Microsoft is a big company, and the OneCare problem sounds very familiar.
Too bad it wasn't DRM-related. Microsoft can patch DRM cracks pretty fast.
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Tags: Microsoft, OneCare
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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