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Outlook and Outlook Express are Microsoft e-mail programs.
Outlook and Outlook Express are not on any lab computer and are not supported by the SCIC.
Why does the SCIC discourage Outlook usage?
Outlook and Outlook Express are significant security liabilities, both to the student using Outlook, and to the campus at large.
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- Virtually every single major worm in recent history has required Outlook to spread. These bugs, such as Klez, Nimda, Melissa, Taskman, My Life, and Goner have slowed the Internet to a crawl for entire regions of the world. Obviously, the Carleton ResNet would take a major hit were one of these to get into our network.
- The current version of Outlook, even with all the security updates, has known security flaws that can turn your computer into a spam factory through the simple act of reading an email. Most spam emails come from the compromized computers of Outlook users who have no idea that their computers are sending out thousands of emails a day. This is bad for you, bad for the people you end up spamming, and even worse for the ResNet, which has to handle the stress you place on it, and generally ends up slowing down access for everyone on campus.
- Even with our requirement that all students use McAfee and automatically update their computers, we're still forced to shut down ports and have the students bring their computers to the SCIC for disinfection. In some cases, these students have lost data. In all cases, the affected computers have been running Windows, and in the vast majority of cases, the computers have also been running Outlook or Outlook Express.
We request that you investigate alternatives to Outlook.
You will almost certainly receive loads of malware, but if you decide to ignore our requests and use Outlook, placing yourself, and the rest of the campus at risk, you can follow the instructions on enabling SSL to be able to send and recieve mail in this guide, http://www.cae.wisc.edu/fsg/info/outlook2003_ssl.html. The instructions will hold true for our network, with one exception:
- the server names are
smtp.carleton.edu and imap.carleton.edu
- remember to fill in the username a password fields
We still request that you investigate alternatives to Outlook.
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