"Martin Gerhold" wrote in
:

"Bill Curran" wrote in message
...
We just noticed today that with Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003, any
e-mails that are received in RTF format can be modified and saved by
the receiver. Plain text and HTML emails cannot be modified. I
googled and searched and found noone else alarmed by this, and it
really scares me that people who have been scared away from HTML
emails because they are blocked/trapped/filtered everywhere have all
switched to RTF (because they gotta have pretty email) and they don't
know that without IRM (Information Rights Management) , these emails
can be freely modified by the recipients and its very difficult to
tell that an email has been modified.

Am I missing something obvious here?

Bill Curran
National Steel Car
IT

I think you'll find its worse than that: all emails (in Outlook) can
be edited (AFAIK), its just that by default, RTF ones open in 'edit'
mode, whilst HTML and plain text don't. With one of the latter open
for reading, select 'EditEdit Message'. This has its advantages
(easy stripping of attachments, for example), but it has always made
me wonder about situations when email texts are held up as proof of
what was sent (and sometimes in legal cases). It may be there are
secure copies held behind the scenes at work, but as an ordinary
office user, i wouldn't know. There are certainly no such copies of
my home email (or if there are, I wonder who's holding them!).

Martin



Ouch. Just saw the edit option. There is a reg hack to hold the original
source for "new" messages that can be seen from the "view-options-
internet headers"- it will obviously require more storage - but can at
least be used to validate the original text of the message.

Thanks for your help.

Bill Curran