Entourage 2008 annoying "This Link Might Be a Fraud" popup

W

William Smith

Eric said:
As noted here

http://breakingwindows.com/2008/01/entourage_2008_this_link_might.php

It seems whenever you click a link in a mail message, you get this annoying
"This Link Might Be a Fraud" popup confirmation. This seems to be part of
the MS "Junk-Mail Protection" feature, but there seems to be no way to turn
it off.

Anyone have a clue about this?
Click to expand...

Hi Eric!

To answer your question first: no, this isn't customizable. Please be
sure to let Microsoft know you'd like to see this feature change if it
bothers you by using the Help --> Send Feedback mechanism in any Office
application.

To address your concern about "whenever you click a link" that's not
true. While I don't know all the criteria for judging a link as possibly
fraud I can easily see why some are flagged.

If you'll notice the link in the blog post's message you'll see that it
has what appear to be two different domains in it:

37signals.cmail3.com
37signlas.blogs.com

Formatting E-mail links like this was a common practice by phishers in
the early days of the eBay and PayPal scams. (It may still be.) The
unsuspecting would click a link that looked like one address but they'd
be discreetly redirected to a phishing website.

Another link that will be blocked are those like this one from the
Entourage:mac Talk mailing list:

<http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>

This one may be getting flagged for the two domains or it may be getting
flagged for the "%40", which is the ASCII substitute for "@". If you're
not savvy, could you really tell what's happening in that URL? Could you
tell what the "%40" really meant?

While I don't believe Microsoft should dictate their blocking behavior
without giving the end-user an option to "opt out", I don't believe
legitimate websites should be sending you links that you can't
understand by simply looking at them.

Will Microsoft ever publish a list of what they flag as a possible fraud
or phishing attempts? Don't count on it.

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>
 
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