Microsoft Outlook Express is one of the most popular e-mail clients used around the world. Because of this, a lot of virus are built around using its capabilities against you. There are a few options you should setup in this program to help stave off viral attacks.
The preview pane is the frame directly beneath the list of e-mails stored on your computer that shows e-mails to you instantly when you select them.
The problem is that many virus can attack your system just by you opening up an e-mail without any warning. Since the preview window opens up e-mails as soon as you select them, any virus contained within that e-mail will infect your computer. So even if you thought that the e-mail contained a virus and you wanted to delete it right away, as soon as you select it to delete it, the preview window opens in and runs the virus! You have no chance to stop it.
Turning off the preview window is simple enough, however. First, of course, you have to start outlook express. If you have the preview pane showing, then the program will probably look something like this:
Click on the "View" Menu, and select "Layout...". The layout dialog will open and looks like this:
The entire lower half is devoted to the preview pane. All you have to do is Remove the check mark from the "Show Preview Pane" option. All the other preview options will turn gray when you do this. Then just press the OK button.
Now your preview pane is turned off! To view e-mails, you simply double click on them, and they will open in a separate window.
Turning off the preview pane gives you a chance to delete an e-mail that you suspect contains a virus, but what if you still open an e-mail that you didn't suspect at first? In order to prevent this situation from resulting in a viral infection, we can turn off some of Outlook Express's enhancements that the virus's take advantage of.
To do that, we will setup Outlook Express to use Internet Explorers "Restricted Sites" security.
This is really easy to do, too! From in Outlook Express, click on the "Tools" menu, and then select "Options..." (which is at the very bottom of the Tools menu).