Re: Ability to change RTF e-mails after receipt

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"Bill Curran" <nospam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:Xns9946783197181xtc13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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 'Edit>Edit 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

.

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