Help for Cable customers

Making sure someone else doesn't use your email account

Keeping your email safe and secure is easy with Outlook Express. You can set up a password for your email so that each time you connect to receive your email, you’ll be asked to enter your password. Or, if you want to relax your security, you can set it to remember your password and retrieve email without prompting you. Choose whichever one works best for you.

If several people work on the same computer, Outlook Express allows each user to have a separate identity, which can be password protected. Click the File menu and click Identities to add or modify a profile.

Managing malicious email scripts and viruses?

Scripts are typically used to enhance your e-mail experience, by displaying additional functionality (such as animations).

However, scripts can be used for malicious purposes such as sending viruses to everyone in your address book.

Another way to tighten security in Outlook Express is to disable the use of "scripts" that may have been imbedded in an email message. This is easy to do:

To ensure that Active Scripting is disabled in the Restricted Sites Zone:

1. Open Internet Explorer.

2. Select Internet Options from the Tools menu, and select the Security tab.

3. Click on the Restricted Sites icon, and then click on the Custom Level button.

4. Scroll to the section labelled Scripting, then check the setting for Active Scripting and make sure that Disable is selected. Click OK twice.

Making Outlook Express prompt you before running scripts

Prompting is another way to avoid the action of the malicious scripts that may arrive through email and newsgroups.

Setting the following security settings will allow you to decide whether a given script is allowed to run on your system.

1. Open the Outlook Express Tools menu, click on Options and select the Security tab.

2. Select Restricted Sites Zone and click OK.

3. Open the Control Panel and click on Internet Options, then select the Security tab.

4. Click on Restricted Zones, and then on the Custom level... button.

5. Mark the Prompt option for all security options marked as Enabled. Do not leave anything set to Enabled in the list. Click OK.

After this action, Outlook Express will always prompt you before running any scripts.

By the way, Outlook Express may tell you that a script is "safe". Be careful: this doesn't necessarily mean that a script really is safe.