FAQ

How do I block messages which cause Outlook to hang

Indications

Outlook hangs when downloading messages, causing the same message to be downloaded many times in a row and other messages cannot be downloaded.

Spammers and hackers have found new ways to harm Outlook users.

Both Outlook and Outlook Express are unable to handle emails with improperly formatted message-ID headers or emails with just receive headers. See the examples below:

Corrupted Message-ID Header

Corrupted Received Header

Emails like these are sent to 'abuse' or 'break' Outlook.

They do not contain any mail body or subject or from/to headers.

The messages do not violate RFC standards, which is why they are able to get past the RFC822 content filter in Merak Mail Server. Merak Mail Server is compliant with all RFC standards and once a standard is set for filtering these types of messages our developers will adjust the core product to filter out these types of emails by default.

The messages are designed to affect Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. Other email clients can download these messages without problems. Merak WebMail can display these emails, along with Mozilla, Netscape, The Bat!, etc.

Once a message is in the user's mailbox on the Merak server it needs to be removed before the user can continue to use Outlook. You can either go into WebMail and delete the message or go to the Merak working directory and delete the message from the \Merak\Mail\domain\user\ directory.

Microsoft have addressed this problem and released an update. You can see more information here.

To stop these messages from getting to your Outlook users, you will need to build a content filter in your Merak mail server to block them.

When setting up these content filters you should move them to the top of the filter order so that these messages can be filtered as soon as they come in.

Missing Information filter

Filter Missing Headers

All the conditions have to have checked and the NOT checkbox and the RegEx function has to be chosen.

Filter Missing Headers NOT

This content filter is for messages where the following mail headers are missing: [To:], [Cc:], [Date:][From:], [Subject:]. Then the action command specifies to delete the message. The regular expression is set to '.+' – it means at least one sign.

You can download the filter and import it to your Merak.