Yahoo anti virus (norton) and E-mail

Clark · External Since: May 26, 2007 Posts: 18

Anyone hear of this problem

I have a customer that was trying to E-mail with an attachment, created with
the new Office 2007.
Office 2007 saves documents by default as .docx and Yahoo was reporting a
virus in every attachment, I scanned the documents with two online scanners
and AVG free (this is on Vista by the way) and all showed virus free.

I had the customer send out the attachment after walking her through
changing the default extension to .doc, guess what? no problem Yahoo did not
declare the E-mail to contain an infection.

anyone else having this problem? or hear of this?

Clark

Clark · External Since: May 26, 2007 Posts: 18

"Clark" <Clark_throwaway.TakeThisOut@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:sDVbi.14$dq7.8@newsfe06.lga...
> Anyone hear of this problem
>
> I have a customer that was trying to E-mail with an attachment, created
> with the new Office 2007.
> Office 2007 saves documents by default as .docx and Yahoo was reporting a
> virus in every attachment, I scanned the documents with two online
> scanners and AVG free (this is on Vista by the way) and all showed virus
> free.
>
> I had the customer send out the attachment after walking her through
> changing the default extension to .doc, guess what? no problem Yahoo did
> not declare the E-mail to contain an infection.
>
> anyone else having this problem? or hear of this?
>
>
> Clark
>
>
>

Does this mean No?? I'm the only one?

Clark

Virus Guy · External Since: Aug 05, 2005 Posts: 407

Clark wrote:

> > Office 2007 saves documents by default as .docx and Yahoo was
> > reporting a virus in every attachment, I scanned the documents
> > with two online scanners and AVG free (this is on Vista by the
> > way) and all showed virus free.
> >
> > changing the default extension to .doc, guess what? no problem
> > Yahoo did not declare the E-mail to contain an infection.
> >
> > anyone else having this problem? or hear of this?
>
> Does this mean No?? I'm the only one?

That question has been asked here:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070606033745AAf7ZNx

And the (lame) answer was to rename the file to .doc or have Word save
it as an earlier version.

Based on a few other things I've read about this, all answers are
pointing to the extensions of the new office 2007 files (.docx, .xlxs,
..pptx, .accdb (access)) as being the problem. Seems that (some?
most?) AV software has a list of "valid" file extensions, and anything
that is not on that list is flagged as malware. For such software not
to have Office-2007 file extensions added (by now) to their internal
database seems stupid.

Maybe Lipman knows more about how various AV software looks at file
extensions as part of their malware detection scheme. I wouldn't have
thought that they would pay any attention to file extensions.

Maybe the .docx files look like word files to the AV software, but
because they don't have the .doc extension the AV software thinks
something funny is going on and decides to flag the file.

What ever the reason, it's clearly a thorn in Microsoft's side in
their efforts to force the migration to Vista and Office 2007 when AV
software (and big players like Yahoo) is apparently confused by the
Office 2007 file formats and/or extensions.

Maybe you're not hearing much about this because there are relatively
few people so far using Office 2007 (and e-mailing files to each
other) ?

Clark · External Since: May 26, 2007 Posts: 18

"Clark" <Clark_throwaway DeleteThis @yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:sDVbi.14$dq7.8@newsfe06.lga...
> Anyone hear of this problem
>
> I have a customer that was trying to E-mail with an attachment, created
> with the new Office 2007.
> Office 2007 saves documents by default as .docx and Yahoo was reporting a
> virus in every attachment, I scanned the documents with two online
> scanners and AVG free (this is on Vista by the way) and all showed virus
> free.
>
> I had the customer send out the attachment after walking her through
> changing the default extension to .doc, guess what? no problem Yahoo did
> not declare the E-mail to contain an infection.
>
> anyone else having this problem? or hear of this?
>
>
> Clark
>
>

Thanks for the replies
I personally use Open Office and MS office 2003, I beta tested 2007 and
hated it.
I gotta tell you, the last Microsoft meeting I attended, I got the
impression that MS was definitely concerned about Open Office because they
spent allot of time talking about it.

Open office does open the 2007 .Doc format but the type looks weird (like an
M is not quite right).
Oo did not, know how to open the .Docx extension though.

No I'm not a big fan of Microsoft either (BTS)

I was guessing that the information would be scarce on office 07 .

I didn't think to go to the Yahoo site to look for an answer (thanks VG)
I was still thinking the AV would be looking for the .exe .bat .com and
that's it, but come to think of it the .Docx ext. is sorta xml.

anyway the customer is happy now.
I did try to open the .docx file with the latest Word viewer and that did
not work either (I think MS is shooting themselves in the foot)

In the meantime more and more of my customers are asking me if they should
by a MAC
go figure.

thanks again
Clark

Stefano · External Since: Jun 12, 2007 Posts: 9

On Fri, 15 Jun 2007 10:09:36 -0400, Virus Guy <Virus.RemoveThis@Guy.com> wrote:

>
>What ever the reason, it's clearly a thorn in Microsoft's side in
>their efforts to force the migration to Vista and Office 2007 when AV
>software (and big players like Yahoo) is apparently confused by the
>Office 2007 file formats and/or extensions.
>

Thank you... another good reason for not buying Vista. All I read are
bugs, problems, security issues, not compatible issues... and now...
this.

Thanks, I'm happy of my Windows XP.

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