(MS Word) ".doc" files are (sometimes?) unsafe to share

[HenHanna]

i'm a bit annoyed when People send me (MS Word) .doc files,
because i must first convert them to .pdf before i can read them.

people send them thinking they are sending text files...

and wind up sending an awful lot of metadata .... (like the undo
history). LibreOffice will read Word (.doc) files and let you export to
text, pdf, or rtf formats which are safe to share.

university ... Vice-Chancellor who sent out "all staff"

memos by e-mail in MS-Word format. ...
.... composed them by taking an existing MS-Word file and altering
the contents. He apparently didn't know about the "revision history"
feature, ........ ended up leaking confidential documents.


https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/244902/can-i-be-sure-a-word-document-is-safe-if-it-doesnt-have-macros

I am aware that MS Word documents can be potentially

dangerous due to the executable macros contained within them.

[Steve Hayes]

Post by HenHanna
i'm a bit annoyed when People send me (MS Word) .doc files,
because i must first convert them to .pdf before i can read them.

If you can't read them, then they are not unsafe.

Sometimes they might have macros, but the macros would have no effect
unless you read them with MS-Word, which you obviously aren't doing.

Post by HenHanna

people send them thinking they are sending text files...

and wind up sending an awful lot of metadata .... (like the undo
history). LibreOffice will read Word (.doc) files and let you export to
text, pdf, or rtf formats which are safe to share.

If I am sending people a document that I want them to add to or alter,
I send it in RTF format, which most word processors can handle. If
they just need to read it, then PDF is easier.

Post by HenHanna

university ... Vice-Chancellor who sent out "all staff"

memos by e-mail in MS-Word format. ...
.... composed them by taking an existing MS-Word file and altering
the contents. He apparently didn't know about the "revision history"
feature, ........ ended up leaking confidential documents.

Yes, that is stupid.

I send all emails in plain text, and if formatting is needed, I send
it as a faile attachment.

[Peter Moylan]

Post by Steve Hayes
I send all emails in plain text, and if formatting is needed, I send
it as a faile attachment.

I recently had to send a document to my uncle and a cousin, so I
converted it to PDF first. It turned out that their mail provider (the
same provider in both cases) rejected mail with a PDF attachment. I'm
going to have to send it by snail mail.

(Or perhaps it was rejected because my message was in plain text, with
no HTML. I still haven't tracked down the precise cause.)

Some mail providers are becoming tougher and tougher about rejecting
mail for obscure reasons. (And sometimes they don't even tell the sender
that the attempt failed.) Maybe we'll all have to go back to snail mail.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

Post by Peter Moylan

Post by Steve Hayes
I send all emails in plain text, and if formatting is needed, I send
it as a faile attachment.

That's essentially what I do.

Post by Peter Moylan
I recently had to send a document to my uncle and a cousin, so I
converted it to PDF first. It turned out that their mail provider (the
same provider in both cases) rejected mail with a PDF attachment. I'm
going to have to send it by snail mail.
(Or perhaps it was rejected because my message was in plain text, with
no HTML. I still haven't tracked down the precise cause.)
Some mail providers are becoming tougher and tougher about rejecting
mail for obscure reasons. (And sometimes they don't even tell the sender
that the attempt failed.) Maybe we'll all have to go back to snail mail.

A few days ago I had a message rejected because it exceeded the size
limit. However, they didn't think it helpful to say what the limit was.
A day or two later a message with a 13 megabyte attachment was rejected
(by the same mail server) but they didn't bother to tell me at all; it
just didn't arrive.

Other recent messages didn't because (probably) some servers don't like
messages with more than some limit (3?) of recipients. Again, they
don't bother to tell you that.

A few years ago I had a message to rejected by mail system of the
University of Chile because the subject line contained "Hi". Hi? No,
but the subject line was something like "Forthcoming visit to Chile",
and "Chile" contains the string "hi".

Sorry, this message says nothing relevant to sci.lang, but then neither
did any of the other contributions to this thread (started by someone
who never has anything relevant to say).

[Tilde]

Post by Peter Moylan
I recently had to send a document to my uncle and a cousin, so I
converted it to PDF first. It turned out that their mail provider (the
same provider in both cases) rejected mail with a PDF attachment. I'm
going to have to send it by snail mail.

Came across this looking at some older posts.
Something I've successfully used many times
in the past is to simply change the file
extension (to ".txt" for example) and let the
recipient know to save it with the correct
extension. If the mailer only looks at the
file name this gets through. Have not had to
do this for quite a while, so YMMV.