Outlook address book

It seems that most of the trojans, virii, etc. in circulation propagate themselves at least in part by exploiting victim's address books. It occured to me that if I could burn my Outlook address book onto a c.d. and not keep a copy on my hard drive that I could minimize exploitation considerably by only having the address book accessible when I'm actually using it. It also occured to me that I don't know if Outlook would cooperate with such a setup. How would I go about doing this?

 

I don't know if it will work but if you're willing to take the time to try it, here's how it can be done. First, you have to change where OE looks for the wab, which isn't as simple as changing OE's store folder for messages.

With Outlook closed:
1. Go to Start>Run, type in "Regedit" (without the quotes), click OK and navigate to this key:
\HKEY_CURRENT_USER
\Software
\Microsoft
\WAB
\WAB4
\Wab File Name
2. Click Registry| Export Registry File and save the selected branch to your desktop as "WAB.reg ". You can then restore the current location simply by double-clicking the saved WAB.reg file.
3. In the right-hand pane, right-click on (Default) and click Modify, then carefully enter the full path and file name of your relocated *.wab, which in your case will be the CD Drive.
4. Close Regedit and with the CD containing the address book in the CD drive open Outlook Express.

The major problems I can foresee with this arrangement is that you'll have to have the CD in the drive every time you open OE and if the drive requires a while to spin up, OE might decide the address book "can't be accessed" and refuse to proceed.

If you try it, post back and let us know how it worked out.

 

Outlook or Outlook Express?

IMO, this course of action is a tad extremem - an antivirus program and firewall backed up with sensible practices should be sufficient.

 

Thank you for your replies. By the sound of it, it's more of a project than I want to undertake just to try an idea. I'm not comfortable messing with my registry unless I really have to.