Well, it’s over. I think I have the damn thing wrestled to the mat. The big time-sink this time was peculiar: When I tried to save out an email attachment from inside Thunderbird…nothing happened. I tried again. Same thing. I tried another email attachment, as a test. Same thing. I tried yet another attachment, a silly picture of a kid in a very clever Halloween costume. And…it was saved to where I save things, the Downloads library.
Huh? It drove me nuts. Some things were saved but most weren’t. I tried to save them to different folders, like Documents and others, no good. I searched online and found a number of suggestions when Thunderbird won’t save an attachment file to disk. None of them seemed pertinent. Then someone suggested looking at the AV program. I’ve used Windows Defender for years with good results, and it never gave me grief about saving attachments.
Then it hit me: McAfee AV had been pre-installed on the new Dell machine. I didn’t register it and didn’t think it was functioning. But when I uninstalled McAfee, alluvasudden Thunderbird saved out attachments without a fight, right where I wanted them.
Bingo. My guess at this point is that the picture of the kid in a costume was a .jpg, whereas all the others were Word .docx files. You can insert macros into Word documents, and I think that’s what McAfee was worried about. I looked at all the .docx files I tried to save out, and none contained macros.
And with that, the war was over. Oh, I expect to run into an occasional Win 11 setting or somesuch that goes against logic. So far so good.
Yes, I know, attachments can contain malware. C’mon, I’ve been in this business for a long, long time. I’ve disabled macros in Office documents. I don’t save or open attachments from people I don’t know until I can scan them or in some other way figure out what they are. Most of the time I just delete them.
Again, because I spend nearly all my time in Windows looking at software other than Windows, the switch really isn’t that radical. So I’m on to other things, like a new release of FreePascal from Square One, which I’ll be writing up in the next day or two.
McAfee. It figures — I haven’t trusted them in years. Many moons ago, I had clients who had the McAfee firewall cut off their network access when they let their subscription expire. Now, I ALWAYS recommend that they uninstall the McAfee trial from their computer and use the built-in Windows AV. If they feel they need something more, I have recommendations for them, but never McAfee. And I’m not much fonder of Norton.
Boy, am I with you on this one! I like Windows Defender and rely on it, since I’m not stupid and don’t do dumb things like clicking on an attachment from an unknown source. I get scam emails with attachments semiregularly so I’ve had plenty of practice.
Speaking about Office macros: I wonder if Microsoft will ever allow macros on Office 365 (there might be workarounds, but they are probably not worth the trouble). I understand the risks macros present, but VBA can increase the functionality of Excel & Access programs.
A couple things about modern MS Office files: When Microsoft moved on from the old Office formats that had 3 letter file extensions they decided to use a different extension for files containing macros. So, technically the extension should end in “m” not “x” if the file has one or more embedded macros. That said, from a security point of view anything is possible and you should not simply trust the extension to check for macros. Also, FYI all modern Office files are really just zip files. Go ahead, change the extension to .zip and see. You can pretty easily hide whatever you want in a perfectly functional Office file.
Huh. I never knew that you could look inside a .docx by renaming it to a .zip. 7-Zip faithfully showed me all the different internal guts of a .docx. Fascinating business. I don’t do much with macros (in Word especially) but I’m tempted to create a macro and then look for it inside the .docx.
To find the macro you will have to save the file as *.docm not *.docx, but otherwise yes.
I have a PC running Ubuntu out in my workshop. I use sshfs to mount a couple of filesystems from the desktop in my study. A year or two ago Firefox “updated” and suddenly I couldn’t save files across the network to my desktop any more.
It turned out that Ubuntu had replaced my functioning Firefox install with a “snap”, and some internal conflict with the snap system and sshfs doesn’t allow that.
Uninstalling the snap and downloading a fresh copy of Firefox from firefox.com was the obvious solution, but some browsing showed a whole bunch of people trying to do that, not always successfully, since Ubuntu’s package manager insisted on replacing directly-installed software with snaps, and none of the work-arounds seemed to work for everyone, or all the time.
I’ve been saving to the Downloads folder and just copying stuff to the other machine before I shut the remote box down.
The correct solution is to back everything up, blow Ubuntu away, and install Debian, but I haven’t found the round tuits yet.
There is absolutely no point in running 3rd-party AV software with Windows 11 – Microsoft’s built-in offering is incredibly efficient (both in CPU and memory consumption) and both safe and solid – well, AFAIK I have never had a virus or malware…