If you are unfortunate enough to work in a Windows/Outlook/Exchange/MS
Office/Adobe/Flash environment, you know that you are constantly at
risk of being infected with email viruses. Needless to say, no system
is completely secure but there are safer alternatives. Of course, if
you’re in that environment it’s probably because you work for an
organization that insists on it so you don’t have the option of moving
to something safer.
Karl Voit is in that situation and has developed a reasonably safe and
sane way of dealing with email in it. You should read his post for the
details but the TL;DR is that he set up a virtual environment on his
Windows machine that runs an instance of Debian Linux. That instance
gets mail from Outlook on the Web and reads attachments using a
hardened PDF reader (Ocular) and LibreOffice for MS Office files.
Is it 100% safe? Of course not but with a little care you can avoid
most of the problems. Voit took pains to make the environment simple
to use and familiar for Windows users. Having been Windows-free for
decades, I haven’t used his setup but it looks very nice and Voit
appears to have addressed the weak security spots.
If you are someone you know is stuck with an insecure email
environment, take a look at Voit’s post and see if his solution will
work for you. It’s bound to be safer and it doesn’t appear to be
terribly inconvenient to use.