Widgets for Microsoft Exchange
Rich Text Sentry


Rich Text Sentry

Exchange makes it very easy to send a rich text message to a recipient running a client other than Exchange. That recipient will see a huge, unreadable chunk of encoded binary data. If that recipient happens to be an Internet mailing list, five thousand users will each receive that chunk.

Rich Text Sentry helps guard against such embarrassing accidents.

Requirements and contraindications

You must be using a message service that addresses its messages with the SMTP address type, such as Microsoft Internet Mail and Netscape Internet Mail.

MSN users need not load Rich Text Sentry, since MSN already filters all rich text from messages that leave it.

Installation

Download rtfguard.zip (available in both Intel and Alpha flavors) from this Web page, and unzip it. Copy the DLL rtfguard.dll into your system directory (\windows\system on Windows 95, \windows\system32 on Windows NT). Check your system directory for the file msvcrt40.dll; if you lack this, see the runtime installation instructions above. Finally, feed the file rtfguard.reg to regedit. (Double-clicking it in Explorer will do this.)

De-installation

(How thoughtful of me.) Exit and log out of Exchange. Fire up regedit, open the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software
\Microsoft
\Exchange
\Client
\Extensions

and delete the "Rich Text Sentry" tag and its value. Delete the file rtfguard.dll from your system directory.

Usage

The Rich Text Sentry guards against the common mistake of sending Exchange-format rich text messages to Internet recipients not using Microsoft Exchange.

Once installed, Rich Text Sentry watches every outgoing message for Internet recipients with the Send to this recipient in Microsoft rich text format flag set. When it finds a message with such, it warns the user, who may send the message as it is, stop sending the message, or else have Rich Text Sentry eliminate the rich text setting.

A user can circumvent this check by selecting the recipient from the Address Book. Rich Text Sentry assumes that any recipient selected from an Address Book bears an intentionally set (or reset) rich text flag.

Known shortcomings and bugs in this release

Rich Text Sentry cannot tell that you're responding to a message that contained rich text in the first place.

Change history

Go to the Widgets for Microsoft Exchange page
Go to Ben Goetter's home page

Last modified: 3 May 1996
Ben Goetter, Angry Graycat Designs