Disable download full text of articles as HTML attachments in Outlook.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-17610	DTOO283 - Outlook	SV-18743r1_rule	ECSC-1	Medium

Description
Many RSS feeds use messages that contain a brief summary of a larger message or an article with a link to the full content. Users can configure Outlook 2007 to automatically download the linked content as message attachments for individual RSS feeds. If a feed is frequently updated or typically contains very large messages and is not AutoArchived regularly, downloading full articles can cause the affected message store to become very large, which can affect the performance of Outlook. By default, Outlook does not automatically download the full text of RSS entries when retrieving feeds.

Description

Many RSS feeds use messages that contain a brief summary of a larger message or an article with a link to the full content. Users can configure Outlook 2007 to automatically download the linked content as message attachments for individual RSS feeds. If a feed is frequently updated or typically contains very large messages and is not AutoArchived regularly, downloading full articles can cause the affected message store to become very large, which can affect the performance of Outlook. By default, Outlook does not automatically download the full text of RSS entries when retrieving feeds.

STIG	Date
Microsoft Outlook 2007	2015-09-17

Details

Check Text ( C-18908r1_chk )
The policy value for User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 -> Tools \ Account Settings -> RSS Feeds “Download full text of articles as HTML attachments” will be set to “Disabled”. Procedure: Use the Windows Registry Editor to navigate to the following key: HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\RSS Criteria: If the value EnableFullTextHTML is REG_DWORD = 0, this is not a finding.

Check Text ( C-18908r1_chk )

The policy value for User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 -> Tools \ Account Settings -> RSS Feeds “Download full text of articles as HTML attachments” will be set to “Disabled”.

Procedure: Use the Windows Registry Editor to navigate to the following key:

HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\RSS

Criteria: If the value EnableFullTextHTML is REG_DWORD = 0, this is not a finding.

Fix Text (F-17524r1_fix)
The policy value for User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 -> Tools \ Account Settings -> RSS Feeds “Download full text of articles as HTML attachments” will be set to “Disabled”.