Keep from Adding Hidden Info to Attachments

Did you know when you attach Microsoft Office documents to messages in Outlook, it adds hidden info to those documents that can be used to personally identify you? Information like your name and email address? Well, it does. The story goes like this...

Why Outlook Adds Hidden Information to Attachments

This isn't some sinister plan by Microsoft to spy on people. It is actually meant to be helpful. The idea is that by adding some personal information to Microsoft Office documents that you are sending to someone as email attachments, it becomes possible to track and manage changes to those documents.

This makes quite a lot of sense, except sometimes it can be a disaster. The disaster comes about when that hidden info violates someone's privacy. I'm sure you can think of cases where someone wouldn't want their name and email address to appear in a document they create, or that they receive and forward to someone else.

Microsoft has recognized this problem too, and in Outlook 2007 you can prevent such information from being added to Office documents sent as attachments.
Note: Hidden information can get into Office documents before they ever reach Outlook. That's a different problem, and one that you need to deal with in the individual progams you use to create the documents you send.

Preventing Hidden Info from Being Added

To prevent this information from being added to Office documents you send as attachments, you use the Attachment Handling area of the Trust Center. Take a look at the following figure:

You block hidden info in the Attachment Handling security area.

You'll notice that there is nothing in Attachment Handling that says "stop secretly adding personal information" or anything like that. Again, that's because this issue is a side-effect of a useful features, in this case the Reply With Changes feature of Outlook.

The ability to Reply With Changes required Outlook to add that personally identifiable hidden data we've been talking about. So, there is a trade-off here:

Do you want the ability to track the changes people make to documents you send them, or do you want to keep personal information out of the documents you send as attachments?

If you want to keep your personal information out of documents you send, clear the Add properties to attachments to enable Reply with Changes checkbox.

If you want or need the Reply With Changes feature, set the checkbox.

Of course, you can always have the best of both worlds by keeping Reply With Changes enabled, and only disabling it when you are about to send something that you don't want to be identified with. Just remember to make the change before you send out that special document.

From here you can:

Return to the top of this hidden info page.

Close this window to return to the page you arrived from.