Problems opening attachments

Are these unsolicited emails? If so, STOP TRYING TO OPEN THEM! If not, you may have to check the settings within excel with regard to running macros.

Sounds to me though like your anti-virus is trying to tell you something. Listen to it!

Tim

Do you know who these are really from and do you really need to open them?

Otherwise delete and move on.

There are quite a few fake 'invoices' going round at the moment

Owain

This is a troll? He can't be serious, surely?

Should also add that if you're in the habit of opening unsolicited attachments, your machine is almost certainly already infected, even if you've had messages saying that the attachment failed to open. Common gambit to put you off the scent.

Tim

The *.xls attachments are MS EXCEL (you probably knew that anyway). Depending on your version of EXCEL and the level of security, it may block files containing macros as they can contain viruses. To lighten up the security, open EXCEL and go to Tools>Macro>security and choose the level of security that you're happy with. Perhaps scan the files first to check for malware.

The same process applies to MS WORD for the *PRCL.doc files (go to Tools>Macro>security and choose the level of security that you want), but there may be something nasty about PRCL.doc files in particular, so read some of the things here to be sure you're not going to have malware installed.

Perhaps just as well since they are almost certainly hostile. Thank heavens that MS Office no longer runs macros by default!

Why do you doubt the AV assessment? If you want an independent scan of a suspect attatchement and your AV appears not to spot it as dodgy then offering it up to virus total isn't a bad way to proceed.

If in any doubt wait 48 hours and try again.

Delete unsolicited emails from unknown sources with attachments unread. Particularly ones with Urgent in the title.

Few?

Many Many Many (or Lots or ...)

:-)

Avpx

I would ask one of the nurses for help when they come round with the inmate's meds.

Sadly the stupidy of H*mo Semi-sapiens in dealing with matters online seems to know no limits. About 10 years ago a friend of mine, mid 40s, private dentist, millionaire, academically adept and uni graduate got an email offering a £100 Harrods voucher in exchange for the email addresses of 30 people. Now most blokes wouldn't have wanted the voucher and even the average 7 year old would have moved on by very rapidly at such an obvious con but numpty here, no doubt giggling and clapping his hands in glee at the prospect of a hamper or similar cos he's gay as a Larry Grayson convention, went immediately through his friends list, pasted 30 of the addresses, including mine, into an email and replied to the scammers. I was thenceforth rapidly bombarded with ginormous amounts of spam which went on for weeks.

The thought that 30 email addresses couldn't possibly be worth £100 and that if enough people replied then Harrods would go bust had not even occured to him. Nor had the foolishness of giving his friends email addresses out to all and sundry. Even his best pal the Nigerian prince he's in regular contact with about an inheritance that he didn't know about said it was a bit of a daft thing to do. Now admittedly he was rather late to the internet compared to those of us who've been online since the late 90s but still FFS Chris!

IQ, qualifications, even the wisdom that ought to come with age does not necessarily translate into even the tiniest grain of common sense for some people.

Thanks for the replies. You are all making incorrect assumptions. If I had fully explained the message would have been too long. I never open, or try to open, unsolicited emails. These concern goods that I have purchased on line. I would love to open them as I am having problems receiving items already paid for. The UK Mail claim to have called and we were not home, however I was in the garage with the door open and my wife working in the kitchen, both with clear view of the drive. They sent an email with an attachment purportedly containing how I may collect the item. However as I cannot open it I am non the wiser. IMHO UK Mail are pits!

It's possible that these are just coincidental phishing emails. Seems lots of folk have had similar unsolicited ones purporting to be from UK Mail.

I'm forever getting emails like these. Just occasionally they do accidentally match up with a real pending order.

Tim

OK. So you have a problem opening office attachments. You can download free viewers from the Mickeysoft support site or one of the free Office clones. Neither will execute macros hostile or otherwise.

TBH I can't imagine any reputable organisation sending out Office docs with macros enabled. It invites being blocked by corporate firewalls.

Are you *absolutely" certain they are genuine ones and not phishing emails?

The other solution is ring them up and find out by phone.

It seems that you can only email them if you have data which I am not able too access.

Have you looked on their website for contact details?

I don't think you've yet convinced us that these are genuine emails and not just phishing. OK, they purport to come from UK Mail and you're hoping to hear from UK Mail. But how *sure* are you that these emails are anything to do with your transaction and not just scams which coincidentally arrived at the same time? Is there anything in the visible portion which is personal to you and which a scammer wouldn't know? [For example, some organisations quote part of an account number or a postcode in order to help you to be sure that they're genuine].

If you're satisfied that they *are* genuine, have you tried saving them to your hard drive and then opening them in the appropriate application rather than double clicking them in the email? That sometimes works.

One thing I've found is that if you have quite an old version of Msoft Office then you cannot open some of the later files from the new Offece programs. Having said that if you install the converter pack this should go away, though a warning about it will be converted to a format you can work with but any exteras in later formats might spoil the formatting of the file. The interesting thing in your message though is that neither of the suffixs appear to be the new file types. This points to them being bogus and I'm not surprised the anti virus jumps on them. If you have an old machine isolated, turn off the anti virus and export the files to a ram stick and then play with them over on the other machine. Chances are its c*ck up, but you really cannot be too careful. Brian

Good point. They are almost certainly hostile then.

That is a very bad idea for someone who can't figure out how to open fairly basic attachments. AV disabled will allow whatever malware is there to run unmolested and the results of that could easily end up making the USB stick an infective vector on autorun.

OP would do well to look at:

Or download them and investigate them on a non-Windows box if you really want to see what the payload is.

In article , Chris Hogg scribeth thus

If ANY file or attachment is received here from ANYONE I don't know in the bin it goes without question.

Its a simple as that:)

That's no guarantee (although it makes you a bit safer)

Andy