12.03.2007
Microsoft Erases Users' E-mails
The software giant Microsoft admitted the fact that its Live OneCare security suite has caused serious problems. It deleted by accident users' Outlook and Outlook Express e-mails.
The main cause of deletion, as posted on OneCare forum, was the antivirus program the goal of which is to find viruses in e-mail attachments. The program deleted all .pst or .dbx files instead of quarantining or deleting only the hazardous e-mail. Users said that the whole personal folder where the messages of non-Exchange Server users were whether quarantined or sometimes even deleted.
Microsoft’s forum received a message from a user that asked if there was any chance of recovering the e-mail. The user said that in case the recovery of all messages was impossible than OneCare might have caused a lot more damage than any virus for the last 30 years of user’s computing experience. The forum, however, states that in some cases the recovery is possible. This means that .pst or .dbx files might be available when they are quarantined, these files can be found in OneCare’s quarantine facility.
The administrator of the forum, Stephen Boots, posted a message saying that he was very unhappy with the occurred problem, mainly because it was reported over a year ago and later he though the problem was fixed with the 1.0 release. He mentioned that there was no problem in the beta version but when the company launched 1.5 it suddenly appeared.
The spokesperson of the software giant said in a statement that Microsoft is currently working on the issue. The fix, according to the spokesperson, is to appear on Mach 13 in a new update of OneCare.
This year Microsoft’s OneCare was highly criticized since it failed to achieve certification while passing through an independent security product test. Even before that happened the program did not sufficiently protect against malware those users that used Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system.
Screenshot of Live OneCare running on Windows Vista.
Microsoft’s officials admitted that the company’s Windows Live OneCare security suite has been accidentally deleting e-mails of those users that worked with Outlook and Outlook Express.

Microsoft’s OneCare forum included postings that stated the cause of message deletion. Thus the issue occurred thanks to an antivirus application that finds e-mails containing viruses. The problem with the software was that the antivirus, instead of deleting or quarantining the hazardous e-mail, deleted all messages from the personal folder.

The forum, however, gave hope in a post saying that some messages might be recovered but only in case they were quarantined. Thus users are able to find those e-mails in OneCare’s quarantine facility.

The administrator of the forum, Stephen Boots, outlined that he was very unhappy with the issue which, he said, appeared over a year ago and the company thought it fixed the problem with the release of 1.5 version. Boots said that the beta version of the program worked fine but when the final version was launched the problem occurred once again. 

According to the statement, reported by the spokesperson of the software giant, Microsoft is now working to fix the problem and release an updated version of OneCare on March 13.

OneCare was criticized after it failed to pass an independent test of security products that provided a certain certification. In addition to this the program did not provide enough protection for Windows Vista users.