1.1.6.1 Ensure 'Download full text of articles as HTML attachments' is set to Disabled

Information

This policy setting controls whether Outlook automatically makes an offline copy of the RSS items as HTML attachments.
If you enable this policy setting, Outlook automatically makes an offline copy of RSS items as HTML attachments.
If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, Outlook will not automatically make an offline copy of RSS items as HTML attachments. The recommended state for this setting is: Disabled.

Rationale:

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 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.

Solution

To implement the recommended configuration state, set the following Group Policy setting to Disabled.

User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Outlook 2013\Account Settings\RSS Feeds\Download full text of articles as HTML attachments

Impact:

This setting enforces the default configuration and therefore should have minimal impact on most users. Disabling this setting could cause minor disruptions for users who are accustomed to reading articles as HTML attachments within Outlook. These users will have to click the View article link to open such articles in the default Web browser.

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/552

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-6b.

Plugin: Windows

Control ID: 239a135f4adbf7bed9e0509bf1facded81a464c76f54da92fbad2bf6f59ef794