Outlook Addins & Email Productivity

My Spyware checker has recently found Silent Mail installed on my company laptop. I did not install Silent Mail personally and the only other person who has had access to my laptop is my company's IT Administrator who has confirmed that this software was not installed by him. I have previously installed the Bells and Whistles add-in for Outlook on this laptop but this was de-installed several months ago. Does Bells and Whistles (or any other DS Development product) install Silent Mail ? or use components of Silent Mail? Can Silent Mail be installed remotely? Is there any way to trace when Silent Mail was installed and where copies of my e-mail messages have been sent to?

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Nicholas C Waller

Hi Nicholas,

SilentMail is NOT installed by any of our other products. It can only be installed by downloading the SilentMail setup file - we guarantee you that it is not included with the setup of any of our other products (like Bells & Whistles, Easy Mail Merge or else).

Also, SilentMail can NOT be installed remotely: you need to be logged on as a Windows local administrator in order to install the program.

To check if SilentMail is actually installed on your computer, go to your Program Files folder, then to DS Development -> Silent Mail. If there is no SilentMail folder under the DS Development folder or under the Program Files folder, do a search on your computer for a folder named Silent Mail. If you can not find such a folder, it means that the program is not installed on your computer.

Plus, lately we received similar reports from other user, regarding an anti-spyware program that reported Bells & Whistles as SilentMail. On these cases, it is an error on the spyware checker algorithm that confuses Bells & Whistles with Silent Mail - they both use the same kind of anti-piracy protections, most likely this generates the confusion.

Bottom line: SilentMail can only be installed by someone who logs in as a local administrator (not remotely) and who actually uses the silentmail.exe setup file. The program is not delivered, downloaded or installed with any of our other products.

Kind regards,
Bogdan

Thanks for the detailed reply - the spychecker that found Silent Mail was Webroot Spy Sweeper and I assume that what it found was a remnant of Bells and Whistles not removed when I de-installed it. I assume it is safe to delete the empty DS Developments folder and sub folders from program files ?

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Nicholas C Waller

Yes, assuming that Bells & Whistles was uninstalled, you can delete the DS Development folder entirely.

The spyware checker that you mentioned is the same one which was reported to us by other users - misreporting Bells as SilentMail.

Regards,
Bogdan