Help with Excel and Word auto-notify script
Let’s say you send a confidential document to a client and on the off-chance that your client sends that document to someone else, you want to be notified.
There are only two ways that I can think of to “notify” someone: email and http.
If you can program the document to email you when it’s open, then your chances of getting more information are greater. You can potentially get the sender’s name, email address, mail client, and obviously the IP address of his machine. But you run a greater risk of detection. What if his email client asks for confirmation before sending the email? Or what if he doesn’t have a mail client on his machine? How will you pull the SMTP server you need to use if there’s no mail client configured? I suppose you could setup your own SMTP server and script a telnet session to send the email.
On the other hand, you could use a simple HTTP GET request that grabs a 1×1 image from a web host. This would be more likely to work unless there’s a software firewall in the way popping up with a “Excel is trying to communicate with the Internet. Do you want to Allow or Deny this connection?” However, at the most you’ll get his browser agent and IP address. I wonder if there’s a way to grab configuration information from his mail client and use it in the HTTP headers somehow? Like set his browser agent to his email address or something. I guess you could program a PHP app that accepts email addresses as arguments and then your URL could be something like: http://site/?address=me@myaddress.com.
This is extremely back burner stuff that I’m not going to put any effort into. I’m more interested to know if it can be done or not. I’m sure it could using some VB macro, but can you auto-run macros? I know there are macro viruses that auto-run so maybe it is possible.
Anyone out there have any idea of how this can be accomplished? I did a few Google searches and came up blank.