Recently in Email Category

Postini is sending out the quarantine messages an hour later than normal as they obviously didn't apply any Daylight Saving patches.

This list of smarthosts for the major isps in the US should come in handy if your dsl ip address gets on a blacklist. Hopefully the isp's are more concerned if their own smarthost gets on the blacklist. A quick change to exchange's smtp server and a restart should get mail flowing (to roadrunner for example) again.

My hotmail account has now been upgraded to Live Mail. Considering my invite said it could be two weeks and it only took a couple of hours, I am impressed with the signup speed.
I'm not sure what I think of it so far but it doesn't leap out to me as a "woohoooo!". It does have a fairly decent looking calendar with the ability to share the calendar to my contacts, passport holders or anyone who knows the url (which is pretty easy to figure out). The publication of the calendar is in realtime, with an error message returned if the publication is revoked so no loss of privacy there.
There is quite a bit of functionality missing that can be seen at the Beta feedback page but you get a LOT of functionality missing if you use firefox - the calendar and the contacts tab is missing.

In my second email post for today - it looks like you can sign up for the Windows live mail beta - they say you have to wait a couple of weeks to get the invite. Neil had posted a way to get this earlier by hacking some urls in hotmail but that never worked for me so this is probably the next best thing. It will be interesting to see how it compares to gmail which is getting to be my mail client of choice now. It is certainly a lot better than Lotus Notes 6.5 which we have to use for work - that is the worst mail client ever - so many features just don't work right (sorry Notes readers but it's true!)

I upgraded thunderbird to rc2 last night - It wiped out the couple of extensions that I had installed. One (and the one I use most) was virtual identity that allows me to hack the from address in the email easily. Useful when you reply to emails sent to the catchall address and Mailing list Headers which gives better links for handling the header information. Both the above links allow you to download newer versions which don't get picked up by the "automatic update"

I was at the bank filling out the mortgage application the other day (as you do) when I realised I had left some important documents on my usb key back at the office, but I had also emailed them to my gmail account. Using the banks pc I tried to go to http://gmail.com and was surprised to see that it was blocked by their content filtering - I guess that they try to restrict web based email so they can control the flow of email into and out of the organisation. However, www.google.com/gmail was not blocked and I was able to access the email that I needed. I also needed to get some dates from the past for the application so thought I would look it up on my blog - except that absoblogginlutely.net was also blocked....so back to google, a search for the terms that I needed restricted to site:absoblogginlutely.net, a click on the cached link and I had all the information that I needed. Just shows how useless corporate filtering is.

If you used to be on our wabsnwos email list about what Kristen and I are up to and didn't receive an email this week then let me know so I can ensure you are still on the list.

Got my first piece of spam delivered to my inbox at gmail today. Not bad in just under a year of use (I signed up 1st July 04). In that time I've also not had a false positive either. The only spam that I have had to the email address has been some sort of "working under pressure" mailing list that somehow got my address from somewhere. Seeing as though I am careful about who I give the email address to I know I didn't sign up for it and it also looks like gmail is more resilient to the mailbombing antics that yahoo and hotmail seem to face.

After my previous post on an alternative mail client, most people recommended thunderbird (as I expected). However the suggestions of creating identities didn't really help the situation as I need lots of identities. However this morning I had plenty of time (it is 5am at the moment) to browse the list of available extensions and there is one to create virtual identities on the fly, which easily enables me to edit the from field.Virtual Identity is the perfect extension for what I need....Now to import the Bat settings..........

Arrggggghhhh - I've had it with theBat! being so unstable on this new pc. Keeps freezing at very strange times and I can't risk getting my mail store corrupt on the machine. The strange thing is that it was nice and stable on the old machine - both running xpsp2 and this one is a clean install so should be even less chance of crashing.
So, I'm in the need for a new (free) email client. I do like thunderbird but the lack of being able to type any old email address into the from field is the thing that stops me using it. I must have the ability to type in sales@ or fred@ or dontbotherspammingthisaddress@ in the from field so I can track down where I am getting spam and filter on it. From what I could tell with Thunderbird this is not possible. The feature of being able to run "macros/programs" on certain events is not critical now either as Geocaching Swiss Army Knife now does the email checking within the application.
Any suggestions? (oh - and the ability to import theBat! files would be fantastic)

Oops - my helsby.net domain ran out yesterday. I'm pretty sure I renewed it, but I actually renewed all the other ones instead! In the meantime, any emails sent to helsby.net will bounce so please post a comment in here if you need to contact me.

After about 3 emails back and forwards with yahoo, they have finally admitted there is a problem with their verification process and their engineers are going to look at it. I'm not holding my breath, but in the meantime I'm going to create a new email address to sign up for the distribution list - and one that doesn't contain a plus sign in it.

Theres a nifty gmail signature generator which will generate a graphic you can use to denote your gmail address. Thanks to office.weblogs

It is perfectly possible to subscribe via email to yahoogroups with an email address containing a plus sign. However if you try to verify the email address you can't as they encode the plus sign to %2b and then the server drops the %2b to a space and complains that "sb @domain.com" is invalid (which it is).

Dave has his Gmail Tips - The Complete Collection in one place and makes some very helpful and useful tips. For instance, I didn't know that you could use username+something@gmail.com, replacing something with tags so you can track your email. I do something very similar at the moment with my helsby.net domain but this will be handy for gmail. I've actually started using this for my testing now - any emails with +test now go directly to my testing label category and do not appear in my inbox.
I have a couple of invites left if anyone wants one btw.
Update Not all the tips are valid now - the unread label doesn't work as thats included automatically but its still worth the 15 minute read to find out something new.

Cool - I now have pop3 access to gmail AND I can have my email forwarded to another account. Not really sure why I'd want to do that though with all this 1gb of space to play with. (jk). The pop3 access will be really handy though as it is much easier to check with a pop3 client than use the web browser or gmail notifier. The pop3 access will also make it easier to check multiple gmail accounts as the various gmail notifier programs that previously existed didn't seem to like swapping between accounts very often.
Oh - and if you haven't got access to pop then don't moan at me, its a phased implementation.

Popfile 0.22 is out today. There is also a link in the announcement mailing list to The Spammers' compendium a webpage showing how spam tricks are used to get through filters - now I know why a lot of spam has loads of spaces in the subject and then a word or number at the end. I still don't know why this breaks bayesian filtering but I know thats the intention. A very interesting read and the last example shown is suprisingly complicated.

If you change the ip address of your webshield server (not a good idea) then remote consoles will never be able to talk to it, and there doesn't seem to be a gui way to change this. However, HKLM\Software\Network Associates\TVD\Webshield SMTP\FrontEnd\FrontEnd_ServerList has the entries you need to make.

Well I still stand by my opinion that the software is rubbish, but I've tracked down the main problem. I removed the software and reinstalled (without the hotfix) and everything worked ok. Installed the latest antivirus dat file - cpu goes up to 100% and emails do not get forwarded to our server. Remove, reinstall and everything seems ok. Changed the ip address to be a static machine, thinking everything was good - bang - same thing. Removed, reinstalled everything is fine. Installed av update again (just to check) - bang. Now on my *final* removal/install. Hopefully I can set the update to *never* update as I'm not using it for antivirus scanning anyway. Now allegedly the hotfix that I really need to apply should fix issues similar to this but it obviously doesn't from the frustrations voiced yesterday.

In order to move our existing internet connectivity from leased line to broadband without disrupting email whilst dns changes take affect we're putting in a mail relay on the local lan and the easiest way to do this was to use Mcafee's email scanning server and use this as a relay. The problem is that the software is pants and everytime you save the configuration of the server it crashes and the machine has to be rebooted.
The hotfix that I had to install also had no installation routine - you had to download a zip file,extract it, determine that you needed to read hotfix8.txt which prompted you to stop the services, copy the files across and then restart them. Now surely it can't be that hard to write an install script to do that?
I really hope this is not an indication of the stability of the corporate version that I might have to rollout in the near future :-(

According to the popfile mailing list a vulnerability has been discovered in the way it handles graphic files in certain conditions. Check the posting for details and a fix coming in the next couple of days. In the meantime, a quick google search for open popfile servers only came up with one, running an old version of the software, and password protected.

Well I finally took the plunge and signed up for a Gmail account. The funny thing is that I see blog entries everywhere saying that they've had one and they have invites to give away etc and yet when I signed up, the opening email thanks me for being "one of the first" to try the beta service. I can see some use for the service, especially with the Pop to Gmail converter to allow you to use gmail as a pop3 account.

My Outlook tip was published as Outlook Daily Tips: Tip 111: More SMTP Servers on Monday. I didn't get to see it until today as I was out on customer sites.

There's a new version of The Bat! although it could be two versions. The front page says version 2.04.7 is hot and available, yet the News mentions 2.04.4, although this was on the 20th Feb. I'll be downloading it tonight.

One of our satellite offices uses a different email domain than we do and their email is handled by a local isp. Other the past three years I reckon they've changed the name to use for retrieving pop mail at least three times, probably the same for outgoing. Each time they don't bother telling the customers that they are doing this, so the first you find out is when you eventually get hold of them on the phone and they tell you its changed. I reckon we're also paying at least £25 a year for email forwarding and they want £15 to change the iptags too. If it wasn't for the fact that we need to move them onto our real domain, I'd have changed to another isp that charges £2.50 a year for email forwarding.

I upgraded my Bat client this morning to version 2 after I realised it had been out (lots of months) and was pleasantly suprised to see that there was a 30% discount until 10th January on the Christmas edition so I got a bargain. It looks nicer and I'm glad to say that the autocheck of accounts works on my xp installation (which it never did on my 98 or w2k installation)

After rebuilding the server at home, I had loads of unread, spam email in one of my pop mailboxes and didn't really want to download and delete them with the mail client.POP3 Internet Mail Retriever came to the rescue by selecting all messages and deleting all.

Some quick links as I don't have to to blog them all individually. Real Underground map (funny), Microsoft's free/busy service, Interesting Exchange articles, Freeware list

Just downloaded the latest version of popcorn to see if it would stop trying to be the emailserver that I am trying to send to. (when it sends email it sends the command EHLO mail.domain.com if my mail server is mail.domain.com). This causes problems for pipex (unsuprisingly). However the latest versions are no longer freeware, but shareware in that you have to register it if you want to use multiple pop accounts. Thats a big shame as that is what I use popcorn for. So its back to the older 2001 version.

According to the spam email I've received from hotmail staff, hotmail is getting a new look later this month and I can click a link to see a preview....All clicking on the link gives me is the same page telling me about a preview...so sneaky even I can't see it.
Update You need ie to view it which is why nothing happened in Firebird.

I often have a requirement to send emails from an address that is not really mine. Normally this is used for testing relays or sending unsubscribe messages to mailing lists on behalf of people who have left the company or have got on a mailing list they can't get off. Exchange is really helpful in that it insists you can only use your real email address to send with in Outlook. Blat is a useful command that I use when writing batch files, but its not very useful for sending quick emails as a user. QuickSend from Xtreme Webware does the trick and enables me to send emails by specifying the to,from and email server that I want to send mail to. Works a treat.

I was trying to find this on my work computer after reading about it at home but couldn't find it anywhere. it's a 500kb email client. Great for putting on a usb disk (or floppy for those woefully behind the times) and checking email whereever you are. I've had a VERY quick play with MemeCode's Scribe and will use it more when I'm back in the office on Thursday.

GFI have updated their Email Anti Virus and Security Testing Zone with some more checks for recent vulnerabilities. Well worth a scan on your exchange server (as long as you have the approval of your administrator as some of these tests may trigger security notifications). I'll be testing our server tomorrow morning.

Our remote site got an error message when trying to pull their email from a remote server which said "Unable to process From lines (envelopes), change recognition mode. A quick call to the isp (suprisingly quick actually) and everything was working. Being curious I searched on the error message and it looks like the mail file was corrupt and the first line needed to be changed to be
From: fred@asdadsasd
Thanks to unix managers mailing list

It made the news on several places when email was banned at Phones4U. Seeing as though its a phone company you would have thought they'd have rung each other up anyway! Apparently the boss reckons they waste too much time being tied to email so he's banned internal emails. From what I've seen from the emails that have been sent to me by someone working there (he no longer works there) most of the emails are likely to be funny jokes and flash cartoons and links to more of the same on web pages. It will be interesting to see if they move towards Instant Messaging - something we are looking at, informally, at the office with remote users starting to use it to communicate instead of email.

Useful page on
advanced emailing of worksheets or workbooks to multiple recipients using an addin. Thanks J-Walk

Discovered a new free hotmail alternative called postmaster that gives you 3 months before you have to relogin and they claim they are much better at spam filtering......we shall see