Month: June 2004

Scaling up for the Spam Onslaught

After moving our farm website over to bluehost.com I waw somewhat surprised to find out how much spam I was getting in the default account. It was way too much to delete manually and I was really short on time so I made an executive decision to enable Spam Assassin to start segregating the mail and pick up the pieces later. Enabling Spam Assassin was very easy with bluehost.com. I clicked a few buttons to select the default settings and off it went. I was not surprised to see it quickly put almost all the mail into the spam folder.

A few days later when I had more time I configured Mailwasher Pro to read the spam folder. Mailwasher Pro is my favorite tool to sift through spam for false positives and delete spam. I have trained Mailwasher to identify my “good” mail but I also use a combination of regex rules to catch the stuff that falls through the cracks. I sent a couple emails to myself from different email accounts and the good stuff is getting through and the bad stuff is getting diverted.

I have since looked at the statistics in Mailwasher Pro. Prior to the switch over I was deleting about 300 to 350 spam emails a day. After the switch over I had several days in which I deleted over 1000 spam emails a day. I am sure glad I am deleting this stuff on the mail server and not letting this junk steal my limited bandwidth.

Moving Legacy Farm website to bluehost.com

Over the last couple of days I have been moving our farm web site from Interland to bluehost.com. The folks are Interland have been okay but way overpriced for the features. I have made the move much more complicated because I opted to convert the site over to phpwebsite in the move. To make this even more difficult I opted to create a tableless 2 column design layout I borrowed from glish.com and integrate the css list navigation menu I was already using. In the next couple of posts I will document my outline for making the new theme and changes to the website. To start things off the reasons for moving were:

  1. Use Announcements to replace my manually entered News and RSS feed
  2. Use Photoalbum for organizing my horse photos
  3. Use Whats Related to show customers other horses and links they might be interested in.
  4. There are several interesting developments in phpwebsite that I may use in the future

RE: IMF Archive Manager

Here’s an Exchange blog I haven’t seen before but I found in the SBS mailing list. Looks like it has some nice utilities and info.

Daryl Maunder has written an IMF Archive Manager application which he has kindly allowed me to make available here. It’s a web-based application for managing the files archived by the IMF. The zip file that you download contains a set of ASP web pages and a readme Word document.

Once you have installed the application, just navigate to http://servername/spam – this URL, of course, assumes the default virtual directory name of ‘spam’. You will see a screen like the one below – I’ve created a sample spam message to show you what it looks like.

IMF Archive Manager

From here, you can choose to View, Resubmit or Delete any individual message, or even delete all archived mail.

No warranty, express or implied, is provided. This code is supplied here “as is”.

[Via MS Exchange Blog ]

McChris Revisited Implemented

I finally decided to go live with the changes to myweblog. As I have said before it is a mixture of McChris, the default template from WordPress, and a little Eric Meyer.

Scheduled POP3 connector e-mail message downloads may not occur on your Windows Small Business Server 2003-based computer

833992 – Scheduled POP3 connector e-mail message downloads may not occur on your Windows Small Business Server 2003-based computer

The Imbdownl.exe process may use 25, 50, or 100 percent of the CPU resources that are shown in Task Manager. If you end the Imbdownl.exe process, the scheduled downloads will occur.

I ran into this problem today. I got an email telling me of low idle time on the server. When I looked at the CPU utilization I found somebody called imbdownl.exe using almost all of it. I did a quick search and found this patch. I then found that I had downloaded the patch earlier in the year but had not applied it. I think my reasoning was that I wanted to see the problem first. Mission accomplished!

Changes to Yahoo Plus

Today I was somewhat surprised to see some changes to Yahoo Plus. I know they are competing with Google but I really have not paid much attention to the details. Today Yahoo told me that I had 2 GB of mailbox space and they had removed the paid advertisements. I really could not care less about the disk space. As part of my procedure of controlling spam I constantly check the Inbox and the Bulk folder to make sure the spam algorithms used by Yahoo and Mailwasher Pro are correctly identifying the good mail and the spam. I did not plan on using the 25 MB they had allocated me before yesterday so the 2 GB is overkill. The removal of the ads makes for a nicer interface that loads quicker. I get a lot of mail so the faster the interface the faster I can get through the email and on to other work.

831747 – Overview of the Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 Update: Windows Small Business Server 2003

831747 – Overview of the Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 Update: Windows Small Business Server 2003

Microsoft has released an update to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager. This update allows Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 users to configure a Microsoft Exchange Server service in their mail profile, as long as the Exchange Server is a Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003-based computer. Previously, this was not a supported configuration.

I found this KB by reading Chapter 6 of Brelsford’s new book, Windows Small Business Server 2003 Best Practices. This CRM reminds of the features found on salesforce.com but is better because it links to the email I have in Outlook. It is not a fancy CRM but is fairly useful because I will have a more complete customer history. To make this work with my present setup I had to move the email I was storing in a public Exchange folder back to my email folder.

I got chapter 6 as a free download. I have his previous version of the book and I heartily recommend it.

McChris template modifications : Revisted

I think I finally have the new template working for both IE and Firefox. The final issue was the differences in the way Firefox and IE handle image overflow. If you have a large image in a post, IE will resize the divs to handle the image. The causes the border to disappear and the righthand div to more right. I thought overflow:hidden would fix the problem but it did not work for me so I set the width on the image. This may not be the most elegant solution but it works. I have one image that was giving me this problem.

Putty configuration

I am not sure how I got started on trying to fix this problem but it did not take much time. I finally configured Putty to tunnel my vncviewer. I typically use a ssh tunnel I setup via a cygwin script so this has been a really low priority annoyance. I copied the info from the script and it worked.

Cygwin: space in file name

I recently fixed a problem with the profile script that is used by cygwin. It had a problem with a space in the filename, “My Documents”, and was generating several errors and not ending up in the correct directory. I tried several things that I thought should work but I ended up changing the script to use the “short” version of the filename. The DOS command “dir -x” will tell you its name.

More Exchange 2003 sp1 issues

SP1 changes the way Exchange reports memory allocated and now generates an alert. I opted to not figure out the correct value and disabled the alert.

Exchange 2003 SP1

I applied SP1 to Exchange 2003 last night. Today I noticed I was not getting any local mail. I used google to find a thread that recommended re-applying sp1 because store.exe was probably still at the old version. After applying sp1 and rebooting, the mail got delivered after a couple minute delay. I did not find any error messages to help my debug the problem. I did confirm that store.exe had not been updated the first time I applied sp1. Oh well!

McChris Revisited

Last night I got bored with television and started working at modifying McChris’s templates. It was much harder than I thought but par for the course. The hacks caught me again. Once again Firefox was easy and IE was frustrating. I used the cow template as my example and the default wordpress template for most of my design elements. It works for the most part but I am still bothered that I cannot IE to center the div block. I am missing something. I will probably modify the template page to make it look closer to the default but I will leave that for another day.

McChris :: Free WordPress Blog Website Templates

McChris :: Free WordPress Blog Website Templates

I found another source of WordPress weblog templates. They have the functionality I desire and look like they will be easier to be IE/Firefox comaptible.

Reverting back to the default css

I decided to go back to the default css for wordpress. I was wasting too much time trying to get the screens to look the same in firefox and IE. I learned a little bit more about css but obviously not enough to get the job done the way I wanted to. Maybe I will try again when I have more time.

Wasting time with css

Wow, I have really wasted a lot of time trying to get my weblog to look the same under Firefox and IE. All I want is for the right content to fit in a smaller screen when I ask it to resize. Firefox displays the screen how I would like it to appear. IE is not bad but it leaves the content off the screen to the right. Very annoying!

Listamatic: Unraveled CSS Tabs

Listamatic: Unraveled CSS Tabs
Unraveled CSS Tabs

Use combinations of padding, borders and a:hover to achieve different list effects. From Unraveled CSS Tabs.

I am pretty sure I used this for the Legacy Farm Ltd. website. I have been looking for this for some time. I think I have been to both of these sites before.