It’s unusual for mail servers to suddenly start rejecting messages internally and from external sources. That’s exactly what I saw though over the weekend. A mailserver running mdaemon on Windows 2000 was rejected ALMOST every message that was sent it’s way whether it was an internal mail sender and recipient or external sender to internal recipient. The really interesting things was to see a message sporadically succeed. This problem was with mdaemon, but could have occured with ANY mail server. Here’s why…
Month: March 2008
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BBpress integration with WordPress
I’ve started the process of upgrading several websites to the newest release of WordPress and one of the things that became possible was installing bbpress. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, wordpress is the “blogging” software that I use for this and several other sites. It makes adding content to a website very easy and has a great ability to be extended with plugins. bbpress is forum software by the makers of wordpress and with a similar look and feel. It also has the capability to share the user list with wordpress.
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Voiceshot – Easy Way to Get a Message Out – Automated Message Calling
We’ve all received them…. “robocalls”. Usually they fall into a couple categories…. 1) doctors appointment reminders and 2) political campaign ads and 3) telemarketers. Items 2 and three annoy me to no end. In hotly contested elections we have easily received several robocalls a day from each side for a decent stretch. These types of things do have their use though. Recently I had a bit of a dilemma, I needed to cancel about 20 appointments in a short period of time with short notice. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could send out one phone message and not have to call each one individually (in some cases at multiple numbers…)
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Great tip for Dealing with SPAM email
In reading over at the Gmail Blog, I came across this suggestion to try with Gmail. The idea is, let’s say your address is johndoe@gmail.com Okay, next time you sign up for a mailing list, or need a free website login, use johndoe+freelogin@gmail.com or johndoe+spam@gmail.com or any other unique identifier (something you’ll be able to track.) The idea is this… gmail ignores anything after a + in the address and the mail will still get to your inbox, but… here comes the cool part.
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What Should you Look for in a New Computer?
This is one of the questions that I deal with at least weekly. Here’s where I usually start answering… First you have to ask yourself what you want to do with a computer. If your goal is email and internet access, most ANYTHING sold new today is much more than sufficient to the task. It will be hard to find something that won’t work for you. If you want to work with office documents, spreadsheets and other text files, you’re still looking at just about anything currently on the market. But what if you want to do some gaming or get into video or music editing?
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Qassia Invite – new social networking site
Qassia is an interesting social bookmarking/tagging site. What they’re trying to do is have their members tag and organize websites, in return you get unlimited backlinks to YOUR websites. A very interesting way to be in a participating in a social networking site, promoting your website and perhaps getting traffic back from it. Currently they’re in a closed beta. New signups by invitation only, consider yourself invited!
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Virus Warning – Email Subjects – IRS Notice – Important Information from the IRS
I’ve seen a couple of these emails today and wanted to give a post just to warn people that these are bogus and you should NOT follow the link suggested in the email. I HOPE no one reading this falls for it, but the “tax software update” that they are pushing is a virus. (SHOCK!) Only a little over half the antivirus vendors currently detect it.
Read on for details on the message body…
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Varying Degrees of Password Security
Last week we talked about creating strong passwords, but should we use different passwords for every site? It’s best practice to do just that. Do they all have to be really hard passwords? Again ideally, yes. So, how can we keep up password spreadsheet? Big sheet of paper? Password management program. Some advantages of password management programs are that many are equipped with encryption. In other words one password locks the whole list away. The bad news is if you lose or forget that password you are locked out of everything. Lists are generally bad because with access to your pc, your list is easy to get at.