Another Thursday Afternoon Question (Still Before 12, but I’m Hungry)
Dan from Washington D.C. writes
My Imail server gets flooded by spam even using there filters – what type of solution can you recomend? We have 30 users and get almost 1 million spams a week. It is horrible. If we cant get a solution soon we will be switching back to phone/snail mail.
Dan in DC
Don’t Make DAN Switch back to snail mail… help him out.
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Can I disable the RESTART option after completing windows update? Is there any way to cancel a Reboot?
March 26, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: Question, Tips, Troubleshooting, windows
Posted in Windows Mobile | 10 comments
MJ writes to us that her machine runs updates around lunch time and she keeps getting the prompt do you want to restart now?
Not only is it annoying – sometimes she clicks yes by accident and her whole world comes crashing down. (See the fix for this at the bottom of the post – not [...]
I need to open a port on my router or firewall. How do i do that? What is that? Should I Be Scared??
January 20, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: networking, Question
Posted in How To, Questions | No comments
Almost 3 weeks in to the New Year and the Admin needs some rest – maybe a day off?
Yeah right we have even more emails today and I am studying for my 2008 Microsoft Certs! This has been a big year for the AtA gang – stay tuned for more of our geeky flavored content [...]
What The Hell Happened To My Task Managers Tabs and Options?
January 13, 2009 - 4:00 am
Tags: Question, windows
Posted in Admin's Arsenal, How To, Questions | 9 comments
A reader from Idaho was seriously freaked out after a late night at the computer and sent us a picture of their task manager in a strange state.
They asked for their identity to be with held so here is a screen-shot of a random person’s task manager in a similar mode.
Have you seen this before? [...]
Why am I getting Winmail.dat files on my mac from Windows users?
January 12, 2009 - 12:20 am
Tags: apple, Question, Troubleshooting, windows
Posted in Questions, mac | 20 comments
Jodi writes in:
I wasn’t sure who I should contact about this, so i am sending this to you. As of late, word attachments coming from my friend on a Windows XP Machine appear as “winmail.dat” files.
When I try to open these, the text runs about 150pp long, (it’s a 4page doc) and the [...]
Why is Outlook 2007 showing red Xs instead of my pictures?
November 25, 2008 - 9:00 am
Tags: Question
Posted in Questions | 14 comments
We got this message from Fred early in the AM. I guess its great for him that we don’t sleep past 7AM anymore!
I am using Outlook 2007. When I get email the pictures show as Red boxes with “X”’s in them. I used to be able to right click on the boxes and download the [...]
Can Vista hit me on the hip when an event occurs through the OS? Is this true and how can I configure it?
October 24, 2008 - 12:00 am
Tags: Question
Posted in Admin's Arsenal, How To, Questions | 4 comments
Good Morning,
I just saw the link to ask you a question and here is mine. Admin do you know of a way I can configure Vista to let me know if a specific error or event happens while I am AFK?
I hear Vista can hit me on my Blackberry when an event occurs and it’s [...]
How do I manually back up my Outlook PST file?
May 10, 2008 - 8:20 am
Tags: backup, How To, Question
Posted in General | 7 comments
So I got a frantic phone call yesterday from a buddy of mine who lost his PST file due to a crashed hard drive.
The thing is this guy normally backs up EVERYTHING! I was shocked he didn’t have another copy ready to go.
When I asked him why he didn’t back up his PST file regularly [...]
Can I Change The Inbox Font in Microsoft Outlook?
April 10, 2008 - 10:00 am
Tags: How To, Question, Tips
Posted in General | No comments
I have this user who just got upgraded to a new laptop. When he logged in for the first time and opened Outlook, he was shocked. He said the fonts were way to small (Apparently he is as blind as a bat, or just likes larger fonts). Anyway, he called me to fix it.
If you [...]
Codec issue for videos downloaded via Bit Torrent. Why dont my videos have audio?
April 2, 2008 - 6:14 am
Tags: Free, Question, windows
Posted in General | 3 comments
Today’s question is a very common problem that most of you have had one time or another. It is especially annoying if you are about to sit down to watch a video and you can’t… Then you have to venture out onto the world wide web to try and hunt down a solution.
Look [...]
Pain Free Backup: Using WordPress to Back Up Blogger – Also Can Be Used For Migration
March 4, 2008 - 9:20 am
Tags: How To, Question
Posted in Uncategorized | 10 comments
So we flopped around Google’s website yesterday and stared in disbelief as the only answer to backup or export your data still seemed like a crappy work-a-round.
But it looks like WordPress one up’ed Google’s Blogger by adding an Import feature to their Wordpress 2.0!
It also works with LiveJournal, TypePad and MovableType.
It only works with NEW [...]


June 21, 2007 - 11:57 am
Oh do I have one for you.
It requires VMWare Server/Player. It is an appliance as I’ve posted before about them.
We had the same problem, only much less spam then what you’re getting. Then I tried this:
ESVA’s Anti Spam Appliance
This thing is the cat’s pajamas!
It is VERY easy to configure and set up. What you need to do is set this up as an inbound(you can do outbound as well) gateway. You point the Mailscanner app to your mail server and it forwards straight in while scanning for viruses, trojans, spam, malware, etc.
You will need to change your MX record to the IP you give the appliance to make sure mail wont go to your email server directly.
It will take about 48hrs for the MX to fully propagate so mail no longer goes to the server, but when it does you will find the load and impact on your server will be greatly reduced.
The ESVA does tune itself. It will learn your habits. It has the ability to whitelist individuals and IP address ranges. It also sends a message when a prospective spam is found, it give you the option of releasing it. Viruses are stripped out and the file extensions that are allowed are VERY stringent. It is very configurable and you can add many domains to it, I currently host about 7 on ours.
It also provides graphs to show you how much of what is being blocked and how it is handled. A really great FREE application.
Since I put the application in play last November we have rejected over 500,000 bad connection attempts, and flagged 70,000 spam messages.
We are a smaller firm, and don’t have a lot of traffic per se, but the numbers are about this: prior to the ESVA being put in, over 80% of our email was spam, as out emails received have dropped by 80%!
Think of the load on processing cycles, and disc space that is saving???
Hope this helps.
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June 21, 2007 - 12:11 pm
That looks very interesting Sloth – we are using the Barracuda SPAM Firewall 300.
This thing is amazing definately not free like Sloths idea but we filter almost 500,000 daily down to 12,000 real non spam messages. The appliance cost us around $1000 and $800 for a years worth of support and updates.
It downloads spam defintions hourly and has lots of powerful features.
Look at me I sound like a sales rep!
Commission please!
Brracuda Networks
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June 21, 2007 - 12:23 pm
The ‘cuda is the defacto spam filter….should have mentioned that.
It can be a bit flaky though and testy with some mail domains. But by and large it is the best commercial offering out there.
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June 21, 2007 - 1:06 pm
the barracuda looks good but it seems like it is out of our price range
im downloading this esva and vmware server player now.
thank u guys for your fast suggestins
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