Paradise SMTP server errors

I have come across this a couple of times recently. Paradise email user having problems sending mail - gets something like a 552 error from smtp.paradise.net.nz http://paradise.net.nz/. Username and password OK for receiving email and works on web mail.

The solution I have found in both cases so far is to replace smtp.paradise.net.nz http://smtp.paradise.net.nz/ with smtp.clear.net.nz http://smtp.clear.net.nz/ and emails then send OK. vodafone would probably work too. I think this is just more evidence that Vodafone is trying to kill off the paradise domain….

Bill

iMac running slow

I ran into a late model IMac running extremely slowly and discovered what was causing it....

Opened the activity monitor and sorted by memory use and found a program called installerT running that was using over 5gb of memory....force quit it but each time on startup it came back again.....

Showed info on the file and found its location and moved it to the trash and immediately eset recognised it as malware....

Recommendation on any machine like this.....start in safe mode (hold down shift when pushing power button) install eset, restart in normal mode and then find file associated with installerT and move to trash.

Mount a System restore point

When a customer deleted their PST file and emptied the recycle bin we tried to recover using an undelete utility but the file was not recoverable, using the restore point browser the PST file was actually backed up and after copying it back into his outlook mail folder was able to access all his mail again.

NOW NZ ISP

NOW NZ is a company headquartered in Napier who are selling hard into the fibre market. They are offering well priced packages to get customers on to fibre services including VOIP phone. I am not going to make any judgements yet about the quality of their services, suffice it to say that so far I have NOT been recommending them myself.

They currently use a Netcomm router on the fibre connections I have worked on and they replace any existing router. I found out today that they do not, by default, allow customer access to this router. You have to get to it on a special port (192.168.20.1:8080) and the admin/admin credentials printed on the bottom of the unit do not work unless you talk to their tech support and get them to enable it. They will then tell you that the customer is then responsible for it. All this because I wanted to change the SSID and password to match the customers other router to save changing a whole lot of other devices!

This customer had not been set up with an email account by default, when they asked they were setup with an address@nowmail.co.nz . Pop3.nowmail.co.nz http://pop3.nowmail.co.nz/ and smtp worked with default settings and no security. When asked if they provided IMAP services they said no!

This customer also had phone service (VOIP) with them and said they had some issues in the first week. They had the 30MB fibre connection but I could not get a reading above 22MB from speediest. I also observed the same at another customer using this ISP and he also had a lot of phone issues.

Please post any further feedback or experiences with this ISP in the comments here.

Police Virus on Mac

I ran into what looked like a police virus on a Mac.....turns out it was just a malicious website that didn't allow yo to leave it and started up ever time Safari started.

The way to get rid of it was to force quit Safari and the hold down shift while starting safari......forcing to open the normal webpage....once this was done the Mac functioned normally..

Cannot run Office applications after 365 install

I came across this issue today after installing Office 365 (Office 2013) on two different laptops. Neither would run ANY office applications after a new install of Office 365! They just bombed out, tried a Repair of Office and that did not help.

I had uninstalled older versions of Office on both machines which had issues, so i thought this might be a clue but could not find anything to do with that.

Some searching turned up a possible conflict with the Abbyy FineReader which is an OCR Package often installed (I think with Epson printers).

I removed this package from both machines and Office applications ran fine, did not even need a reboot.

New one on me - but well worth knowing about as we do more of these installations!

Bill

Photos with Windows Live Mail

Using Windows Live Mail (which I tend to promote as the standard Windows tool if Outlook is not available) clients can have issues trying to send photos as attachments.

Turns out this is because MS changed the way this works when they introduced SkyDrive (now Onedrive or whatever). They changed the default behaviour when you right click on a photo and select Send to -> Mail recipient to use “Photo Mail” which works in conjunction with Sky/OneDrive to send a reduced version of the picture as an attachment while uploading the full size version to Sky/OneDrive so the recipient can download the larger image if desired. This is why that extra bloody window pops up asking you to log in the Live Mail or whatever - its trying to get you to sign in to Sky/OneDrive if you are not already! If you skip that then the message just gets stuck in the Outbox and jams up WL Mail until manually deleted.

This is all great 1) if you understand it - which the average user does not and 2) if you have and use a Sky/OneDrive account - which the average user does not!

So how do you make it behave “normally” and just attach the damn photo to an email and send it? Read this:

SkyDrive bypass for pictures in email Go to picture source (My Pictures) select pictures (Ctrl-Click for multiples) Click on email (on top of screen) select size (if other than full size desired) Click attach, it should then open in Windows Live Email. It will be in the Sky Drive format Click on one of the pictures Click the format button on top Click the paperclip That cuts out SkyDrive and makes the photos regular attachments. Add email address, type message and send

This (relatively) simple process just allows the user to change the “attachment format” from trying to use Sky/OneDrive to a normal attachment.

Yes, its a pain to have to do this but I have been looking for an answer to this for a while, and here it is!

Cheers

P.S. in case you wonder why on earth people are trying to do this, the answer is “because they can”. They want to look at the picture in Windows Explorer or Photo Gallery or whatever and then send it from there. They don’t understand that life would be a lot simpler if you compose an email and THEN select the attachments. To be fair, this method allows file resizing which is a handy feature...

P.P.S interestingly enough, there does not appear to be a problem if you use Outlook (2013 in my case) as your default email client - it just gets sent as an attachment without any fuss.

Post by email

POSTING GUIDELINES

If you would like to post to this blog, register with the website. This means getting invited to be a content manager on this site and then creating a username and password for access. After that you will be able to post by sending an email from your registered email address to an email address we provide you.

You can attach one image to display in the blog post:

• File formats - .jpg, .gif, or .png only
• Attachments - Attach the image. (Don't drag and drop it into the body of the email. If the image is in the body of the email, it won't display in the post.)

When adding text:

• Email body - Add add content for the blog post in the body of the email.
• Email subject - Add a title for the blog post in the subject line.
• Format - Use plain text (as opposed to rich text).

Remember that although there is no link this blog is public, so under no circumstances mention confidential client details or use any inappropriate language at all.....basically if you wouldn't say it in front of a customer with Bill standing there.......don't say it, this blog is for the purposes of technical discussion and documentation only.

Atheros wireless adapters.

If you are having a problem with one of these, check this site for the latest drivers and give it a go.  Report success or failure here please!

Qualcomm ATHEROS Wireless drivers for Windows

atheros.cz

Qualcomm ATHEROS WiFi and Wireless drivers for Microsoft Windows and AR1111 AR2427 AR5001A AR5001X AR5001X+ AR5002G AR5002X AR5004G AR5004X AR5005G AR5005GS AR5005UG AR5005UX AR5006 AR5006EG AR5006EGS 

Thunderbird IMAP

I have had two different problems in the past couple of days trying to make this work.  Seems like there is a problem with this combination.

I know from personal experience that our method of setting up Yahoo users for IMAP works fine in most cases.  I use it on multiple platforms and, apart from the occasional glitch sending, it has worked OK for quite a while.

However, we set up a customer and had to use TBird as an IMAP client because there was different issue with WL Mail (which I would normally recommend) and it turned into a disaster.  I had to save the day by switching to POP which happened to be OK for this customer.

Next day I tried to change an Xtra mail customer who was already using TBird with POP to using IMAP so it would “sync” with her iPad.  It just did not work correctly - it looked fine at first but when I tried to demo deleting messages it went weird and deleted the wrong message!

So unless we find out what is going on here (and it would take some experimenting with an Xtra email account, TBird client and deleting messages) I want us to avoid using this combination at all costs.

I usually try to stick with standard MS products on any Windows platform as I believe they “should” work better….

Cheers