Are you looking for a mail server but not ready for Microsoft Exchange? Well maybe VPOP3 is the solution!

VPOP3 is a fully-featured Windows Email Server. It is designed to be simple to configure and use, but flexible enough to fulfill most users’ requirements.

VPOP3 will work with any Internet email account which supports POP3 or SMTP methods for incoming mail, and SMTP for outgoing mail. It will also work without an Internet email account at all, using direct SMTP email receiving and sending.

VPOP3 will work with any type of Internet connectivity – from a dial-up modem, through ISDN and broadband xDSL connections to permanent leased lines.

VPOP3 includes many features such as:

Virus Scanning

VPOP3 integrates with the avast! for VPOP3, or Sophos SAVI virus scanning engines to detect and remove viruses from your incoming and outgoing email

Spam / Content Filtering

VPOP3 has a built-in content filter to detect spam before it reaches your users. This content filter is highly customisable so you can use it to perform custom content filtering as well. The spam filter uses a blended approach to detecting spam, so many different methods are used together such as DNS blacklists, Bayesian statistical filtering, heuristic methods etc. This gives a much better result than more basic filters which may rely on just one or other of these methods.

Standards Compliant

VPOP3 is fully POP3 / SMTP / LDAP compliant so it will work with any POP3 / SMTP email client, such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird etc.

In addition VPOP3 Enterprise is IMAP4 compliant as well, allowing more flexibility, such as shared message folders, hot desking, mobile users etc.

Remote Administration

VPOP3 is fully manageable from anywhere on the network (or Internet if you wish) using its fully remoteable web based management console. This allows you to manage the software from any computer with a web browser, or even a PDA. The web management system is platform independent, so will work with Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox etc.

WebMail

VPOP3 comes with a full WebMail server, so you can access your mail using a web browser from anywhere. You can read and send your email messages, view the VPOP3 address book etc through any modern web browser.

Message Archiving

VPOP3 has a built-in message archive store & retrieval system, so you can configure it to store all incoming and outgoing messages in a central store (with the option to archive parts off, as necessary, to removeable storage), and perform searches on this archive to find past messages easily and quickly.

Mailing List Server

VPOP3 has a built in mailing list server so you can manage your customer email shots or discussion mailing lists or internal distribution lists all through VPOP3 without needing any further software.

Automatic Responses

VPOP3 can automatically respond to email messages which arrive for specified users, so you can easily set up ‘vacation autoresponders’ or helpdesk acknowledgement emails etc.

Multiple ISP support

VPOP3 can collect mail from as many different ISP email accounts as you wish. It will work with incoming SMTP and POP3 mail accounts at the same time, and can distribute mail from several ‘catch-all’ POP3 accounts with no problems at all.

For further information about VPOP3 and to download a free trial click on the link below:

Free Trial VPOP3 Mail Server

Look for Download – Try in the left hand menu!!

A couple of days ago someone hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account…

… her personal e-mail account, not her official Alaska-government one.

It was a Yahoo! account that she used for both personal and government business.

The hacker has posted an account of how he or she hacked into the account.

Magic?

No, the hacker simply had to guess the “secret” information that Yahoo! demands for resetting an account’s password. This secret information took less than 45 minutes research on the Wikipedia online encyclopedia and other sites (think Social Networking etc.).

Once the hacker got the authorisation to reset the password, he or she could read anything in the e-mail account …

… or send messages masquerading as Sarah!

Now, you can see right away that she shouldn’t have been conducting official business from a Yahoo! account. For one thing, it keeps state business out of the public record, which is illegal. For another, the security is inadequate but what this should remind us is how vital it is to protect our e-mail accounts (even if they are a less juicy target than Sarah Palin’s).

If you choose a weak password, it’s pretty easy for a hacker to break using a “dictionary” attack (a list of possible passwords in descending order of likeliness) but even if you choose a strong password, the password-reset mechanism can nuke your security. So play it safe.

With a systems similar to Yahoo’s, this means:

Whichever of the security questions you choose, don’t give publicly available information.

Give a fake date of birth … this is security information, not an identity check.

Give a different postcode … anybody who knows where you like can look up your postcode, so don’t use the real one.

Get the idea?

Stay Safe

If you’ve got a Hotmail, Yahoo or Google account you’ll probably of come across “captchas” before — the pictures of distorted text that you have to decipher and type into a box when you create an account. This is a device to prove you’re human rather than a program signing up for an account from which they can spam the world.

“Captcha” is a weird word. It’s an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart and by and large, captchas have worked pretty well for several years.

A few months ago it came to light that hackers had built captcha-cracking programmes that analyzed the text and took a shot at what the characters were. These were good enough to threaten some captcha-protected systems.

Now things have taken a turn for the worse, Captcha-cracking has become an industry!

The forces of evil have set up captcha-cracking factories in low-income economies in the Far East. Picture rooms full of people, busily cracking the captchas and being paid for each one they crack. The payments are small, but at a fast workrate, they add up to more than a living wage in a low-income economy and the work probably compares pretty well to dealing with tech-support queries!

This new menace makes it all the more vital to remember the #1 rule for dealing with spam:

NEVER, EVER ASK TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM SPAM.

If you reply to a spam, even to ask to unsubscribe, it tells the spammer your e-mail address is “live”.

That means the spammer can sell it to other spammers for more money and …

you’ll get a ton more spam.

This article describes Non-delivery reports (NDRs) & Delivery Status Notifications in Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. It is an abstract of Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 284204

Non-delivery reports (NDRs) are system messages that report the delivery status of a message to the sender. The messages are a subclass of a general message information structure that is referred to as delivery status notifications. Delivery status notifications describe three different types of situations:

• Success (2.X.X numeric codes)
• Persistent transient failure (4.X.X numeric codes)
• Permanent failures (5.X.X numeric codes)

===================================

The following list describes the numeric codes and the corresponding error conditions that most frequently occur:

• Numeric Code: 4.2.2

Only available in Exchange 2000 Service Pack 2 or earlier. See 5.2.2

• Numeric Code: 4.3.1

Possible Cause: This code may be caused by resource problem such as a disk full condition. This code may also occur if your Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) queue is on a File Allocation Table (FAT) partition and the service has reached a Windows-imposed limit on the number of concurrent file handles that can be opened by the SMTP Service. In this case, instead of receiving a disk full error, you might be receiving an out of memory error.

Troubleshooting: Make sure you have sufficient disk storage, and try to operate your Exchange Transport queues on an NTFS partition.

• Numeric Code: 4.3.2

First Available: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1

Possible Cause: The message was not delivered because of Administrator action through the queue viewer interface in Exchange System Manager.

• Numeric Code: 4.4.1

Possible Cause: The host is not responding.

Troubleshooting: This code may be caused by transient network conditions. Exchange will automatically try again to connect and deliver the e-mail. If delivery still fails after multiple tries, a permanent failure NDR will be generated.

• Numeric Code: 4.4.2

Possible Cause: The connection has been dropped between servers.

Troubleshooting: This code may be caused by transient network issues or servers that are down. The server tries to deliver the message for a specific time period, and then generates additional status reports.

• Numeric Code: 4.4.6

Possible Cause: The max hop count was exceeded for the message. This code may also occur if a loop situation exists between a sending server and a receiving server that are not in the same organization. In this scenario, the message bounces back and forth until the hop count is exceeded.

Troubleshooting: The max hop count property is set for each virtual server, and you can manually override this setting (the default setting is 15 for Exchange 2000 Server and 30 for Exchange Server 2003). Additionally, look for any situations that could cause loops between servers.

• Numeric Code: 4.4.7

Possible Cause: The message in the queue has expired. The sending server tried to relay or deliver the message, but the action was not completed before the message expiration time occurred. This NDR may also indicate that a message header limit has been reached on a remote server or that some other protocol timeout occurred during communication with the remote server.
Troubleshooting: This code typically indicates an issue on the receiving server. Verify the validity of the recipient address, and verify that the receiving server is configured to receive messages correctly. You may have to reduce the number of recipients in the header of the message for the host that you are receiving this NDR from. If you resend the message, it is placed in the queue again. If the receiving server is on line, the message is delivered.

• Numeric Code: 4.4.9

First Available: Exchange Server 2003

Possible Causes: This code indicates that a temporary routing error occurred or that a bad routing configuration exists. This issue may occur in one or both of the following scenarios:

• A Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) connector is configured to use DNS without a smart host and is also configured to use a non-SMTP address space such as an X.400 address space.

• A message was sent to a recipient who was identified as a member of a routing group that was deleted.
Troubleshooting: If the problem persists, use the WinRoute tool to examine the routing groups in the tree view pane, and then examine the address spaces of the route that the problem message takes. For more information about the WinRoute tool, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
281382 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281382/) How to use the WinRoute tool

• Numeric Code: 4.6.5

First Available: Exchange Server 2003

Possible Causes: This code occurs when conversion of an inbound SMTP failed because the code page that is specified in the message is not installed on the receiving server. This delivery status notification contains only the original message headers. None of the original content is provided.

Troubleshooting: View the MIME of the original message. Make sure that the required language files are installed on the server that is receiving the message.

• Numeric Code: 5.0.0

First Available: All numeric codes that were first available with Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1 (4.3.2, 5.4.0, 5.4.4, and 5.5.0) were classified as 5.0.0 in Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1 and earlier.

Possible Causes:

• There is no route for the specified address space. For example, an SMTP connector is configured, but this address does not match.
• DNS returned an authoritative host that was not found for the domain.
• The routing group does not have a connector defined. Mail from one server in one routing group does not have a route to another routing group.
• An SMTP protocol error occurred.

Troubleshooting:
1. Correct the address space, or add an address space of type SMTP with asterisk (*) value to one or more SMTP connectors.
2. Verify that DNS is working correctly.
3. Make sure that the routing groups have connectors that connect them.
4. If you are running Exchange 2000 without Service Pack 1, apply Service Pack 1 to help determine the actual issue.

• Numeric Code: 5.1.0

Possible Cause: This code indicates a general categorizer-based failure (bad address failure). An e-mail address or other attribute could not be found in the directory. This issue may occur if contact entries do not have the targetAddress attribute set. This issue occurs most frequently when MDAccess receives “object not found” errors from DSAccess when the Categorizer is doing the homeMDB lookup on a user.

This issue also occurs if you used Microsoft Outlook to save your e-mail message as a file and someone opens and replies to this message offline. The message property only preserves the legacyExchangeDN when Outlook delivers the message. Therefore, the homeMDB lookup may fail.

Troubleshooting: Verify the recipient address and resend the message. Verify that the recipient address is formatted correctly and that the categorizer was able to correctly resolve the recipient.

• Numeric Code: 5.1.1

Possible Cause:
• The e-mail account does not exist at the organization the message was sent to. This issue may occur if there was a problem when users were moved between sites. For example, if a former Administrative_Group_1 user moves to Administrative_Group_2 and then replies to an old e-mail message, or if the user does not re-create his or her Outlook profile, an old Administrative Group style LegDN address will be used, and an NDR is generated.
• The message was sent to obsolete personal address book entries.
• The categorizer rejected delivery because you configured your SMTP contact with see comment SMTP RFC821 characters.

Troubleshooting: Use the troubleshooting procedure described for numeric code 5.1.0.

• Numeric Code: 5.1.3

Possible Cause: Bad address syntax. For example, a contact is configured with a targetAddress attribute that has no address type.

Troubleshooting: Use the troubleshooting procedure described for numeric code 5.1.0.

• Numeric Code: 5.1.4

Possible Cause: Two objects have the same proxy address, and mail is sent to that address. This issue may also occur if the recipient does not exist on the remote server.

Troubleshooting: Verify the recipient address and resend the message.

• Numeric Code: 5.1.6

First Available: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 2

Possible Cause: The user directory attributes, such as homeMDB or msExchHomeServerName, may be missing or corrupted.

Troubleshooting: Verify the integrity of the user directory attributes, and then run the Recipient Update Service again to make sure that the attributes that are required for transport are valid.

• Numeric Code: 5.1.7

First Available: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 2

Possible Cause: The sender has a malformed or missing mail attribute in the directory structure. The Transport categorizer cannot deliver the mail item without a valid mail attribute.

Troubleshooting: Verify the sender directory structure and determine whether the mail attribute exists.

• Numeric Code: 5.2.1

Possible Cause: Local mail is refused because the message is too big. An absent Master Account Security ID number (SID) on the recipient can also cause this error message.

Troubleshooting: Verify access permissions in addition to the message size. Determine if the recipient has an SID.

• Numeric Code: 5.2.2

First Available: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 3 (previously 4.2.2 in earlier release).

Possible Causes: The recipient’s mailbox is over its storage limit.

Troubleshooting: Verify the mailbox storage and the queue storage quota limit.

• Numeric Code: 5.2.3

Possible Cause: The message is too large for the local quota. For example, a remote Exchange user may have delivery restrictions set with max incoming message size.

Troubleshooting: Resend the message without attachments, or set the server side limit or the client side limit to permit a larger message size.

• Numeric Code: 5.3.0

First Available: Exchange Server 2003

Possible Causes: Exchange Server 2003 has a feature that permits Exchange 2003 to operate without the Message Transfer Agent (MTA). If a message was sent incorrectly by using the MTA route, this delivery status notification is returned to the sender.

Note Although Exchange 2003 can operate without the MTA, Microsoft does not recommend or support this configuration.

To turn on this feature and to prevent the messages from queuing to the MTA, follow these steps:
1. Disable the MTA service.
2. Set the DWORD value to 0 in the following registry subkeys for every information store database and public folder store:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIS\\ \Gateway In Threads
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIS\\ \Gateway Out Threads
When you do this, you are making store resources that are associated with MTA delivery available.
3. Restart the information store.
Troubleshooting: Check your routing topology. Use the WinRoute tool to make sure that the routes are correctly replicated between servers and routing groups.

• Numeric Code: 5.3.3

Possible Cause: The Exchange 2000 remote server or the Exchange 2003 remote server is out of disk storage to hold mail. This issue occurs most frequently when the sending server is sending mail with binary DATA (BDAT). This code may also indicate an SMTP protocol error.

Troubleshooting: Make sure the remote server has sufficient storage to hold mail, and examine the SMTP protocol log for errors.

• Numeric Code: 5.3.5

Possible Cause: A loop-back situation where the server is configured to loop back on itself was detected.

Troubleshooting: If you have multiple SMTP virtual servers that are configured on your Exchange computer, make sure that they are serving unique incoming ports and that the outgoing SMTP port configuration is valid to avoid looping between local virtual servers. Check the configuration of the server’s connectors for loops. For example, make sure that no connectors exist that have the address space of the local organization, unless you share the domain and you do not select Use DNS to route to each address space on this connector.

For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

321721 Sharing SMTP address spaces in Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 2003

Make sure that if there are multiple virtual servers, that none are set to All Unassigned.

• Numeric Code: 5.4.0

First Available: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1

Possible Causes:
• An authoritative host was not found in DNS.
• The smarthost entry is incorrect.
• FQDN name in HOSTS file. This issue was fixed in Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3).
• There was a DNS failure or you constructed an invalid IP address for your smarthost. *
• SMTP VS does not have a valid FQDN, or your SMTP VS FQDN lookup failed.
• A contact’s SMTP domain does not resolve to any SMTP address spaces.

Troubleshooting: Use Nslookup to check the DNS. Verify that the IP address is in IPv4 literal format. Verify that there is a valid DNS entry for the server or computer name in question. If you are relying on the FQDN in HOSTS file, ignore it and update the entry in Exchange System Manager with valid IP address or correct name.

• Numeric Code: 5.4.4

First Available: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1

Possible Cause: No route to message, next hop not found. You have set up a Routing Group topology but there is no Routing Group Connector set up between the Routing Groups.

Troubleshooting: Add or configure your Routing Group Connector between Routing Groups.

• Numeric Code: 5.4.6

Possible Cause: A Categorizer forward loop was detected.
The targetAddress attribute is set on a mailbox-enabled user. Hosting Pack: This is a common hosting configuration problem when someone creates a contact in organizational unit (OU) 1 and then creates a user in OU 2 that has the same e-mail address by using the user provisioning tool.

Troubleshooting:
• This issue occurs when contactA has an alternate recipient that points to contactB and contactB has an alternate recipient that points back to contactA. Check the alternative recipient for every contact.
• Check and remove the targetAddress attribute from mailbox-enabled users.
• For hosting where you want to send mail from one user in one company (OU) to another company (OU), it is best to configure the following two related objects:
User: SMTP proxy: user@company.com
Contact: targetAddress: user@company.com; SMTP proxy: contact@company2.com

• Numeric Code: 5.4.8

First Available: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1

Possible Cause: This code indicates a looping condition. This issue may occur if one of the recipient policies includes a local domain that matches the FQDN of an Exchange server in the organization. When the Transport Categorizer processes e-mail that is destined for a domain that matches the FQDN of an Exchange server, an NDR with this code is generated.

Troubleshooting: If this issue occurs because of a domain that matches the FQDN of an Exchange server in the recipient policy, you must remove that entry.

• Numeric Code: 5.5.0

First Available: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1

Possible Cause: Generic protocol error (SMTP error). The remote SMTP response to our EHLO with a 500 level error and the sending system will QUIT the connection and report this with NDR indicating the remote SMTP server cannot handle the protocol. (For example, if a Hotmail account is no longer active, a 550 SMTP error will occur.)

Troubleshooting: Run an SMTP Log or a Network Monitor trace to see why the remote SMTP server rejects the protocol request.

• Numeric Code: 5.5.2

Possible Cause: This refers to a general protocol error when SMTP protocols are out of sequence. For example, an SMTP protocol error occurs when AUTH is tried before EHLO. In one observation, this occurred when the system was experiencing an out of disk condition.

Troubleshooting: Run SMTP Log or Network Monitor trace and make sure that there is enough disk storage and virtual memory for SMTP to operate.

• Numeric Code: 5.5.3

Possible Cause: Too many recipients on the sent message.

Troubleshooting: The recipient limit is a configurable limit on the receiving server. To resolve this issue, either increase the recipient limit, or break up the message into multiple messages to fit the server limit.

Note The default recipient limit on a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) message is 5000. To set this limit, start the Exchange System Manager, click the Global Settings node, right-click Message Delivery, and then click Properties. This can also be a per-user setting in the Active Directory.

• Numeric Code: 5.6.3

First Available: Exchange Server 2003

Possible Causes:

1. The message contains more than 250 attachments. More than 250 attachments cause the MAPI_E_TOO_BIG error.
2. Mail has been sent with a malformed addr822 header.

Troubleshooting:

1. Reduce the number of attachments in the message, and then resend the message.
2. Correct the header. The error is misleading, as it indicates the NDR occurs because of the malformed P2 headers.

• Numeric Code: 5.7.1

Possible Causes:

• General access denied, sender access denied – the sender of the message does not have the privileges required to complete delivery.
• You are trying to relay your mail through another SMTP server and it does not permit you to relay.
• The recipient might have mailbox delivery restrictions enabled. For example, a recipient’s mailbox delivery restriction was set to receive from a Distribution List only and non-members’ email will be rejected with this error.
• For Exchange Server 2003, a distribution list can be configured to restrict mail delivery from unauthenticated users. Mail that is sent by using an unauthenticated SMTP session are rejected.

Troubleshooting:

Check system privileges and attributes for the contact and retry the message. Also, make sure you are running Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1 or later for other potential known issues.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has issued a warning on the dangers of “vishing”, similar to phishing, claiming that instances of the scam are increasing at an unnerving rate.

Alert Prepared by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)

January 17, 2008

VISHING ATTACKS INCREASE

Are you one of many who have received an e-mail, text message, or telephone call, purportedly from your credit card/debit card company directing you to contact a telephone number to re-activate your card due to a security issue? The IC3 has received multiple reports on different variations of this scheme known as “vishing”. These attacks against US financial institutions and consumers continue to rise at an alarming rate.

Vishing operates like phishing by persuading consumers to divulge their Personally Identifiable Information (PII), claiming their account was suspended, deactivated, or terminated. Recipients are directed to contact their bank via telephone number provided in the e-mail or by an automated recording. Upon calling the telephone number, the recipient is greeted with “Welcome to the bank of …” and then requested to enter their card number in order to resolve a pending security issue.

For authenticity, some fraudulent e-mails claim the bank would never contact customers to obtain the PII by any means, including e-mail, mail, and instant messenger. These e-mails further warn recipients not to provide sensitive information when requested in an e-mail and not to click on embedded links, claiming they could contain “malicious software aimed at capturing login credentials.”

Please beware; spam e-mails may actually contain malicious code (malware) which can harm your computer. Do not open any unsolicited e-mail and do not click on any links provided.

A new version recently reported involved the sending of text messages to cell phones claiming the recipient’s on-line bank account has expired. The message instructs the recipient to renew their on-line bank account by using the link provided.

Due to rapidly evolving criminal methodologies, it is impossible to include every scenario. Therefore, be cognizant and protect your PII. Beware of e-mails, telephone calls, or text messages requesting your PII.

If you have a question concerning your account or credit/debit card, you should contact your bank using a telephone number obtained independently such as; from your statement, a telephone book, or another independent means.

The original alert can be read at the following web page:

http://www.ic3.gov/media/2008/080117.htm

E-mail spam, also known as “bulk e-mail” or “junk e-mail,” is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. “UCE” refers specifically to “unsolicited commercial e-mail.” (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

It is believed that on an average an email user will receive more than 2000 spam emails in a year! According to some research as much as 77 percent of all email sent is spam. With such high amounts of spam being sent anti-spam software becomes a necessity just as anti-virus software has done previously.

Spam is one of the biggest disadvantages of using email. There is every need to find ways to separate the wanted emails from the unwanted and unsolicited ones. Choosing the correct anti-spam software or Spam filter is the right way to cut down on the spam you receive.

Apart from the usual spam emails, the new menace has been created by the “phishing emails” targeting primarily eBay, PayPal and other financial institutions accounts. These emails come as a “Last Warning”, “Attention Required”, “Password Change Required” or “Your account is suspended” among many more. These mails appear to have come from eBay, PayPal or your bank and provide a link a website that appears to be genuine.

These pages are designed just like the original pages and the unsuspecting user ends up providing his/her sensitive information like username/password or Credit Card Information to these duplicate pages.

There have been many ways of filtering spam emails like blacklisted domains, banned IPs, words in subject and many more. The spammers have always found out a way to change their identity. But here is the catch. The spammers are being paid to send the message. They can change their Domains, IPs & subject lines.

Things to look for when choosing a SPAM filtering solution:

This is a brief introduction to the features and capabilities that your SPAM solution should provide in-order to combat the ever growing and ingenious ways that spammers get their emails into your inbox:

* Works at the email transport level.
* Always up-to-date software by having the ability to use DNS blacklists and SURBLs
* Attachment filtering
* Custom tests: SPF test, Keyword filtering, Greylisting, Reverse DNS, FQDN test, etc.
* Reject emails sent to non-existent recipients
* General email filtering tools – you can create your own IP address, sender and recipient email address lists, whitelists etc.
* Ability to learn from blocked emails
* Monitoring and Reporting to let you know how much spam the software has stopped

If your looking for a solution to your SPAM problem we use and recommend the following:

For Home Users (Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird etc.)

Spamihilator

For the Corporate Environment (Microsoft Exchange)

Open Relay Filter

This article contains a list of possible SMTP & POP error codes that may be returned by the Microsoft mail clients when trying to send/receive email:

Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) Errors
——————————————–

ERROR CODE DESCRIPTION
———— ————-
0x800CCC60 Invalid response.
0x800CCC61 Unknown error code.
0x800CCC62 Syntax error returned.
0x800CCC63 Parameter syntax incorrect.
0x800CCC64 Command not implemented.
0x800CCC65 Improper command sequence.
0x800CCC66 Command not implemented.
0x800CCC67 Command not available.
0x800CCC68 Mailbox is locked and busy.
0x800CCC69 Mailbox not found.
0x800CCC6A Error processing request.
0x800CCC6B User mailbox is known, but mailbox not on this server.
0x800CCC6C No space to store messages.
0x800CCC6D Storage limit exceeded.
0x800CCC6E Invalid mailbox name syntax.
0x800CCC6F Transaction failed.
0x800CCC78 Unknown sender. This is caused by having the incorrect e-mail address in the Reply-To field.
0x800CCC79 Server rejected recipients.
0x800CCC7A No sender address specified.
0x800CCC7B No recipients specified.

Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) Errors
——————————————–

ERROR CODE DESCRIPTION
———— ————-
0x800420CB Mail cannot be stored on server.
0x800CCC90 Client response invalid.
0x800CCC91 Invalid user name or user not found.
0x800CCC92 Password not valid for account.
0x800CCC93 Unable to interpret response.
0x800CCC94 STAT Command required.
0x800CCC95 No messages on server.
0x800CCC96 No messages marked for retrieval.
0x800CCC97 Message ID out of range.

Open Outlook Express

Click on the Start button in the bottom left corner of the screen. Now move the mouse up so that the cursor rests on the word Programs, or All Programs if you’re using Windows XP. Then move the cursor along the new list that appears until it rests on the words Outlook Express. Keep it there and click the left mouse button once.

Open the Outlook Express Accounts panel

Now that we’ve successfully opened Outlook Express, we need to make some changes to the settings – or Properties, as Microsoft calls them.

Move the cursor to the top of the Outlook Express window and click on the word Tools. Then move down the list – also known as a menu – that appears and click again on the word Accounts.

Add a new Mail account

Once you’ve done this, the window below should appear. We need to move the cursor to click on the button labelled Add and then select Mail… from the options that appear.

This should now open the Internet Connection Wizard.

Follow the Internet Connection Wizard

If all has gone well so far we should see the window below – this is the first screen of the Internet Connection Wizard. In the white box type in your name as you would like it to appear on the emails you send.

After you have entered your name click on the Next button at the bottom right corner of the window.

Enter your email address

Now type in your email address provided by your ISP or Web Host – this is the address you need to give people so they can send email messages to you.

Once you have typed in your email address click on the Next button at the bottom of the window.

Enter the email server names

This will take us to the email Server Information window.

Complete the details for the type of server (POP or IMAP), the incoming (POP3 or IMAP) server and the Outgoing (SMTP) server.

Double-check these details and then click on the Next button.

Fill in your logon details

The Internet Connection Wizard will now open the Internet Mail Logon window. In the ‘Account name’ box type in the username given by your ISP or Webhost.

Then in the ‘Password’ box type in the password you chose when you registered your account. You won’t be able to see the letters as they appear on the screen, so type carefully.

Remember:

Type CAPITAL and lowercase letters exactly as they were originally entered because your password is case-sensitive. Make sure you haven’t accidentally pressed the Caps Lock button too.

If you click in the box next to ‘Remember password’ a small tick will appear and this means that you won’t have to type in your password every time you want to check your emails.

Make sure you don’t put a tick in the box marked ‘Log on using Secure Password Authentication (SPA)’ unless you have been told to by your ISP or Webhost.

When you are finished click on Next.

Finishing off

We are now at the final screen of the Internet Connection Wizard. If you have entered all the settings correctly it should show a message like the one below.

If the ‘Congratulations’ message does not appear click the Back button and check that you have filled in all the required boxes. Otherwise click on Finish to close the Internet Connection Wizard and return to the main Outlook Express screen.

Congratulations! You have now set up Outlook Express to send and receive email.

Spam is a daily nuisance for all of us. It doesn’t matter whether you’re at work or unemployed. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Company owner of a multinational or if you’re a work at home parent – spam affects us all.

There are dozens of progams available for combatting unsolicited commercial email (uce, spam). The major problem is that most of these programs are expensive.

What I’m going to do is give you 4 assorted ways of combating unsolicited commercial email (uce, spam) – all free.

1. Don’t give out your personal email address.

This is stating the obvious but it’s the supreme big mistake people make. Do not use your personal email address for sign up forms, competitions, surveys or any other nonsense that may result in you being spammed. It’s much easier to prevent unsolicited commercial email (uce, spam), by never giving out your personal email address, than it is to cure the situation once you’re on 100′s of junk email lists.

2. Use a free email account

Set yourself up with a Hotmail, Yahoo or any other free email account and use it whereas a spam holder account i.e. use it on all those popups or sign up forms that you *suspect* may try to grab your email address inorder to send you unsolicited commercial email. You can then periodically assess your free email account for both legitimate and spam email and delete the rubbish you don’t want. This single step can save you lots unsolicited commercial email related headaches.

3. Use a free unsolicited commercial email (uce, spam) filter.

Unfortunately even when you follow all the correct steps you can still wind up getting junk email. There’s only solution at that point – install a spam filter on your PC. The best free unsolicited commercial email (uce, spam) filter I’ve come across so far is Spamihilator. An excellent application that won’t cost you a penny.

4. Newsgroups and forums

Spammers love newsgroups and forums. They especially love the way people post their personal email addresses there. It doesn’t matter if it’s a paid, anonymous or free forum spammers have their harvester programs hunting for email addresses every minute of every day.

If you have to post your email address then use the following format:

username AT domain.com.

If that doesn’t make sense then what I mean is instead of posting whereas test@unsolicited commercial email (uce, spam)-site.com you’d post whereas test AT spam-site.com.

Spammers can harvest 35,000 email addresses per hour from newsgroups and forums!!