en Passant

Recently one of our executives received an odd email message. Initial review of the message shown that her name was in the FROM field, an external recipient was in the TO field, the subject was something like "Request Update: Original Meeting Subject" and to top it off, it shown up as unread in her Inbox.

Initial analysis suggested that the message was a spam or spoofed message, but the subject was deceiving. OK, if that were so, then someone has been infected with a virus or spam-bot. Not good. This required further investigation.

We recently had a secretary who created a personal distribution list (PDL) with too many members.

This is a limitation of distribution lists that are created and stored in a Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox store or in a personal folders (.pst) file. There is no definite limit to the number of contacts that you can add to a distribution list.

The default Outlook Address Book is saved in the Windows registry. I've created this script to be used to push down a new Address Book view at logon for a large group of users. The script will read the current default Outlook profile for the currently logged on user, then push down the address book view you specify.

Troubleshooting Outlook delegate permissions is a pain. I found the easiest way to get a user's delegates is to create a profile, open their mailbox and check each person.

That's why I created this script. Using the Quest Powershell addons for AD, it reads the delegate permissions for a specified mailbox, then looks up the display name for each delegate or mailbox they are a delegate for.

I had an interesting request. A user wanted to search their mailbox for all read/not read/delivery/non-delivery receipts in their mailbox. You would think that it should be as easy as searching for "READ:" in the subject line. Unfortunately, Outlook does a wild-card type search on what you enter. This means you may get read:, bread: and read:s.

Sure creating a signature in Outlook is easy. Open Outlook, type in some information, change a few settings and you'll have a decent looking signature. Now, if you want to include a graphic (like a company logo), or use HTML, you have to get a bit more fancy.

One thing every corporate employee has to deal with is email. Go on vacation, and you get tons of it. Stay home with a sick kid, and you get a ton more. The work does not stop, even if you can't go. In turn, we either don't take time off, even when needed, or we read our email all the time (Curse you Blackberry!).

Thanks to a recent change, Americans will soon be getting more daylight. Yes, we will start saving daylight approximately 3 weeks earlier this year. Previously, Daylight Savings started the first Sunday in April, now it will be the second Sunday in March!

I just received the latest joke/hoax/chain-mail from a family/friend/co-worker regarding some new issue, scam or sentiment. When this person forwarded along the message, I had to skim through pages upon pages of valid e-mail addresses to get to the actual message, which ended with "forward to all your family and friends".

Thanks to this person, I made $$$ with very little work. How? I extracted out all 200+ (validated and real) e-mail addresses, then forwarded the file off to a website that collects e-mail addresses. (Spammers pay extra for validated e-mail address like these, you know!!)