I’m very well aware of all Symantec Anti Virus Products, specially that I used to use Symantec Anti Virus Corporate Edition (now called Symantec EndPoint Protection) .  The best thing that I like from Symantec that even though many people complains that Symantec Anti Viruses are very slow (and I agree ) but it very stable.

And talking about viruses, I prefer slow but accurate rather that fast but there are many viruses still slip away.

But, after many successful installation of Symantec EndPoint Protection, I failed in one computer, with the error message.

symantec endpoint protection has detected that there are pending system changes that require a reboot

After search the net, it’s not Symantec problem, actually more than Microsoft problems.

The solution is quite simple.

Open regedit (you should know where and how to run regedit ), find the value PendingFileRenameOperations, then delete all the data.

The data should be like this:

\??\source file
!\??\target file

After you delete the data, now you can continue to install Symantec EndPoint Protection without anymore problem.

This is a big news, for people who maintains email servers everywhere in the world.

That the White House email server was down almost for a day. Yes, the White House, where they should hire experts from around the world.

But the email server was down.

Source

How is it possible that the e-mail system for the White House could go down that long, a caller asked? Press secretary Robert Gibbs had just apologized on live television for the lack of any e-mail contact.

“We still don’t know,” the help-line guy said, adding that two e-mail servers had been rebooted but that two others remained mysteriously down, with no immediate explanation.

He then abruptly put the caller on hold, returning momentarily to say that he was no longer authorized to answer questions.

Remained mysteriously down, lol, that is very funny.

Source

As of Tuesday morning, the White House was once again sending its regular slew of e-mails.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged the outage during a briefing to reporters Monday afternoon. White House aides at the briefing had to pass out photocopies of the executive orders signed by the president that day, rather than e-mailing them to reporters. The outage, however, did not appear to cause any major disruptions at the White House.

Well I guess email is not really important in the white house, while many other business depend heavily on email traffic.

And that what will hapen if they used MS Exchange as their mail server.

Or, maybe they should change it back into Lotus Domino/Notes system? Maybe now they regret the migration?

With outlook express, you will be facing many problems.

These are the most common problem that I encounter with outlook express.

Missing emails (corrupt dbx files)

Outlook express based on dbx files. Each folder in outlook express actually one dbx file. The structure of the folders are stored in special file called folders.dbx.

The problem with folder in outlook express is if the outlook express closed unexpected, one of the folder may become corrupted. Whe the folder got corrupted you will notice missing emails, worst case all the emails in that folder are missing.

When this happen, DO NOT run compact, or you will loose your emails for good.

There are many utility to recover the corrupted folder, the utility actually extract each emails from the dbx file into may eml files. One email one eml file.

The utility that I like most is Advanced Outlook Express Repair,is very simple and do the job done.

There is also freeware for it called Macallan Outlook Express Extraction, or many more in http://www.insideoe.com/resources/tools.htm or try google it for more tools.

==Update==

Alex just added outlook express dbx extractor as his favorite dbx recovery tools, you can read his comments in here.

Thanks for Alex for this info.

====

Can’t send and receives emails

These two problem most likely because the inbox folder or sent folder already reach it maximum size, which is 2 GB.

The real problem with outlook express is there is no warning at all if one of the folder reaching it maximun size until it’s too late.

When you can send email or your email stack in oubox folder than your sent items folder is already full, reached it’s maximun size.
If you can’t receive email, than your inbox folder already full.

There are two options to fix it.

1. The easiest way is to moved emails from sent or inbox folder (respectively) to another folder and than run compact. It may take sometime to finish.

2. Or you can create a new folder, click it once so outlook express will create the dbx file. Quit outlook express. Find the dbx file in windows explorer and delete the dbx file that you just created. Find the inbox or sent folder (respectively), rename it with the same name of the folder that you just created. When you run outlook express again, it will re-create the inbox or sent folder (respectively). The old inbox or sent folder is now in the folder you just created.

There is also another possibility that outlook express can’t send and receive emails because of buggy anti virus software. I found it with symantec anti virus 8 and symantec anti virus 9. With symantec you just disable the internet email auto protect, with other anti virus should be similar.

Relaying Not Allowed

You can send email to your colleague within the same domain, but you can’t send email to another domain. You will get the 505 Relaying Not Allowed message.

If this happen, try to enable outgoing email requires authentication. It seem the mail server you use require smtp auth for users to send emails to another domain.

Can’t open Outlook Express

This problem some times happen without any reason at all. It actually still trying to load, just take a long time to finish. Many user will think that their outlook express is hang or crash.

To test it very simple. Just login in safe mode, and try to open outlook express. If it run, than there is nothing wrong with your outlook express, just need a longer time to load. In my case it may take 30 minutes to one hour.

If in safe mode the outlook express still not run, than you might have corrupt folders. You can take a look at my previous post about it.

That’s all, the most common problem that I encounter with outlook express. Maybe other people have another problem that not in my list. For that try this Inside Oulook Express for solutions.

So many times that users with outlook express loose their emails, so I have to recover their emails. If they got lucky, I can recover their emails. If they not, the emails is lost.

One user came to me because her outlook express can’t start. I tried to start it and wait for 1 hour, nothing happen. Form the task manager I can see that outlook express is working because the process use almost 100% of cpu resource.

The Outlook express simply can’t start. Usually when this kind of problem happen, I will boot up to safe mode and run outlook express. Most of the time that will solved the problem. But not this one. I already tried to boot to safe mode, run outlook express and wait for more then another 1 hours and nothing happen.

So I tried another way.

I create another identity in outlook express, and try to import messages from the original store folder. First, it start to import the messages but then it stop.

Curious, I start again. And again it stop.

So, I tried again, but now I import one folder at a time. One folder imported, another folder imported, and it stop when I tried to import the inbox folder.

Curious, I did it again and it gave me the same result.

So, the conclusion is the problem caused by the corrupted inbox folder. I moved the inbox folder to another folder then start outlook express, and it started fine. Outlook express will created a new inbox folder.

All I have to do next is to recover the inbox folder into many eml files, then copied them back to the new inbox folder. Solved.

So, I just wasted my full day of work just to fix one unreliable outlook express email client.

This is my personal experience when trying to convert MS Outlook users to Lotus Notes users.

1. How to attach email in Lotus Notes?
This is the most annoying question, because Lotus Notes can’t attach email as attachment as MS Outlook does. Almost every MS Outlook users ask this same question. And if my answer is Lotus Notes can’t attach email as attachment, the next question or statement from them almost the same “why we have to use Lotus Notes?”. That is why this question for me is the most annoying question.

Exporting message to rtf file works for some users, but not for others. For me, exporting emails into rtf file, is not the same with attached the emails it self, because emails contains headers and attachment(s) that can’t be handle by rtf file.

But there is a work a round.

There is another mail template from http://www.openntf.org that have many features. One of the feature is to be able to forward emails as attachments. So far the template is works great for me, and I will give it to my users who need it.

You can download the OpenNTF Mail Experience in here. You need to register first, but it only take less than 5 minutes.

2. How to automatically added email addresses into contacts.
While this can be done by Lotus Notes 8 standard edition, Lotus Notes 8 basic edition can’t do it – as far as I know.

For me personally, the features in MS Outlook is annoying features, personally – I have to disable it.

Why, because I want to take control of my contacts, and keep it clean as possible. Only add email addresses if I want it too, not automatically. I don’t know why people like the feature. More than often that I see people have double or triple records for the same contact in MS Outlook. They can live with that, but not me.

And again, I have to promote the same template from http://www.openntf.org, because it have the feature to add not only add the sender, but also the recipients to the contacts. This will save a lot of time for Lotus Notes 8 basic edition.

3. How to change the default font, style in Lotus Notes?
MS Outlook is easy to customize, specially if the use MS Word as their mail editor, and now they want to customize Lotus Notes the same way they customize MS Outlook.
My simple answer is that they can use text properties to change the font, style etc, but they can’t change the default font.

4. Have more than 64 columns.
One bad habits of MS Outlook users is copy paste table from excel file to the body of the email. While this is work for another MS Outlook users, but (they should know that) not every body use MS Outlook.

Lotus Notes having problem since the design of Lotus Notes, that Lotus Notes documents doesn’t support any table that have more that 64 columns in it. So, simply Lotus Notes can’t open emails if inside the emails contains a table that have more than 64 columns, the way around to solve this is to open the email via web.

5. How to put attachments in top of the emails?
This is the last question they ask. In MS Outlook they can see attachments in top of their emails, make them easier to look. In Lotus Notes, attachments are put in the bottom of the email, so user need to scroll down the email until they can find the attachments.

I agree this is annoying, but if all users using Lotus Notes, we can put attachment the way we want and the recipients can see the way we put the attachments.

But, than again, not everybody using Lotus Notes.

My summary is that MS Outlook and Lotus Notes have different strength and weakness, while MS Outlook is easy to use and customized, Lotus Notes is very stable and power full mail client and much more. Personally I think that without custom applications, Lotus Notes will lose it appeal.

One thing that I learn about this is changing another mail server to Lotus Domino is easy, changing another mail clients to Lotus Notes is easy, but changing people habits is very difficult, specially if the already using MS Outlook for years.

Note, that I hate HTML mail, not every body using HTML mail clients. There are some people still using mutt as they mail client.

In terms of IT, we have different perspective. It’s been a long time since we moved from GroupWise to Lotus Notes, while our head office still using Novell GroupWise. It’s kind of funny that we “a branch office” could choose different software and technology, but that happen. As long as we can sent email to each other that not a problem.

Now, seeing that they want to migrate their GroupWise, it is time for me and my boss to put some influences.

Right now, they want to migrate to MS Exchange along with MS SharePoint. So my boss give them a simple demonstration with one and two Lotus Notes databases, and now they already have doubts on their choices

They impressed. Very impressed.

But, about MS SharePoint, I’m the one who have doubts.

After a few calls with one of my friend in IBM, they suggested a few list of Lotus or IBM products: Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections and IBM WebSphere portals.

I think the closest one with MS SharePoint is Lotus Quickr.

I found many interesting reading from the web, that I like to share.

Migrating to SharePoint … the wrong comparisons

Domino or Sharepoint?

SharePoint or Domino

Domino vs. Sharepoint, or should that be Quickr vs. Sharepoint??

From those reading, my temporary understanding is that Lotus Quickr is the closest one to match MS SharePoint. While comparing MS SharePoint with Lotus Quickr is not like comparing apple to apple, but very close product.

We can’t compare Lotus Domino with MS Exchange, is NOT apple to apple.

Right now, I’m going to look for Lotus Quickr and give it a try and hope that my head office will like it and use it.

If you have any experiences with both products, please share it with us.

You can see windows Vista requirements at
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/…/systemrequirements.mspx

You see know, why I says Windows Vista: A Killer OS. It will kill your
budget and wallet. If you have any plan to use one, you can say good bye to
your old computer. Simple upgrading the memory simply not enough, this
beast will require new processor and new graphic card too.

The rules is simple. If you wan to use it, buy a brand new computer with
the latest hardware and huge amount of memory. Event the home basic
edition require minimum of 512MB of memory, that just for the OS! If you
need to run applications like MS Outlook 2007, that you need at least 1GB
of memory. That minimum configuration. The ‘Wow’ starts now – that’s True!.

These are just a few words about vista that I got from mailing list that I
join. These people mostly computer consultant with years of expertise. I
think I listens for what they says.

• I’m running Outlook 2007 on a dual Xeon 3.06Ghz (not HT either) with 4G of RAM and it still drags.

• I just tried Vista with the latest MS Office. It ran quite well. Of course, you have to have a system with the nuts to handle it. This was on a Dell with an Intel dual-core (3.8 Ghz I believe) system. Tons of memory. I would never use it on an outdated single core system with 512memory.

• I find Outlook 2007 to be MUCH slower than 2003. I’m am not impressedby Vista or Office 2007 so far.

• Yeah, and what will be the requirement in the next version on windows, a supercomputer, and that’s just for basics

• Quad processor, 4 GB ram, 2GB will be used upon successful bootup. In order to have the cool graphics as MacOS XII, you will need an SLI-2×4 4 – GPU video card that costs twice as much as the motherboard and processor chip.

• I used Vista for a week on a laptop that was purchased within the last six months and branded as “Vista Ready!” It ran like crap, the driver support for the touchpad was abysmal, and it lived in virtual memory. I’ll run XP until I can’t anymore. After that, FreeBSD on the desktop is looking more and more attractive.

• I don’t object to Microsoft taking advantage of the power of newer machines, but I do find it rather annoying in the case of Vista that the *requirements* for the OS are so high. I’ve seen nothing in Vista that justifies using so much machine for just the OS. I do need to run a Vista box so that I can be familiar with the thing when my clients call with questions about it.

• Currently I’m running Vista Ultimate on a Core 2 Extreme X6800 with 2G of very nice RAM and an X1950XTX graphics card. I have a very fast array of 3G SATA drives, and Vista does look pretty and it’s quite snappy. But… The same box feels faster with XP SP2.

Sure they are also some good words about Microsoft Vista, but hey… I’m
not gonna quote them.

I’m not yet running Windows Vista, but for the prices of the OS and the
price for the new hardware, I think I never will.

I’m not prepare to buy a new computer, and I think many people are like me,
have a tight budget. I think I will stick with my old notebook powered by
Pentium III 733 Mhz with 512 MB, running dual boot nicely with Windows XP
Home edition and with Open Suse 10.1.

I still belive linux is the future (and now Lotus Notes runs under linux
too)