This all works perfectly in most cases and with most email clients but one laptop (the boss’s laptop of course) didn’t work as normal.  The problem machine runs Windows Vista and  uses Microsoft Mail as the email client.

Sent Items are stored in Local Folders

Incoming emails are stored in the IMAP folders as normal but outgoing emails are stored locally, the Sent Items folder isn’t on the IMAP server but instead is on the local hard disk.  It limits the usefulness of IMAP if your sent emails aren’t stored centrally too.

The problem only seems to occur with Windows Mail, in this case on Windows Vista but I assume that it could also affect anyone using Windows Mail on Windows 7.   Other email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird don’t have the same problem.

Telling Windows Mail to store Sent Items on the IMAP Server

The following solution works on our mail servers, we have a reseller account with Hostgator  so a lot of other servers will have a similar setup.

Setting up Windows Mail for IMAP

1. In Windows Mail Click on the Tools menu
2. Then click on Accounts
3. Select your IMAP account from the list of accounts
4. Click Properties
5. Then click the IMAP tab, you will get a window like the picture to the right.
6. Type Inbox in the Root Folder Path box.
7. Make sure that Store special folders on IMAP server is selected
8. You should also change the 4 path names to match those actually used by your server, so Sent Items should be changed to Sent, Deleted Items to Trash…
   If you don’t do this everything will still work ok but you will end up with some sent items (from Windows Mail) in the Sent Items folder and others (from other email clients or from Webmail) in the Sent folder.
9. Save your changes, Windows Mail will need to rebuild your folder list but from now on any emails you send should be stored on the IMAP server rather than in Local Folders.  It is a good idea to move the contents of your Local Sent Items folder to the new IMAP Sent folder

But will it run on my computer?

Yes, as long as you are running Vista or Windows 7.

IE9 uses features  which don’t exist in Microsoft’s older operating systems; that is anything older than Windows Vista,  there are pretty good technical reasons for doing this and IE9 is faster and more secure because of it, but it does mean that IE9 will never run under Windows/XP.    Of course Windows/XP is now pretty old and we can’t expect it to be supported forever, but you can still buy a brand new PC with XP installed and over 65% of PCs are still running XP, more than twice the market share of Windows Vista and Windows 7 combined.

Will people upgrade to Windows 7 so they can run IE9?

I think the days of people upgrading their operating systems to run the latest software, particularly something as basic as a browser are long gone.  Windows 7 looks like a pretty good operating system and I will happily run when I get a new PC, but I’m not going to upgrade an old PC to run it just so I can install IE9.  If I want a better browser than IE8 it is much less painful to install Firefox, Chrome or Opera than it is to change operating systems.

As PC usage increases and as people replace old PCs Windows 7 usage will increase and XP will continue its decline, but it will take years for Windows 7 (or it’s successors) to overtake XP in market share.    As technologies like HTML5 etc become more widespread there will be more need for XP users to move away from browsers which don’t support these features, otherwise they will be unable to use many of the features that other people take for granted.

So what will Microsoft do about Windows/XP?

The people at Microsoft are pretty canny and I don’t think they will want to risk the huge user base still on XP gradually drifting onto non-Microsoft browsers.  They might get the idea that there are other areas where Microsoft products aren’t the only option.

Internet Explorer 8.5?

My theory is that we will see a new version of IE8, perhaps they will call it IE8.5, which will incorporate a lot of the features from IE9 and will run on older versions of Windows.   Although Internet Explorer version 8.5 will never be as fast or as secure as IE9 it could use the same techology to render webpages and so be a good interim step.  It could be distributed through Windows Update (as IE8 was) and so would keep the average Windows/XP user on a Microsoft Browser until they are ready to upgrade to Windows 7.

Of course this is just my theory and I’m sure Microsoft won’t be announcing any such move any time soon, they would much rather that everbody bought Windows 7.  But they didn’t get the market share they have by ignoring most of their customers.  Maybe this time next year I will be able to say ” I told you so”.

Fake Anti-Virus Windows

Recently we have had two cases of PCs (both running Windows XP and Internet Explorer) being infected by “drive by”  malware.   The user is surfing normally and comes across an innocent looking website, then suddenly up pops a virus warning, apparently from their own anti-virus software.  These messages are pretty scary and quite persistent, the correct response is to close the window (by clicking on the cross at the top right rather than by clicking within the window) and leave that website but if you aren’t sure you can easily end up allowing the site to install it’s “anti-virus software” on your computer.

Once the infected website has installed it’s payload (usually what is known as a trojan, from the Trojan Horse) on  your computer you have a big problem, it will pop up “anti-virus” windows all over the place and make web browsing and email impossible.  And, it will usually disable your own anti-virus software and make it very difficult to install any more.

Anti-Malware

The solution lies with the marvellous people at Malwarebytes.org, they offer a free download which, so far, has solved the problem for me.  The  paid version is well worth looking at too, it isn’t expensive and their work is definitely worth supporting.

Now if you have been very wise you will only have been using a limited account for your browsing rather than an account with administrator privileges; you can just login as an administrator and download the software you need.  Sadly some software doesn’t work that well without administrator privileges and most people set themselves as administrators to avoid hassle.  In this case it is likely that the whole computer is inaccessible and you will need to call on a friend so you can download the necessary software to a USB memory stick.

Removing the fake Anti-Virus Trojan

1. Visit the  Malwarebytes.org website and download their anti-malware product to a memory stick.
2. Boot the infected computer in safe mode (you can usually get this option by pressing F8 while Windows is starting up).
3. Insert the memory stick and run the anti-malware installation program
4. Use the anti-malware program to do a complete scan of the computer.  In safe mode you won’t be able to access the internet to update the malware signatures first but I found that the signatures were only a couple of weeks old anyway.
5. Hopefully the anti-malware program will find one or more offensive programs, use the program to remove them then reboot your computer, this time normally rather than in safe mode.
6. Now run the anti-malware program again, update the definitions from the internet and do another full scan.   Malware is a fast moving field and it is quite likely you will find more with a second scan.
7. Reboot again and all should be well.

How to stop malware infections in the future

Make sure your computer is fully updated with the latest updates to Windows and to your other software packages.    Vendors are pretty quick to release security patches; use them.

Install and use another browser;   our current favourite is Google Chrome, the design of Chrome makes it very difficult for Malware to affect anything outside it’s own browser window.  Microsoft try hard with Internet Explorer but even the latest versions are nothing like Chrome for security and of course they also provide the biggest target for Malware authors.

Installing Chrome for all users on your computer

By default when you install Chrome it will only install it for the current user, this is a nuisance if you want to get the whole family using the safer (and faster) browser.  The answer is to  download Chrome Pack , this offers you a whole raft of goodies from Google some of which you may fancy, but if you only want Google Chrome just untick all the other boxes.

Part of keeping your site secure is keeping the software up to date, just like you do with your own computer (I hope).  There is a constant battle going on between nice people improving and fixing software and nasty people trying to find new holes which they can exploit for their own gain.  The nice people are working for your benefit so take advantage of their labours and use the upgrades they provide.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress Blog, like this one, then you need to be aware of a new attack.   Take  a look at Lorelle on WordPress for details.  If you haven’t upgraded to WordPress 2.8.4 then your blog is vulnerable to this attack.

We have already upgraded all the blogs we host, we keep an eye on software upgrades as a matter of course.  WordPress is very easy to keep up to date, some other packages require a lot more work, but we will always apply security fixes to any package we host.

No system is 100% secure but by keeping up to date you encourage those nasty people to look for easier targets.

And then there is Internet Explorer 6! The bane of any web designer’s life.  Getting IE6 to behave the same way as more modern browsers can be a real pain.  If a site works in any more modern browser it will probably be pretty good in all the others.  Anything that works in Firefox will almost certainly work  prettywll in Chrome, Safari and Opera and although IE7 and IE8 are not as good at complying with the standards they aren’t too difficult to work with.

IE6 Market Share overtakes IE7!

The problem is that IE6 is still installed on millions of machines around the world.   In fact I just checked out browser versions on the excellent marketshare website and discovered that IE6 has regained its position as the most popular browser in the world with over 25% of the market.  This is largely due to the advent of IE8, many people are starting to migrate from IE7 to IE8 which means that the market share of the newer browsers is being split.  If you combine the shares of IE7 & IE8 it adds up to more than 36%.

I guess that most people who have made the move to IE7 will be happy enough to let Microsoft upgrade them to IE8 so eventually IE7 will fade away as earlier versions like IE4 & IE5 have.  But IE6 is a bigger problem, it was the biggest browser for a  long time early on in the development of a lot of corporate systems, and it still works just as well as it ever did.
If you are running a corporate intranet the substantial cost of  upgrading hundreds or thousands of PCs  to a newer browser and retesting all your internal systems to make sure they still work properly is not matched by any real benefit.  It isn’t broken so don’t  fix it.

This means that while a corporation may have a lovely modern website for its external customers to use, it may only have IE6 installed for its own staff, that is the browser that has been tested against their internal systems.  But this means that when those staff do a bit of surfing in their lunch hour they are still using IE6 to look at everyone else’s websites.

IE6 for Ever

I can’t see this situation changing any time in the next few years, IE6 will continue its slow decline and new websites will have to contine to support it.  This support comes at a cost, extra testing, extra coding and of course a whole bunch of lovely new features like CSS2 & CSS3 which make building good websites much easier but which IE6 just doesn’t know about.

So much as I loathe IE6 I continue to use it every day for testing.   If your site doesn’t work properly with IE6 you could be losing 25% of the customers that have already made the effort to find your site.  That is like kicking out 25% of the customers in your shop because you don’t like the way they talk.  Not a good way to run a business.

That was more than a decade ago now and I have used AVG (both free and paid editions) on several machines since, and I have recommended it to many friends and colleagues.  But no more; AVG (or specifically the AVG Toolbar) has become the malware that it is supposed to be protecting me from.

Malware, short for malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent.

Now I know that the AVG toolbar isn’t designed to damage my computer but you have to be pretty alert to stop it inflitrating your browser  and making it behave the way AVG wants rather than the way you want.  When you install AVG it will install the toolbar AND make Yahoo your default search engine unless you deselect the appropriate boxes on a fairly cluttered screen, this is annoying but sadly not uncommon, Java tries to install the Yahoo toolbar  every time it installs an update.

Now this is annoying enough but at least you can hide the AVG toolbar using the View/Toolbars option in your browser.  But No!  AVG will reinstate itself after a week, you have to use the AVG options (on the AVG toolbar) to stop it coming back every week.

Another, even more annoying, feature is that AVG will set and keep Yahoo as the search provider for your browser.  Now most modern browsers let you set a default search provider but also select from a list for specific searches.  I use Google as my default provider but I have about 8 others which I use from time to time, including Yahoo.  What AVG does is set Yahoo as the default search provider, and also make it impossible to change to any other search engine.

To change these unacceptable behaviours you have to change the Advanced Options for the AVG toolbar.  To do this you need to be displaying it, then select the drop down list just to the right of the AVG logo on the left (before the Yahoo search box).

Then select the Advanced Options tab and you will see a whole list of options, all of which should be deselected.  You can then save the changes, go to the View/Toolbars option for your browser and hide the AVG toobar for ever (or until a future update undoes  your work).

I have chosen to uninstall AVG altogether and install new anti-virus software from a (so far) better behaved provider.  I will be installing the free version of Avira anti-virus.  I have been using Avira for a few months now on one of my PCs and it seems very good;  lean, quick and well behaved,  just what AVG used to be.  The free edition will nag you briefly to upgrade once per day which I think is fair enough, it is certainly worth paying for and it isn’t expensive.

I presume that Yahoo (which I think is a good search engine) has paid Grisoft (AVG) to include these features in their software.  I hope they have paid them enough to compensate them for the customers they will lose because of it.  They won’t lose much when  I uninstall AVG free from my family PC, but I won’t be renewing the paid subscription for my work PCs either.

In the first case I found that PC tools was just converting a dollar price straight to pounds, so a product price of $29.95  became £29.95 for British buyers.  At the time the exchange rate was nearly 2 dollars to the pound so PC tools was asking British customers to pay nearly twice as much as US customers.

The sites that do this generally use your IP address to determine which country you are coming from.   Fortunately there are a number of free proxy servers available, like proxify or freeproxyserver.net which allow you to mask your real IP address.   Doing this means that the website thinks you come from the country where the proxy server is hosted rather than your own country.

But there is a catch of course, both of these proxy servers have US IP addresses, so the website you are visiting will think that you are in the USA too.  To get around this you can visit Public Proxy Servers to find lists of servers in different countries.  It is interesting to try a few different countries to see what affect it has on the website you are visiting.

I use a nice little Firefox addon called Flagfox which displays a little flag in the address bar showing you which country the server is located in. Of course the location of the server isn’t always significant, all my websites are for UK businesses but they are hosted in the USA because I use Hostgator as my hosting provider.  But for this purpose it can be useful.

I was looking at Macrium Reflect disk imaging software and noticed that the price displayed was £19.99, not a bad price but I wondered what other people would be charged.  If you come from the USA they charge $39.99 or from Germany €29.99.  I’m sure that when Macrium (who seem to be  UK based but whose server is in Germany)  set these prices they made sense but in a world of rapidly changing exchange rates they just can’t keep up.   In this case the pound has plunged far enough to make any other currency look quite expensive (at least at the time of writing  in Feb 2009).

The lesson, as always is Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware!  But at least we have the tools available to check out the options in just a few minutes without moving from our desks, isn’t the internet a wonderful invention?

But to keep cotsweb.com going I needed to be able to check emails, browse the web and potentially to update websites while we were away.  I can’t expect my clients to wait for weeks until I return, if their site is broken it needs to be fixed now.

I could have taken a laptop but I didn’t particularly want to be lugging hardware around the world, it was supposed to be a holiday not a business trip.  Also we were mostly staying with family who all have PCs but who didn’t necessarily have Wifi or even routers.  I could have used their PCs with webmail to check emails but they don’t have all the web development software I would need to fix any problems.

I found the answer in portable apps which gave me a whole host of applications which could be carried on a USB memory stick.  The applications are mostly open source  but as I use the same applications from day to day that didn’t bother me at all.

First of all I tried using the suite but I found that this didn’t necessarily include the latest versions of the software so I downloaded the applications I wanted separately instead.  I could fit far more than I needed, including loads of data, on my 8GB memory stick so I could take applications for any occasion.

To use the applications all you have to do is plug the USB stick into a USB port on a handy computer.  Usually the stick would autoplay and you would be offered a menu which included starting the portable apps application, otherwise you have to use explorer to find the program on the memory stick and double-click.  Then you can select which of the loaded applications you want to run.

It is important to test the applications (I had to reinstall one of them) and to set them up with your own data before you hit the road but this didn’t take too long.  I was able to set up Thunderbird with all our different email addresses so I could check all our emails on the road.  We use IMAP for all our various email addresses so all our emails past and present are accessible on whichever computer we happen to be using.

In the end nothing went wrong, I didn’t actually need to run a webserver, edit an image, edit a program or change a website but it was nice to know that I could do it if I needed to.

I should point out that you need a  Windows PC to run this application but most of the software (being open source) will run across a variety of platforms so you can take you familiar applications with you.  And they are working on a portable linux operating system! That would be very cool.  You can already get a portable version of Mac OS7.