Author Archives: David Pilcher

About David Pilcher

IT engineer, guitarist, singer & wannabee sound engineer, angler, photo nut, website geek and programmer. Currently residing in SW France. Wanting to make a difference to peoples lives! Interests: Alternative food and energy production, reigning in government and the banks.

ISP Changes Mail Retrieval Parameters

I had to solve a problem last month for an old UK client of mine. In 2005 I installed MS Small Business Server 2003 with Exchange Server & set up the MS provided POP3 Connector for retrieving mail from several accounts.

Until last month this functioned perfectly and so I was surprised by the call and from the conversation initially suspected that the exchange server database was corrupted (this had happened before).

When I investigated further I found that this was not the case so a bit perplexed. After several conversations with their person nearest to being their on-site IT support I received a forwarded email from BT Broadband stating that they had upgraded all their business accounts onto a new platform and that they should be contacted if there were any problems. I asked for further details of the upgrade and finally as an aside to the other info about new server address, ports, etc. was informed that retrieval was now through Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Drat! A quick search of Google proved that the MS POP3 Connector was insufficient to the task.

Several hours of Goggling (not a spelling mistake) my eyes were going square after looking through review after review of alternative exchange server add-ins able to accomplish the task.

Eventually I found that:

1. A paid for product was the only ‘safe’ way to go.

2. One which would allow for a trial run ought to be used.

3. It had to tick at least all the same boxes of the now defunct connector with the addition of SSL capability.

4. The price shouldn’t break the bank or be an on-going cost.

In the end POPBeamer was the only performer which I felt confident would be up to the task.

It allowed a 30day trial with no restrictions, the cost is one-off approx £175.

Installation was relatively easy (except for some slight confusion as usual with acronyms – why the hell can’t people spell things out these days?).

So in conclusion it’s worth trying POPBeamer if a similar situation arises with your Exchange Server.

Facebook Foibles

Getting around the set up of  Facebook can be a bit of a chore. Yesterday I was trying to set up an app to send WordPress blog posts to a new Facebook page. When I tried to create the new page I was presented with an error headed ‘Invalid Name’. After several hours punting around Google and Facebook help and finally creating the page manually I found that the problem was to do with capitalisation of the page name, i.e. Facebook insisted on using ‘It’ instead of  ‘IT’ in ‘The English IT Guy’ even though they stipulate that they allow capitalisation of acronyms. Gosh, how long has the world substituted IT for Information Technology?

Outlook, Outlook Express, etc. email not working in France

Webmail users need read no farther.

On arriving in France many people find that their email cannot be sent when using Outlook, Outlook Express and other email clients.  Emails are received as normal but new mail, replies and forwards refuse to move from the outbox.

It’s annoying to say the least. Your email system worked perfectly well before leaving the U.K.

It’s easy to do I know but don’t blame your mail client or your email service provider.

Many people have had their email set up by an IT engineer or it was set up when you initially hooked up with your email service provider so they may not have a clue as to where to look to solve the problem.

And so to the problem. The problem is with Orange who block port 25 (this is the port that your email is normally sent through) to any domain but smtp.orange.fr so that emails have to be sent via the Orange mail server. This is almost the complete opposite practice of most providers who accept any sending domain server address provided that it is sent securely i.e. with a username and password.

The reason for this they say is apparently to reduce spam but is a confusion for those people who do not know about setting up email systems and I would estimate that accounts for about 80% of the population.

The problem can be solved by altering the outgoing mail server setting. In Outlook go to Tools, then click Email Accounts, click View or change existing email accounts, find the email address required then click change. Find the outgoing mail server entry and change it to smtp.orange.fr and then go to More Settings and make sure that the box next to My Outgoing Server (smtp) requires authentication is unticked. Click OK and then Finish.

Outlook Express is Tools, Accounts, Mail, highlight the required account and click Properties. Click Servers and you will see the two settings that need changing on this page.

Don’t know about Eudora or Thunderbird specifically but from experience most people who are using these clients know their way around them.

Hope this helps you.  I’m passing on the knowledge I had to aquire when I came here in January 2012.

Opening Files

Someone the other day said that they could not open a file attachment received in ‘Outlook Express’.

When I looked into it, the person had the ‘Works Word Processor’ installed on his system but the attachment was a Word 2007 or newer document saved in the docx format.

He like many others I’m sure had no idea what to do with this to enable opening. Microsoft have viewing utilities for Word, Excel & Powerpoint 2007. There is also a download to allow users of Office XP (2002) or Office 2003 to enable opening of docx & docm files for these versions in Word, Excel & Powerpoint. Just perform a ?search in Google or your preferred search engine asking how to open the file i.e. ‘how do i open docx files’.