Category: Microsoft

When Google Apps Sync for Outlook goes wonky.. here’s the solution

Posted by Martyn Drake – August 29, 2010

I recently gave Google Apps Sync for Outlook a go – in order to determine whether somebody was having problems with Outlook or Google Apps. I ran it with Outlook 2010 and was very impressed with the program indeed. One complaint from the user was that Google Apps Sync creates a new Outlook profile which is not what they wanted. But I can completely understand why Google Apps Sync does this. And it’s not as though it doesn’t migrate the data in the existing Outlook profile – it give you the option to migrate all the data across, and it does the very well.

The problem I had was clearing out Google Apps Sync afterwards. I only use Outlook 2010 for testing purposes for the most part these days (until Microsoft ever decides to get around to implement a sane reply quoting system and one that doesn’t top post to boot) so I ununstalled Google Apps Sync and deleted the profile it had created. I was hoping to then switch the profile back to the default profile called “Outlook” but I couldn’t. Starting Outlook 2010 got me a “Can’t Start Microsoft Outlook” message, and attempting to fire up the Mail (32-bit) control panel application told me that I had no free system resources to do so. Uninstalling Office 2010, rebooting, re-installing, and tinkering with Windows registry would not get it working again.

Until I saw this Help Article on the Google Help Forums.

The instructions given by Jeffrey Roberson were spot on:

* Shutdown the computer and restart in safe mode
* Login as the user with the problem
* Launch the Mail control panel by hitting Win-R and typing in: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\MLCFG32.CPL”
* Delete all of the profile configuration so that it is blank
* Reboot
* Launch the Mail control panel as normal and setup the profile again.
* Launch Outlook.

(Note for Windows 7 64-bit users, the path to the control panel is has the (x86) in Program Files)

I don’t believe this is entirely Google’s fault, but rather mostly Microsoft’s for making data recovery a complete pain in the arse. No application should have to force you to go into Safe Mode of your operating system to fix this.

Email client design: The basics, and why Outlook 2010 fails miserably..

Posted by Martyn Drake – June 28, 2010

I am an email client snob. I demand that my email client gives me the following:

1) Proper reply header/attribution control: no top posting, selective quoting, auto/manual rewrapping of long lines in quoted text if required.

2) Word wrap. While format=flowed is nice, I want to see nicely formatted paragraphs (

3) Easy enable/disable of HTML messages (plain-text part higher display priority to those clients that love sending multi-part HTML/plain text), reply to HTML as plain text only.

Three rules that keep me happy. And yet, both Outlook 2010 and Thunderbird fail on a number of levels. Let’s start with Outlook 2010. This is a popular email/calendaring/groupware client that’s been around since the stone age, and despite that, Microsoft have still completely failed to understand Internet standards and has failed to listen to customers regarding some of the most basic functionality of text transmission.

For starters, Outlook 2010 still only top posts. That is, it’s reply header consists of at least five separate lines before you get to the quoted message. There is absolutely no way (without having to delve into Macros, and those that I’ve come across have been woefully inadequate) to adjust that reply header. You could switch on the > quote prefix within the Reply Settings section of Outlook’s options, but you still have to do significant manual trimming to get it anywhere half decent. This is WRONG. People have been (rightly) bitching to Microsoft for years about this, and they still don’t listen/can’t get it right. I’d really like to hear from Microsoft why they think their version is better and why they don’t offer their customers a custom reply header system. IRONICALLY, however, their Mac Entourage email client gets it right. Single line reply header and decent quoting system. Sadly, Entourage is to become Outlook on the Mac, and I fear that it’ll adopt it’s Windows brain-dead reply system.

Outlook 2010 still seems to send out emails with extremely long lines that show up in Thunderbird as hideous unwrapped single lines. There’s a problem somewhere. Is Outlook actually sending out messages properly? Is Thunderbird incorrectly interpreting Outlook’s mess? I’ve not looked deep enough yet, but I suspect blame can be had on both sides on this one. Thunderbird is incapable of automatically wrapping quoted long lines unless you hit the Rewrap key (CTRL-R on a PC, CMD-R on a Mac). There should be an option (or Thunderbird extension) that does this automatically. I can’t tell you what an absolute pain in the arse it is having to CTRL-R each and every time messages from Outlook and other equally brain-dead email clients.

And while the internet is big enough to support HTML in email transmission, it still can be absolutely fugly having receiving email from somebody whose gone overboard on stationery making it bloody difficult to read anything they’re written. Or massive HUGE logos displayed in the signatures of email, courtesy of HTML tags. Outlook 2010 is still stupid in that if you hit reply to an HTML email, it’ll use HTML/rich-text text for your reply. I can understand WHY this is so, but nonetheless I don’t want to be forced into it. If there is an option to disable this, I have yet to find it, or make it work.

Right now, the only true email client I like is Apple Mail. It does everything I want without fuss. It’s not perfect by any means, but it works marginally better than Outlook and Thunderbird put together. If Apple would consider making this available for PCs (as it has with Safari and iTunes), I’d be a very happy man. Sadly I’m not going to go out and buy another Mac for the home simply because of Apple Mail.

In the mean time, I’ll attempt to pester Microsoft to add better reply functions to it’s email client. Outlook 2010 is generally a far superior product to it’s predecessors (as is Thunderbird 3), but at it’s heart – it’s text handling/reply capabilities – it’s still stuck in the late 1990s.

Training Day: Windows 2008 Certification – here I come!

Posted by Martyn Drake – June 25, 2010

Got the first rung of obtaining the first, I hope, in the whole batch of Microsoft related certification doodads. I’m hoping, after that, to then do LPI exams, then head into the MySQL DB/PostgresQL DB field. That’ll take YEARS (and will keep me out of mischief). But there is an increasing demand for Windows, and I need to understand why. This is a good way of doing so.


Click to enlarge

Back to Redmond: IIS 7 isn’t really THAT bad..

Posted by Martyn Drake – May 7, 2010

.. but it can still be a bit of a pig in places.

What I really like is that Microsoft have moved over to a much more file-based configuration with each web site having it’s own configuration file. Additionally, Microsoft are releasing (separately mind) some additional utilities via their official iis.net web site which expand the usefulness of IIS enormously.

When setting myself back up on 2008 Web Edition (this time around – I was using 2008 Standard R2 previously which ran IIS 7.5 – 2008 runs version 7.0) there was a rather annoying problem with MySQL. With PHP 5.3.2 installed (non-thread safe as FastCGI as recommended) I found it wouldn’t talk to MySQL despite MySQL being installed and available just fine through the command line. Turns out there is some kind of issue with IPv6 which required me to comment out this line in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts:

127.0.0.1 localhost
#::1 localhost

Once that was done, MySQL and PHP played happily with each other. I’ve consequently gone on to move this blog over to Windows 2008, set-up Wincache Extension for PHP which provides caching acceleration for PHP scripts, and supports WordPress too. I’ve got URL Rewrite blocking referrer spam and Dynamic IP Restrictions providing some mitigation against DoSers.

What I’d really like is for Microsoft to incorporate a better interface for bulk adding IP addresses. Useful if you want to block entire networks that span multiple providers (corporations, governments, etc. etc.). While you can add IP restrictions through the configuration file, it’s syntax is somewhat a pain in the arse and the IIS manager hasn’t been able to parse my attempts thus far.

If we can fix the log files always being stuck in GMT, I’m really rather happy with IIS at the moment. It’s a bit of learning curve, but I think it’ll pay off.

Anti-virus vendors: how about an affordable AV product for Windows Server?

Posted by Martyn Drake – April 23, 2010

Does anybody out there do a free or CHEAP anti-virus product for Windows 2008 server (R2 or otherwise)? The main reason is that everything I’ve seen is extraordinarily expensive and yet you can buy a Windows 2008 server VPS for as little as £12 a month. Ideal for people like me who are exploring, learning and ultimately training on these things and using them as simple web servers, email servers, file servers or whatever for personal use. Just because somebody is running a Windows server doesn’t necessarily mean that (a) it’s on dedicated server or (b) they’re a business with oodles of money to spend on software. I suppose most people associate Windows with “I’ve got lots of money” which is immensely annoying and the wrong attitude to have against this OS.

The opposite could be said of Linux. It’s a free operating system so everything has to be free. But there are some very good commercial products for Linux (some expensive, most reasonably priced) and strikes a good balance between the goodness of ‘free’ and that of commercialisation. But Windows, Windows is seen as a license to print money. That’s not to say there isn’t good ‘free’ software for Windows, but it’s nowhere near as plentiful than on Linux.

What I was actually thinking of is some form of IIS 7 AV/firewall that can determine potential worms hitting the server and temporary or permanently block the IPs that are sending them. And while I’m on the subject of firewalls, why the bloody hell has Microsoft made it almost impossible to import a flatfile list of IP ranges in CIDR format to add to the Windows Firewall? Useful for blocking or allowing large number of IPs, etc. There must be a command line capability for doing this? If there is, I’ve not found it yet.

Windows 0 – Linux 1 on the affordable AV front

IIS 7.5 fun: blogging made difficult by Microsoft

Posted by Martyn Drake – April 15, 2010

For the past 24 hours or so, I’ve been tinkering with Windows 2008 R2 (64-bit). This very blog you’re reading is now hosted on it. And boy, it required a steep learning curve when getting the various components to work (PHP 5.3, MySQL 5.1, ActiveState Perl, IIS including URL rewriting, ISAPI and FastCGI configuration, SMTP configuration (which I still need to figure out – I’m currently using the free 5 user MDaemon product for outgoing mail) and everything else in-between).

Generally I like Windows 2008 R2 a lot. Microsoft have put an enormous amount of effort into making things a bit easier from the mind-boggling array of confusion that was Windows 2003. There are still some issues with getting applications working under 64-bit (thankfully you can specify application pools to use 32-bit mode instead) and was utterly bamboozled with ActiveState’s Perl for x64 servers (which was offered as a ZIP download with batch file installer and apparently no DLL provided for ISAPI use within IIS – later I found out there is an MSI installer). I installed the 32-bit MSI installer instead. Now Awstats is running just fine.

This is all part of my efforts to get to grips with Windows 2008 sufficiently to pass Microsoft’s exams. I will need to persuade work to buy me lots of relatively expensive books to accompany this, but I feel I’m making reasonable progress into the still horrendously overcomplicated world of Microsoft.