Tech Support

[Betty]

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

Who is hosting your email? Are you using a self-hosted Exchange server or is it a web-based host?

When we had Go Daddy hosting our email, I could easily go the online control panel for Auto Responses and that would respond to every incoming message. Exchange 2003 does not allows that (though I believe that Exchange 2007 does).

We use e-business express using a pop 3 web based account. (not exchange)

[Kevy Baby]

This is just the dumbest ass thing: I did some cleanup work on my Outlook address book, including adding address, phone, fax, etc. I exported the database to a .CSV file and deleted all contacts in my Outlook Address Book (archiving the original file before deleting of course!), did all the work in Excel, re-saved to .CSV, and imported back in to Outlook. It was a great way to make wholesale updates.

However, after I did this, fax numbers kept showing up as email addresses when I was entering addresses in an email. After some digging on the internets, I found this:

Outlook considers fax numbers to be valid e-mail addresses. If you want to be able to send both e-mails and faxes from Outlook, there's no solution to this issue.

There are ways around it (I am just going to add an "F" before the fax number which should prevent it from being thought of as a valid email. But this is just plain silly!

[Alex]

Not necessarily silly but with the general death of fax machines certainly so generally obsolete that they should add a option toggle to control it.

Having fax numbers recognized as the equivalent routing possibility to email addresses was quite useful to me back in my administrative assistant days.

But what I wonder is, this shouldn't be new is it? If you had fax numbers in there before they should have been behaving the same way.

[Kevy Baby]

While Fax is a dying technology, it is far from dead (heck: I had to work with someone recently who was still using DOS). It is silly to have the information in a numeric telephonic field automatically default to an email format without benefit of being able to switch that automatic conversion off. If it were on an option to turn that auto-conversion ON, that would be fine. But not being able to use the field for its intended and labeled purpose is absurd.

I only recently discovered this as I had previously had very few fax numbers entered and had probably never noticed it.

[Stan4dSteph]

Any specific tricks that I should relay to my dad removing a virus/spyware from his laptop? It's Windows Scan. I have this info, but just want to make sure there aren't any special bits that might hide.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Wow, I thought I'd written a response to your post.

If it has been identified as, the info in the link you gave should have done the trick. Did it work?



Now my question. I don't really expect anyone to know the answer to this, it's rather esoteric, but I'm hoping for one of those moments of, 'Oh fvck, while writing it out I realized the key thing I've been missing.' Because this is driving me nuts.

I'm using a python library (_winreg) to read values from the windows registry on Windows 2008 R2. It's a very straight forward thing to do. Basically, open a connection to the registry [e.g. reg=Connect(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE)], then open a connection to a specific key [e.g. key=(reg,'SOFTWARE\\Emulex)]

So, here's what's driving me bonkers.

I am trying to reference a key that's under the HKLM\SOFTWARE key. as in my example above. It won't let me. It says it doesn't exist. But when I look at regedit, it's there. Here's the crazy part. If I look at regedit, I see the following:

HKLM
-SOFTWARE
--ATI Technologies
--Classes
--Clients
--Emulex
--Microsoft
--ODBC
--Policies
--RegisteredApplications
--Tarma Installer
--Wow6432Node

But, if, using the python library I connect to HKLM\\SOFTWARE, list all of the keys that are under it, all I get is:

'Microsoft'
'ODBC'
'Python'
'Classes'
'Clients'
'Policies'

WTF? Why can I only see those 6?! Where the fvck are the other 10??

Also pissing me off is the fact that this works just fine on 6 other systems, including another Windows 2008 R2 system.

And, of course, the one person here that I know could help me is out for Tet until Monday. Grrrrr.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

but I'm hoping for one of those moments of, 'Oh fvck, while writing it out I realized the key thing I've been missing.'

Well, technically the moment happened AFTER I wrote it out, not while, but still applies

[BarTopDancer]

Originally Posted by Stan4dSteph

Any specific tricks that I should relay to my dad removing a virus/spyware from his laptop? It's Windows Scan. I have this info, but just want to make sure there aren't any special bits that might hide.

MalwareBytes. You may need to install it onto a flash drive, rename the .exe from mbam.exe to something else and then run it to get around the virus.

go to start > run > msconfig > start up and make sure that the virus isn't in the menu to run when the machine starts up. Reboot the computer and run malwarebytes. If you have trouble installing it check the start up files.

And use task manager to close the virus windows if they pop up.

[Kevy Baby]

Sorry, but this is about as much of your question that I read before I realized that I had nothing to offer:

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

I'm using a python library (_winreg)...

[Ghoulish Delight]

Like I said, unlikely anyone could have offered much. Even someone who IS familiar with Python and Windows registry might not have been able to do much without seeing the system in front of them.

Although the clue was right there in what I posted. "Wow6432node". Under that was exactly the abbreviated list that the function was returning to me. That's when it dawned on me...Windows 2008 R2 is a 64 bit operating system, and I didn't remember downloading the 64 bit Python package. Which means I must have installed the 32 bit version, so it could only read the 32 bit portions of the registry.

Which I'm sure clears everything right up for you.