Generally, I have been happy with the service (especially when you consider the Standard Edition is free and isn’t a noticeably inferior product to the Premium Edition) although I do acknowledge it has a few quirks, not to mention horrendous support from Google should you require assistance.  Of course aside from push email support via my Android handset, the Google Apps service also includes plain and simple IMAP support; it’s here that I encountered one of the quirks.

Ever since configuring the account on my machine, whenever sending an email using Outlook two copies of the mail appear shortly after in my Gmail sent items folder (although only one copy is actually sent to the recipient).  Now this may not seem such a big deal but it has a couple of issues; firstly over time it will fill up my quota a lot quicker, perhaps not a major issue for most people but if let’s say you are sending a 1Mb file attachment, you’re going to be using 2Mb of space.  Secondly, perhaps more importantly is that when you use the Gmail web client instead of Outlook, it’s going to really mess up your conversation thread as there will be 2 copies which can be a little confusing.

So how do you solve getting two copies of sent mails while using IMAP in Outlook?

It’s important first to understand why the two copies appear and not just accept that they do.  When you send an email through Outlook, Outlook saves a copy of the sent mail and transmits it to the server (in this case smtp.gmail.com).  When the email is sent from the server to its destination, Google save another copy of the sent mail automatically which is then of course – as you’re using an IMAP connection – synced back to your machine hence the two copies.

Of course Google should be smart enough to know that the mail is being sent from a dedicated client such as Outlook and check to see if a copy has already been saved before saving it again, but alas not.  So the solution is to change where Outlook saves its local copy of the sent mail; it’s not an ideal situation but it does stop your Gmail folder from becoming full of duplicates!

To make the change, go to Tools>Account Settings>Email and select the email account in question and then Change.  This will open a window titled Change Email Account.  Click the More Settings option at the bottom.

Click the Folders tab which will enable you to choose where to store a copy of all outgoing messages (remembering that Google is going to automatically store one for you in your Gmail sent items) and change the default choice to Save sent mail in the Outlook Sent Items Folder, this will save the duplicated copy in a local unused folder instead which of course can be cleaned up when required.

The update in question is KB976002 – Microsoft Browser Choice Screen Update for EEA Users of Windows 7.

Once downloaded and applied, the update adds an icon to your desktop (appropriately named Browser Choice) which when clicked, opens up Internet Explorer and continues to offer you a selection of alternative browsers for you to take a look at or download (the download links and appropriate links to the relevant vendor sites for information are included for convenience).  The current options are:

• Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Safari
• Opera
• Sleipnir
• Avant
• K-Meleon
• GreenBrowser
• FlashPeak
• Flock
• Maxthon

By clicking the Browser Choice icon and running through the options, you’ll notice that Internet Explorer is automatically unpinned from the taskbar but that it is not uninstalled (of course Internet Explorer forms an integral part of the OS and can never be fully uninstalled), although it is possible to further remove all reference to it by un-checking the Internet Explorer option by going to Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off.

I think the inclusion of this choice is a step in the right direction but I would have liked to have seen it taken a step further.  It would have been great to have seen an option to not only choose additional browsers, but the ability to define your default browser and remove reference to Internet Explorer (if that’s what you choose to do of course) all in one place.

Personally I still use Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome 4 so this update has not changed anything for me but I am sure that it will have an impact on the browser trends within Europe over the coming years as more and more people come to realise that they have a choice; perhaps then Microsoft will start developing further releases of Internet Explorer to the same set of standards as other vendors in the hope that its popularity increases once again.

Discuss.

After numerous hours spent trying various options and configurations of WINE I’m still unable to get it working.  Sure, I can get it to install but it won’t run so I can’t really call it a success.  I’ll have some time over the Christmas break so will keep trying and hopefully will have a stable solution soon; these things have a habit of ‘falling into place’ and the answer is usually staring me in the face!

My original post showing how to install Office 2007 can be found here – http://www.mikesouthby.co.uk/2009/11/ubuntu-9-10-installing-microsoft-office-2007

Being that I haven’t done much over the past few weeks I haven’t really got much to talk about, but thought I’d share some interesting facts I read last week in one of the journals I subscribe to.  The article centred on password security, something close to my heart being as I act as sysadmin for various businesses.  The article detailed some recent results which had been conducted by the Microsoft Malware Protection Centre, some of them were quite shocking actually considering the world in which we live in today and the precautions we ‘should’ be taking as sysadmins.

Microsoft essentially configured a system and invited automated attacks so that they could monitor the attacks and try to better understand the methods used.  As you will be able to see in the results, the length of the passwords is quite interesting, mainly because the average length according to the data collected is 8 characters and that’s very close to the length of the passwords that many people use for their internet accounts.

So without further ado, here are the findings.

The survey found that the longest username used was 15 characters; the longest password was 29 characters.  The average username length found in the survey was 6 characters and the average password length was 8 characters.

Here is a top 10 list with the most common user names used in the automated attacks, the number in brackets is the amount of instances found:

1. Administrator (136971)
2. Administrateur (107670)
3. admin (8043)
4. andrew (5570)
5. dave (4569)
6. steve (4569)
7. tsinternetuser (4566)
8. tsinternetusers (4566)
9. paul (4276)
10. adam (3287)

And a similar list for passwords:

1. password (1188)
2. 123456 (1137)
3. #!comment: (248)
4. changeme (172)
5. F**kyou [edited] (170)
6. abc123 (155)
7. peter (154)
8. Michael (152)
9. andrew (151)
10. matthew (151)

So what does all this mean?  Well, most importantly it says that as sysadmins we should all have strict password policies in place, users should take good care of what usernames and passwords are being chosen.  If the account has no limit on the number of login attempts (if not, why not?), then knowing the username is giving the attacker a significant head start in breaching your system.  It’s amazing how many systems I have come across that still use ‘administrator’ as a username, looking at the top 10 list of usernames used in automated attacks, I’m amazed why sysadmins do nothing about this obvious flaw in their design.  I can’t stress enough, username and password combinations should not be chosen lightly.

Usually when an end-user chooses a password, they choose something that is either easy to remember or easy to type, but we must all remember that for now at least, those passwords are also most commonly used for authentication on the internet so they really do need to be strong.

The three basic things to remember when creating a strong password are the following:

• Use a combination of letters, numbers and special characters.  Also, remember that some dictionaries have an ‘l33t’ mode, which allows common letter/number to special character substitutions (like changing a-@, 1-1, o-0 and s-$ for example password-p@$$w0rd).  Therefore they must be mixed in different ways so that they are not predictable.
• Use a combination of lower and upper case letters.
• Make it lengthy.  A longer password does not necessarily mean it will be stronger but it will help in a lot of cases.
• Random rules!

A good friend of mine has developed a simple password generating engine which is available freely by visiting http://www.random-password.net.  To check if your passwords are strong, Microsoft has a password checker which is available here.

The moral of the story is to choose the password policy wisely.  Act now, tomorrow may be too late.  I can’t stress the importance of password policies enough, I suggest all sysadmins who may stumble across this post revisit theirs as a priority.