This is topic Computer Tech Support in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.


To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=000553

Posted by Michael Gonzalez (Member # 593) on 11-26-2001, 10:40 PM:
 
Here is a funny site about tech support callers...
http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/


 


Posted by Michael Gonzalez (Member # 593) on 11-26-2001, 10:43 PM:
 
Oops. I meant to post this in the Film Yak Section. Sorry
 
Posted by Michael Brown (Member # 890) on 02-06-2002, 07:34 AM:
 
I like this:

quote:

I actually had this emailed to me once:


Help! I can't find your email address. What is it?



 
Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 02-06-2002, 09:49 AM:
 
quote:
Help! I can't find your email address. What is it?

I've had times when I've used Microsoft Outlook to read email and have wanted to respond from the UNIX machine instead of the PC, so I'd need to get the person's email address. Simple, right? Microsoft Outlook doesn't seem to have a way to see the actual mail header information that you see on a UNIX box. Usually, the actual email address will be in parentheses or brackets to the right of the person's name, but sometimes it isn't, and in that case, I don't know the magic clicks to get the email address. It seems to happen when I get an email message from someone within my organization. Here is an example:

From: Melinda Perez

Usually, when mail comes from outside, it says

From: Nathan Howard (howardn@somewhere.com)

It was really annoying once when I wanted to reply to a message by writing a new message and sending it fron the UNIX machine and never could figure out the right option to see the real email address, so I just gave up and responded from Outlook.

I can see that this scenario of responding to someone to ask them for their email address might not be so silly after all. Just think, If I'm a Ph.D. student in CS and Microsoft makes their product to hide all the real information, think of what non-technical people will do.

I like UNIX/Linux as an operating system much better than Windows, although a lot of the programs I like to use only run under Windows.


------------------
Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site


 


Posted by Jerry Chase (Member # 660) on 02-06-2002, 10:23 AM:
 
Evans, to read that info just use a virus. Outlook and Outlook Express have been exploited more than any other mail program.

FWIW, I have never once used either and have no intention of doing so. I've been using email since the days of the 300 baud modems on the C-64.

 


Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 02-06-2002, 10:34 AM:
 
quote:
Evans, to read that info just use a virus. Outlook and Outlook Express have been exploited more than any other mail program.

Yup. If you send an email to someone and they use Outlook, if you start a line with "begin" and two spaces and something else, it will take the something else and think it's an attachment. A friend told me you could put "begin", two spaces, "something.exe", then on the next line, put the bytes of an executable, and Outlook would run that executable? If so, that's bad.

------------------
Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site
 


Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-06-2002, 11:22 AM:
 
In a plain text message, SMTP defines the character sequence "begin", followed by 2 spaces, as the start of a UUencode attachment. Microsoft has known about this issue with Outlook Express and Outlook 2000 since at least mid-2000, and apparently it still hasn't been "fixed", so evidently it's not considered a serious problem. See their tech bulletin Q265230. (It seems like this behavior would only occur if your or your ISP's email server specifically supports UUencode. UUencode can usually be disabled by the email server administrator but is probably supported by default most of the time.)

On the can't-see-the-sender's-address issue, try right-clicking on the sender's name in the "From:" field at the top of the message (where the email address is missing), and select Properties. It should display the actual address.

------------------
- dave
Avoid the meadow...


 


Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-06-2002, 01:44 PM:
 
As far as I can tell, Internet mail standards RFC2821 and RFC2822 don't address uuencoded binaries at all. uuencode is really just a way of converting binary files to all-uppercase ASCII characters for transmission via email, news, etc.

Since mail servers don't actually interpret the text of email messages, they don't ordinarily care whether a given message contains uuencoded or MIME-encoded files, although a procmail rule could be created to reject incoming mail which meets certain criteria, including, say, containing uuencoded files. At least that's the way it works with sendmail and postfix. I'm not sure about qmail, exim, and others.

As for viewing full headers in Outlook, it is possible, although I don't remember how. It's in the edit menu, I think. Personally, I still read mail in Pine, which I've been using since long before Outlook existed and which continues to work well.

For geek humor, I definitely recommend the Bastard Operator from Hell series: http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html
 


Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-06-2002, 04:11 PM:
 
Re: POP3 clients accessing Microsoft Exchange server, there is an Exchange server config option for POP3 message format: "This page sets the encoding method and character set used when converting Exchange messages for retrieval by POP3 clients. The encoding options include MIME and UUENCODE. Selecting UUENCODE makes available the option to use Binhex with Macintosh clients. The default character set is US ASCII, but you can also choose from many international sets. You can also specify whether Microsoft Exchange rich-text format can be used in POP3 messages".

What this boils down to I think is that Exchange clients typically use rich-text as their default msg format. So rich-text mail passing through an Exchange server may be "diddled with".

Just for grins, I sent a test msg to a Eudora user with the string "begin something" (2 spaces). They did not receive an attachment. I then had the Eudora user send me the same text. Somewhere along the way, 1 of the 2 spaces was eliminated, so what I received is "begin something" with 1 space, and no attachment. This suggests that the sender's mail server diddled with the text and stripped off one of the spaces. If I send the test msg to myself, so the msg passes through only my ISP's mail server, the attachment is created. So it looks like it's Outlook creating the attachment on incoming mail containing that character string intact. Also looks like some mail servers are messing with the content too. ??

------------------
- dave
Avoid the meadow...


 


Posted by Trevor Bailey (Member # 75) on 02-06-2002, 10:12 PM:
 
Jerry,

I had a C-64 with a 110 baud modem. I was blown away when I upgraded to 300 baud!!!

When you look at technology now and think back to the "old" C-64 (or TRS-80 or Apple II or TI 99-4A) it's a little overwhelming. If only relationships among the peoples of the world could advance this quickly.


 






Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classicTM 6.3.1.2