Also, it’s much easier for an Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007 box to cohabitate on a network and still allow ActiveSync and OWA access than doing the same with Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003 (which requires a separate Exchange 2007 CAS, or Client Access Server). Granted, making it work with the ISA firewall was a little tricky, but with a little experimentation it went well and is working fully. So well in fact, that only my Mac user and my Blackberry user are on the old 2007 box now until I stuff is compatible (in the Blackberry case) and I can babysit the migration (in the Mac user’s case, with Entourage–Snow Leopard isn’t an option on our PowerPC hardware). Those will come soon enough. But frankly with Google for the help docs and processes (there’s a lot of good information directly from Microsoft out there already!), the process only required two remote nights working until 3:30am, and some time during one day to work out the ISA stuff to keep ActiveSync and OWA working.

I’m not going to elaborate on the entire installation process here. Microsoft documents it well, it requires installing Exchange 2010 on a new server (no in-place upgrades) to do the transition (that’s how I prefer it anyway, and with virtualization that’s easy!). But it was mostly smooth, similar to 2007 in many ways (different enough to require some reading but familiar enough it was much easier to pick up than 2007 was from 2003). And, as I discovered this morning, for Outlook 2003 clients to connect, you should also run this in the Exchange PowerShell console:

Set-RpcClientAccess -Server [servername] -EncryptionRequired $false

Otherwise, Outlook 2003 will stare at you (or, rather, the user) blankly and not connect (at least if you have internal encryption to Exchange disabled, which I do–I didn’t test enabling it).

Do I recommend going with 2010 now? Yes, as long as stuff you use like Blackberry and Mac supports it or you’re prepared to learn how to make it work. Also, your “now” may not be the day of General Availability depending on the size of your environment and current needs and plans :-)

Any thoughts? Do you think I should have gone with Exchange 2010 the week it was released? I think it’s a reasonably well proven product even though I didn’t participate in the testing myself like I did with Windows 7. Are you migrating soon? (Microsoft likes to call moving from one version to another of the same software a “transition.” I like the term “migration” better, but whatever. They reserve that for when you “migrate” from one of their competitors. I don’t care :-)

However, there is a flag you can set on a moderated object that will allow a moderator for a “parent” group to moderate an email once regardless if subgroups also require modification. Think a moderated all-staff list that contains a moderated group for a specific department; by default both the all-staff moderator and the department list moderator would have to approve a message to all-staff before the department recipients would receive it. If you’d rather have some groups like all-staff set so whoever moderates a message to that group auto-approves any subgroups as well (this is precisely why I wanted it, although we don’t have moderated subgroups yet), that’s why they added the flag called “BypassNestedModerationEnabled” which you can set to true with PowerShell.

The problem is, the few places that talk about that flag online call it a completely different name! Sure you can do “get-help Set-DistributionGroup -full” to see all the options (there are many) or you can find the same help online, but it’s not easy to track down if you’re looking for the wrong setting name! The correct syntax to enable this moderation bypass on a group (from within the Exchange PowerShell console) is:

Set-DistributionGroup -Identity "[group name]" -BypassNestedModerationEnabled $true

However the Exchange Team’s official blog says in it’s moderation post, in the FAQ section where it mentions nested approvals (near the end of the post), “If you set the BypassModerationEnabled flag to $true on the parent group, any messages sent to that group will bypass moderation by child groups.” Close, but it’s actually the BypassNestedModeration flag. If you do some searching, you’ll find a TechNet article called Understanding Moderated Transport which, again near the end in the Handling Multiple Moderated Recipients section, says, “To do this, you set the AutoApproveNestedDLEnabled parameter of the moderated distribution group to $true.” Which provides an even farther-off version of the same thing! At least with the correct version, you can more easily look it up in the TechNet Set-DistributionGroup topic where is is correct!

It’s likely the incorrect articles were both correct at the time they were written, during beta and release candidate cycles of Exchange 2010, with the final flag name being changed in the generally available version that came out this past Monday. I don’t know for sure as the GA version is all I’ve run, but it seems a likely explanation given that the articles are almost a month (the TechNet one) and five months (the Exchange Team blog) old. But apparently I’m the first person to write about it outside of them (that Google knows about).

Or, you should be able to create a new policy with this checked, and apply it to each user’s mailbox directly (Recipient Configuration->Mailbox->right-click user, Properties->Mailbox Features->Exchange ActiveSync->Properties and then select a profile, and make sure ActiveSync is Enabled). Regardless, once Exchange is configured correctly, it appears that you need VersaMail 4.0.1 in order to connect to ActiveSync properly with Exchange 2007, and even on the Centro (where it may have already been installed), reinstalling it with this method fixed my problem. The update is supposed to be for the Centro, but I read several forum posts I found via Google that said it worked on the Treo 755p just fine (one had VersaMail 3.5.5 installed, the other had 3.5.4 installed), and it did for me. YMMV, don’t blame me for problems!

1. Open Email (VersaMail) on the phone and add a secondary account if only one exists (a dummy POP3 account is fine, just enough fake info that the account will be created, it doesn’t need to be checked but you can’t delete an ActiveSync account if it’s the only account).
2. Delete the Exchange ActiveSync account that is not working, leave the POP account in place but no need to verify/check it (it’s just a dummy account).
3. Tap the Home button to return to the phone’s Home Screen.
4. Go to http://ws.palm.com/mypalm/MyPalmGenericUser/ControllerGeneric.jsp?&action=showbonus&productName=CENTRO690P
5. Click Learn More under Palm VersaMail (Not VersaMail Personal Edition), link: here
6. On Treo device, open Web browser, type this URL into address bar: http://dl.svs.palm.com/bonus/VM40_Installer_Stan.prc (capitalization matters)
7. Hit Yes to confirm the download.
8. Hit Yes to download to Device.
9. Hit Save and Open.
10. Wait for file to download, it’s 1.21MB.
11. Hit Yes to accept the .prc file into Applications.
12. Will return to Home screen with new application icon called Install Email selected. Run it.
13. Tap the Update Now button on the screen that pops up titled “VersaMail 4.0”
14. Hit Accept to accept the license.
15. Wait for installation to complete; the phone will restart automatically.
16. Re-add the “Outlook (EAS)” Exchange account to the Email (VersaMail) application. Make sure to use “domain\user” format for the username field.

Make sure to hit Test and make sure it’s successful, then continue with the initial sync. This all assumes that you have a certificate installed on your Exchange 2007 server that functions properly with Palm OS devices; e.g. that they trust the certificate root and the certificate is not in the incorrect format and it doesn’t have SANs (Subject Alternative Names) like a UCC cert. But I covered this, and why I’m using RapidSSLOnline.com, in my last post, Palm Centro and GoDaddy SSL Certificates: Fixed! so you can read more about the server side there.

My Palm devices are all on the Sprint network, I don’t know if the same steps apply for Verizon, AT&T, or other providers, although it’s likely they would.

It worked for me! That’s why I’m writing it out here so I remember how to do it when someone else has issues, but I hope it helps others as well. I know I saw a lot of forum posts discussing Palm and ActiveSync (and I’ve run into plenty of issues myself in the past that I’ve had to deal with). Frankly, I will be very happy when PalmOS devices are dead…the Palm Pre is a good replacement, and the iPhone is an even better one. Windows Mobile I haven’t used enough to have an opinion on (it will likely stay that way), and BlackBerry I’ve only used enough to know that the pain of the last two weeks trying to solve a BlackBerry issue that mightbe solved now and might not be, isn’t worth it, but if you have to support it, the features are there if you can get them to work. But my BlackBerry and BlackBerry Professional Server woes are for another post, if I find time to write it :-)

These are some text messaging services that may be useful:

• http://texthub.com/ (another church where I know the Church IT guy, I forget which one, is using this)
• http://www.jarbyco.com/ (Granger Community Church has used this, as have a few others)
• http://www.textmarks.com/ (Granger is using this some too and we are planning to use it at Lakeview at least among staff if not generally)
• http://www.polleverywhere.com/ (this lets you show poll results on the screen that people text in, but I donâ€t think it does mass texting—Jarbyco can do this too I think, at least where people sendin questions via text message and you can have someone put them up on the screen)

Iâ€d start there and see where it gets you! Should be cheaper than phone tree most likely, def. cheaper than mailing postcards and youâ€ll probably get more teen response than from either of those anyway :-) [remember this was an email to the Youth dept.] I would start testing with a small group if youâ€re going to test multiple services, so you arenâ€t switching everyone from one system to another just to test…like set up 4-5 students with one service and see how you like the service and price before putting everyone in.

I later ran into another service worthy of comparison: http://www.churchtextingmanager.com/. I’m sure there are others out there. Other than light testing of Poll Everywhere and TextMarks, I’ve not used any of these services personally or professionally and can’t vouch for any of them, but it’s probably a good list to start your own research!

So, I’m contemplating those new iPhones. Strongly considering getting one, but I have a few questions. Although the price came way down (now $199 for the 8GB version, and $299 for the 16GB version), the data cost goes up for the 3G service. Original iPhone data plans were $20/mo, but 3G service appears to be tiered at $30/mo for personal accounts and $45/mo for “enterprise” accounts. However, I have been unable to find any good definitions of the difference between the two accounts, other than who is paying for them. In the #citrt channel, Chris Green said yesterday that based on his research, ActiveSync was probably going to be avialable only on the $45/mo corporate plan. I can’t find any details other than price on the Apple or AT&T websites, but I’ve found one or two rumors of a similar setup with some Google searching, but those were some random posts on some forums.

While on the AT&T website, a customer service order chat popped up, and I took the opportunity to ask AT&T directly. They were less than clear, and I’m not sure I believe them, but here’s the conversation:

Michael: Welcome to AT&T online Sales support.  How may I assist you with placing your order today?
David: Actually I have a question. What is the difference between the personal and Enterprise data plans for the new 3G iPhones?
David: Other than $15/month?
Michael: I am sorry, but we do not have the information on the new iphones at this time
Michael: We will have that on July 11th.
David: You have enough information to say there’s a corporate plan for $45 and a 3G personal plan for $30. Why can’t you just define those terms?
Michael: One is business and one is personal
David: Yes but if I have a personal phone, will the Exchange ActiveSync feature work with an Exchange server?
Michael: Yes, but is will not be secure
David: That can’t be true, my ActiveSync account only allows for encryped SSL connections.
Michael: Ok, then you would not be able to use the $30.00 plan you will need the $45.00

Other than an uncanny ability to state the obvious (“One is business and one is personal“), Michael says quite plainly that ActiveSync will be possible but “insecure” for Personal accounts. This would have to be done in the ActiveSync client software on the iPhone, because I’m sure the iPhone allows SSL-encrypted web browsing on any data plan, and since ActiveSync is essentially encrypted SSL traffic, AT&T would be hard pressed (in my opinion, which I’m willing to have corrected) to sniff/block the traffic at the network level. I think they’d have to “remove the Use SSL” checkbox from the ActiveSync config on the iPhone itself based on account type. Or are they talking about the ability to remotely wipe the system only on the Enterprise plan?  I have no idea. But I don’t like the idea that only businesses get encryption; ActiveSync over HTTP is not a good solution for anyone, and it’s certainly not worth a $15/mo premium for essentially the same service.

I suppose only time will tell, unless one of my readers has better or more information than I’ve been able to find. If so, do share!

That’s great news Rob, thanks for the heads-up!

UPDATE: Chris Green linked to more details about the iPhone and ActiveSync straight from Microsoft. Microsoft’s Terry Myerson, VP of for Exchange, said, “We started talking with Apple about licensing Exchange ActiveSync before the launch of the iPhone last year. In fact, I met with Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller almost daily for a period of two weeks ironing out the details of the agreement. The result is a true collaboration between Microsoft and Apple.”

UPDATE at 3:15 pm: Apple has an Enterprise website for the iPhone including a beta signup to test the iPhone with ActiveSync using the iPhone 2.0 software! (hat tip to Jason Lee in the #citrt chat.)

Google also jumped on the synchronization bandwagon with its own Google Calendar Sync utility to keep your Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendar up to date (two-way or one-way). It’s not ActiveSync and it doesn’t sync with Exchange, but I can see a use for this even for personal use where friends have Google Apps set up and want to sync with their phones, but their phones will only sync with Outlook. Another, over-the-air option I’ve heard about is GooSync, but I don’t have any experience with that yet. It sounds good but I’ve heard mixed opinions. Thanks to Scott, also in the #citrt chat room, for this piece of news!

And don’t forget about the Church IT Podcast episode recording in just a few minutes this afternoon! (It’s at 2 pm Easter via TalkShoe on Thursday the 6^th, so if you’re reading this later–it may be over for this week, come back in two weeks!)

I received an email response from my request for a sales rep regarding Postini at non-profit prices. Here’s what they (in specific, Peter from The Google Message Security Team) said, in part:

We don’t actually have the non-profit pricing available online at this time. We’re working on making the non-profit pricing available directly online. We don’t have a specific timeline for that, but definitely check back with us later!

If you would still like to move forward with the non-profit pricing right now, I can forward you along to one of our direct sales representatives if you are planning on making a purchase of $1,500 USD or more.

So basically, unless we’re over three times the size we are, we have to wait. This is going to leave a bunch of churches and other non-profits waiting out in the cold for an undetermined length of time. Education customers may, in general, have larger email user bases to qualify for direct sales, but that’s just my guess. I hope their non-specific timeline is shorter rather than longer; perhaps they’re working hard on it right now but don’t have it up since the change is such a new announcement. There’s just no way to know yet, given this response. A note of some sort to this effect would be appreciated on the pricing web page, but as much as I like them, Google will do what Google will do. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon!

UPDATE the next day: My reply to Google went like this:

Thanks for the information and clarification. But you are still saying that if we are wanting to purchase a plan for less than $1500 we will need to wait for online availability, correct?

and Google Rep Peter’s reply was:

You’ve got it exactly. We’re making the $1,500 option available for people who are already planning on paying that much, or need the service deployed either right away, yesterday, or as soon as possible.

If that doesn’t fit your needs, I would recommend sitting tight while we get the Google Message Discovery online purchasing process up. We don’t have a set timeline for it, but it’s going to be sooner rather than later.

This is mostly good news. They aren’t committing to a date, but it seems to be coming soon. When it does, you can bet we’ll be jumping on it like a frog on a lily pad!

I’m waiting to hear from a Google sales representative to confirm pricing and details, but based on this pricing chart, it looks like the non-profit pricing for their highest level of service will only be $8.33/mo, or less than 70 cents per month, per user. We’re paying more than twice that for our current hosted anti-spam, anti-virus filtering service, and it doesn’t do message archiving! Basic spam filtering would be only $1/year/user, or the mid-range plan adding some security features would go up to a whopping $4/year/user. I sure hope I’m reading these prices right, ’cause if I am, Postini will be getting another customer!

Interestingly, the pricing chart is for Postini as an add-on to Google Apps for your Domain, which has a free premium version for non-profits. The chart is not specifically for the Postini stand-alone service. However, if necessary, that service does let you dual-deliver messages both to the Google webmail interface and to your own email server, so setting up a free account to get the Postini pricing wouldn’t be a humongous deal. However, I’m curious to see what the pricing will be for Postini without going through Google Apps! My suspicion is…it will be comparable. When I submitted a request to talk to them, they replied and said they have a lot of people to contact due to the new pricing. No kidding!

(Hat tip: Jason Powell via #citrt).

I could troubleshoot Outlook and try to see why it’s not sending the messages properly. But I’d rather fix the problem at its source, farm the email sending to a server and allow the admin. assistant to turn off her computer over the weekend while I’m at it. I’d also like to make the email appear to come from each person’s supervisor; as it is hitting “Reply” sends replies back to the admin. assistant and not the supervisor. Reply-to would fix this, but that requires compounding the complexity by sending individual emails to each group of people with the same supervisor!

What I want is an email scheduler. I’m open to how it works, but my initial thoughts are:

1. It should be web-based
2. It should run under Apache on Linux, preferably with Perl or PHP (personal preference on all of those)
3. It should send email using our Exchange server as the SMTP server
4. It should let me set up multiple administrators who may create emails, fill them out with From (or Reply-to), Subject, and Body, and select the time of day and frequency of the mailing.
5. It should be free and/or open source, or at least very inexpensive.
6. It shouldn’t try to do everything, unless I want everything that it does (how’s that for a requirement?!).

I’m willing to budge on one or more of those items if given a good reason. I’ve done a bit of web searching and have located a tool called LBE Email Scheduler, which is shareware that sells for $20 for personal use or $200 for business use (a cursory glance did not immediately reveal whether non-profit pricing was available). It’s Windows-based and seems to have the features I’m looking for, but I like the idea of running a server app rather than sending client-side. Server apps are much easier to give multiple users access to. My searching has been hampered by a bazillion (approximate :-) results for spamming tools, which, although some of them could probably be modified to do what I want, really isn’t what I’m looking to support!

I’m willing to consider creative solutions. Possibilities I’ve thought of so far, in no particular order and not particularly connected:

• Set up WordPress-based intranet and use the cForms II plugin to create the report as a form that could be posted on the intranet. Would still need a weekly reminder email with a link to the form.
• Find another method that gets away from using email but still sends a reminder each week (I’d like to get away from email entirely, but I don’t think there’s a better way to at least remind people!)
• A couple of other wacky things using combinations of other open source projects that are probably too complex and that I don’t feel like linking to properly right now :-)
• Build my own script to the specifications I outlined above.
• Use SharePoint. I mention this because I know someone will say something about it :-) I’ve used SharePoint Services for about 4 hours two to three years ago, and that’s it (I installed it because it came with Windows Server and I wanted to play with it). I’m not going to be at the SharePoint Training that Jason Lee is hosting for a few reasons, all of them unfortunate and mostly my fault, but it’s not worth crying over spilt milk. Regardless, I know WordPress and at the very least Perl and PHP, so unless there’s a really, really good Windows-based solution that’s free or very cheap, I need a lot more convincing.

Here end my ponderings thus far, and begin the comments from you! (Thank you in advance!)

While I was at it, I threw in the VersaMail 3.5 EAS Meeting Invitation Update for good measure, just in case I needed it (and it was free!). I got all the updates available, basically; I must be used to Windows Updates where you should install it all, just in case it closes a huge gaping security hole or fixes something you don’t care enough about to research every time :-)

Everything went much more smoothly than expected! I installed VersaMail 3.5, installed and applied the updates, and did a sync. After the first sync, I was able to modify my account preferences to specify that I wanted to be notified “As items arrive,” which enables Direct Push.

So far, so good. Except that several minutes later, I hear my “New Mail Alert” sound and the message I get says, “EAS Account: Please press the Sync button.” Well, that’s fun. I go from email every 30 minutes to an annoying notice to manually “automatically” sync every five minutes! What is this? A Microsoft-like “improvement” from Palm?! Oh no! Things like “I wonder what would happen if I threw this phone through the window” started to go through my mind, but instead of following through with that I reverted to my backup plan:

Must…use…Google. Which I did, and I found this thread on the Palm forums that sounded like a broken record of my problem (not helpful) until I got to the last reply in the thread (which was helpful!). It had links to a blog entry from You Had Me At EHLO about Direct Push and Heartbeats, where, right there under list item 3 under the heading “Deployment Considerations for Direct Push” (I know, so easy to find in such a “short” entry :-) it talks about firewall connection timeouts with a link to an MSKB article (the same one the forum post linked to): 905013, Enterprise firewall configuration for Exchange ActiveSync Direct Push Technology. It’s reasonably short and sweet, and they’re kind enough to include step-by-step instructions for making the needed configuration change to our ISA 2004 firewall. Seriously, the instructions are so good and easy, I won’t even repeat them here. Click, click, click, type numbers, click, click, Apply, done. Or something like that.

I initiated a manual sync again to establish the connection with the new timeout values, and waited. Fifteen minutes later, no sign of the EAS Account error message! And now I get new emails popping up on my Treo usually before they show up in Outlook, whether connected via Cached Exchange Mode or not! Time will tell how good of a thing this actually is, but the concept is excellent!

I did searches across all folders, I checked the Rules and Alerts settings (no rules were configured at all); no results at all, except for emails from several months prior when it was working just fine. To verify that it was an Outlook problem, because I first suspected a POP3 server issue (since other emails worked fine in Outlook), I closed Outlook, sent an email from the problem address, and logged into the webmail interface. There it was. So back to Outlook. I tried repairing the .pst file with scanpst. I did some Google searches without any useful results. And then I created a new profile, manually recreated the POP3 account in that profile, and imported the .pst file from the previous profile. And the problem went away. I almost wish I’d done this sooner, but at the same time, I wanted to know why the problem was happening!

I thought this was an isolated occurrence, but last week I had a report that another user was trying to use the copy machine’s scan-to-email feature and the emails were disappearing! Emails to another user were working just fine, and that user could forward emails from the scanner to this original user just fine; it was just emails from the copier (I was told after the problem was fixed that emails from the user’s personal Gmail account were not coming through either; this hasn’t been tested yet but I suspect that is fixed as well). Initially I suspected that the copier was configured incorrectly, perhaps sending the email to an incorrect address. But a check of the copier showed it was fine, and a check of the webmail account showed that the emails were arriving just fine. Of course, Outlook was kind enough to remove the emails from the server when throwing them away, just as before! This time, Outlook didn’t “pretend” to be receiving an email though, the messages simply disappeared.

At least this time I knew the fix: create a new Outlook profile, set up the email account, import the old data. Worked like a charm. The new .pst file ended up being a couple hundred megabytes larger than the old one, so I’m going to guess the old one was corrupt. This computer is a brand new one that’s around three months old, so I’m a bit concerned that such a problem showed up so fast, but the .pst file being used was copied over from this person’s previous system so it may have brought the problem with it.

Like the title says, I don’t have a reason behind the solution, just the fix. And I have the long-term solution as well: Exchange! I’m moving this office to SBS 2003 by early December, if everything goes as planned. This should solve the POP3 problems above in addition to giving us RPC over HTTPS access for laptop users, calendar sharing of course, webmail integrated with the mailbox, the VPN capabilities of ISA 2004, and I’m sure a few things I’m forgetting. I’ve been working slowly towards a move to SBS for about a year, and in January I had all the software and some extra drives quoted. I just had the quote updated in preparation for purchase, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the SBS licenses for the server and 25 user dropped in price by about $1000 since the first of the year! I’m glad things have come up to delay the upgrade! Should be fun to go from Server 2003 Standard to SBS 2003; I’m sure I’ll have some blog entries to share when it happens!

I jumped on the opportunity to add Gmail as an IMAP account to VersaMail on my Treo 650. But when looking for the necessary server settings, I discovered this sad news: “Palm handheld users: please note that Gmail IMAP access is not currently compatible with VersaMail.” Oh well. I was happy for a couple of minutes. I’ll probably stick to the web interface all around, but it’s nice to know IMAP is an option since there is a dearth of free email services supporting IMAP (Gmail is the only major one that I know of).

In this photo, the three guys around the table on the left (left-to-right) are Matt Bradshaw, a desktop support technician, and Brian Slezak, all from Church of the Resurrection. These guys either develop for their website or have recently, and I got to chat with them at a techie level about website development (not design!). We talked about different backend CMS options (CMS in this case is Content Management Systems, not to be confused with CMS meaning Church Management System, which apparently has been around as that acronym for twenty years and isn’t officially changing to ChMS any time soon per some Roundtable discussion Wednesday afternoon!), and we also shared some stories about some vulnerabilities we’ve had exploited on our websites for various nefarious purposes in the past and how we discovered and dealt with them.

In our afternoon Roundtable session, we discussed spiritual issues surrounding Church IT departments, which I didn’t end up with many notes on. We moved on to Church Management Systems, which had some useful information but my few notes are not in an easily digestible format. In our room, three churches currently use Shelby, two use ACS Technologies, and we had one user each of Fellowship Technologies and Microsoft CRM (which has been heavily customized). This provided some fodder for both theoretical and practical discussion about each system, but I think we were all about ready to wrap up after a long day of discussion and thus this was probably a little less informative than it could have been, but there were a few new gems of knowledge I gleaned. This is one area where I think the vendors in the room should probably have been allowed to participate rather than just observe, because we had vendor reps from Shelby, ACS, and Microsoft CRM (or an integrator of this one) in the room and the systems are sufficiently complex that they may have been able to provide additional information. Oh well, they are great folks to talk to outside of the Roundtable format and I think everyone is making great connections and relationships with the vendors and the attendees.

We moved to the main meeting room after the afternoon Roundtable and got to hear for 30 minutes from Rev. Adam Hamilton, COR’s Founding and Senior Pastor. It was very informative hearing from his point of view, and several people had some very well thought-out questions to ask him afterwards. Around his talk, we watched a leadership video and an awesome, hilarious movie about Facilities Managers (“FMers”) created by I believe the COR facilities manager. It was sooo stinking funny! About 90 laughs per minute! There was another similar video earlier today as well, just as funny. The best part is that everything in the videos about FMers applies just about equally to ITers, which I’m sure made it extra funny for all. We had a half-hour break after this and then it was time for a great dinner at 6:00 from a local BBQ joint catered to a room down the hall, sponsored but I don’t know which vendor paid this time.

7:00 brought a worship service and sermon from Clif’s wife and the band from her church plant, which were excellent. At 8:00 they opened a room (until 11:00 pm at the latest) for hangout and open discussion, where I stuck around for 15-20 minutes and then caught a ride back to my hotel again from Dean Lisenby and Josh Wyse from ACS (thanks Dean!), where I am writing most of this post.

Going back to this morning, I can’t forget to mention that Jason Powell lost his Roundtable name badge and had to make a “fake” one for himself. He was razzed first thing this morning, and he was kind (apparently I said “king” rather than “kind” when writing this post late last night, so let me clarify: JP is cool, but not king :-) enough to post for a photo just so I could blog about it!

In other news, back on the home front I ran into an issue back at Lakeview today: I let the SSL certificate expire for our OWA webmail (which also is used for RPC over HTTPS in Outlook, and by our Treos with ActiveSync). So I spent part of the afternoon Roundtable remotely accessing the Lakeview network and working to resolvethat situation. Technically, the certificate didn’t expire, the renewed certificate was just never updated on the servers. This was for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that it fell off my priorities list with everything else going on, and also I didn’t have the username/password information handy for that account and didn’t find the time to track it all down with all the steps that will likely require. I have a temporary solution halfway in place now (everything but some Treos are working again) that I have to tweak tonight before I go to bed (also known as right now), and it should give me the time to deal with the original problem in the next few weeks. I won’t get into the details for both security reasons and because I’ve spent enough time recapping today already!

This isn’t the first time this has happened; I tried the same thing with another email that had spam issues and Outlook also thought the attached email had no headers, even though it came from the internet (rather than being originated in Exchange) and certainly did have headers. I even managed to get that one forwarded through to the anti-spam support, and they were able to find the problem; in the headers. So I know the headers are there, since they will get forwarded with the message again. But how can I view them? Anyone with a working answer will be greatly appreciated with a reward of me posting his or her name in a new post thanking them for the solution :-)

I’m using Outlook 2003 connected to Exchange 2003 Standard, and my user is running the same, and forwarded the original spam to me “as an attachment.” Google does turn up plenty of results from my searches, but they all reference how to view the internet headers of a regular message, not one attached to a forwarded email.

The emails appear to have stopped on Friday, although if they continue I can easily block them at one of several points (such as our spam filter).  I’ve sent an email to our staff explaining the details in case anyone was confused about the sender of the emails.  But there is no easy way for me to track down who actually sent the emails, since technically, Google did.  I could contact them about the abuse, and will if there is more of it.  But it is very annoying to have an email system that’s so open to abuse and spoofing and takes time out of my day to deal with such petty junk pulled as a prank.  And we have no idea whether this was sent to any church members or anyone outside of the staff, and if it was…will they know enough to realize it’s a spoofed piece of junk?  I know there are email verification and authentication schemes out there, some good, some bad, and none universal.  There are big problems with most, and the likelihood of authenticated emails becoming a global practice anytime soon is not something I’m holding my breath for, but an IT guy can dream, can’t he?

Thanks for letting me vent, as much as my strong feelings have been held back above to prevent publishing anything I’ll later regret :-)