The Sender Policy Framework, the hot shot retired or revived?

Spam issues has never been easy. We know that. The ancient IT heroes have told us stories how SMTP was not meant to be built secure. But now, in the era of gadgets, mobility, and messaging everywhere, I am sure it is worth to take a look at what we have as anti spam.

I am running exchange servers for in the office. Those servers are great. Really, you can have everything you can expect from a mail server with so many pluses. With exchange you will have much more than mail, you will have the whole business attached with you.

Well, there is a slight thing you need to know. It's the capability to handle spam emails that is a little short there. Exchange 2003 is not hot with it. With me, I put a GFI Mail Essentials installed in the back end. With a litte fine-tuning, everything is fine. Until then..

My boss was a bit pissed off by some emails he sent did not delivered to some recipients. He sent it from his phone with IMAP protocol. I definitely looked very stupid because the recipients were in the same domain. Our domain. OK, I won't assume a thing. I needed to look. Then I found the email was sitting there in the Junk Mail folder. Yes, I frowned. How come emails from the same domain get into junk folder?

I am sure to fix this, I need to mock around the exchange server, again.

My first suspect was the Intelligent Message Filtering in the Exchange Server. To provide proof I have to change the setting in the Global Setting - Message Delivery. Change some setting, increasing the SCL level for Junk Mail. No Luck.

Well, how about disable the Intelligent Message Filtering filter from the SMTP at all the servers. Yes I did it, and still no luck.

My second suspect was the GFI Mail Essentials settings. I change the Sender Policy Filter level to Low, and voila! it works.

Well yea, it works, now but still leave me with wonder, why the heck this SPF marks emails from cellphone in the same domain as Junk? I checked the SPF text in my DNS. it allows all to send email. So it should be ok. But why not???

Incoming Windows 7, What's Behind the Buzz?

Installing Microsoft Windows operations systems were always nice and easy. But installing Windows 7 was incredibly easy, compared to Windows XP installation which I have been experiencing hundreds of them. When installing Win XP we sometimes had a crash a little bit, but turned out to be OK. Installing Win 98 do you remember? yes, sometimes we had to reinstall it to have a clean install. But, however they were easy.

I installed a Windows 7 in a dual boot mode. You know, I just don't want to lose anything I've been working on. They are mostly in my Win XP. 

After done installing, I was rather shocked by the degradation of visual quality compared to that i've been experiencing with, that is Vista. Windows 7 is somehow not as 'blink-blink' as Vista. Well, yeah, I must tell you I also have an Acer notebook with Vista business installed, and my favorite a MacBook. I use Vista because Microsoft someday has to leave WinXP to either Vista or now Win7. I don't know, when done installing, I just didn't feel as good as when I first saw Vista. Not that they look alike and I had this taste of Vista first and therefore not being surprised to Win7 because I already got used to something alike at the first place. But rather, the visual quality itself is degraded, Windows 7 however looks rather slum. I am sorry to say that but it does.

Anyway, the dual boot is running great. I installed Win 7 in a different partition, same hard disk. Installed it as custom installation. It is running perfectly well, and about dive to it deeper.

The Cool Mac Dashlets

I was really amazed by the first time I did the programming in Mac. Created a Widget for dashboard was just awesome.

The development environment that was so called SDK was indeed a big bunch of files. Yes, I mean BIG. Consuming some gigs of my hard drive. But tell you, they are worthwhile. I am not such a Mac Mania or something, but from my little experience with Mac. I know it is something great.

I used widgets. Both in Mac dashboard or Windows Vista sidebar. Vista's sidebar is good also, but I haven't got any that I could consider a significant plus. Somehow Mac is different. Mac pays respect for our space in desktop and booting time. I think Mac tries to get rid of unnecessary things from desktop, therefore Stack and Dashboard (as it is now) were created.  You'll be amazed of how fast a Mac machine boots up. That's a really big point.

Vista's sidebar occupies some significant space in desktop. The good thing about it is that it would be very beneficial if you use it as a dedicated dashboard for applications or services needed to be monitored all the time. Unfortunately, that kind of applications or services won't be too many. Until now I don't have any because all important things are already taken care of by the respective applications that deal with them. 

However, widgets may provide a better way of remote computation. It is like having widgets as application agents. To be extended to mobile computations, it will be even better. For me, they are all thin terminals and very potential ones.