Contacting me, or You no longer need to dig up an email address

I have been suprised at the number of people that have gone to the trouble of finding an email address for me to provide comments and compliments about various entries. So I suppose I should provide an easily accessible address.

So consider this an invitation to email me with comments, criticisms, and what not about this blog. The email address is sysadmin followed by the @ sign, with the domain "fief.org" after it.

I apologize for the annoyance of presenting my email address this way, but spammers are doing their best to make email useless, and I must fight back to keep my email a useful communication tool.

Outlook Express, or A reminder of why I avoid the program

A user came into my office this morning saying that he was having troubles with Outlook Express. A few questions later, and I learn that the program crashed whenever he tried to open his inbox. I had seen the problem before, it was undoubtebly because of a corrupt dbx file (the format used by Outlook Express to save folders full of messages).

After making a copy of the Outlook Express folder from his Application Data directory, we tried compacting the folder followed by compacting all folders. Outlook Express would still crash upon opening his inbox. We deleted the folders.dbx file hoping that the central index was the problem. That didn't solve the problem either. Searching for assistance from Microsoft, I come across the page: The Other E-Mail Threat: File Corruption in Outlook Express

Tangent: I find databases and other binary structures for storing mail to be overkill and a bad idea. The primary argument used for why it is a good idea is to make searching and manipulating large mailboxes faster. Sure, it can be faster, but plenty of email clients do a fine job without storing your mail away in a binary blob. Mail should be stored in a nice simple mbox related format. While mbox certainly has it's own problems, at least I have never seen a mail client crash from a corrupt mail file, and when I did see an instance of a client breaking the file, I was able to recover nearly all of the messages by hand with a simple text editor. Plus, text files make it much easier to migrate your mail to another client should that become necessary.

I was horrified by the article. They were advocating purchasing software to solve what is apparently a common fault with Outlook Express. Besides DBXtract (the product recommend in the article above), there are many, other tools to recover corrupt dbx files. There is simply no excuse for this. If this problem is common enough to have spawned that many products to fix it, Microsoft needs to get it's act together, fix Outlook Express and/or ship as part of the program a method to repair corrupt db files.

With no intention to purchase software to support software that isn't on our supported software list, I provided him with the most recent backup of the files and he was able to get back up and running.

Life of a Sysadmin 04 2006

Contacting me, or You no longer need to dig up an email address

Outlook Express, or A reminder of why I avoid the program