Monday, March 25, 2013

Melbourne Brisbane Computer Repairs, Website design & SEO

Melbourne Brisbane Computer Repairs, Website design & SEO

Link to Computer Help

transfer emails from thunderbird to outlook or between any email app

Posted: 24 Mar 2013 06:23 AM PDT

I setup a new computer for someone who had office 2003 (with outlook) on their old PC.

I also installed office home and student 2010, as it was the most cost-effective, but it didn’t have outlook.

So I decided to setup the thunderbird email client, as its not a huge change for most people.

In this case, the new owner just couldn’t cope with thunderbird, so I thought: easy! just buy the standalone outlook 2010, and export the thunderbird emails, then import them into outlook.

WRONG!

Not only was I very disappointed that thunderbird had no decent export facility (and some ineffective third-party addons), I was also surprised that Microsoft Outlook had no way of importing Thunderbird emails.

After a lot of searching, I found most solutions involved either:

  • Commercial programs that would create Outlook pst files from thunderbird (but these programs are usually time-limited, or can only be used on 1 PC)… and I had 2 PCs to convert…
  • Free utilities to export each individual email, and then import each email individually into Outlook… Not good if you need to transfer hundreds of emails

But then, I found that the mozilla website itself mentioned (very briefly) the prospect of using IMAP to transfer between email clients.

I didn’t like the idea of transferring a huge amount of data across the internet (to and from an IMAP server), but I also noticed a mention of a local IMAP email server called hMailServer

hMailServer its easy to install and configure even though setting up a server is quite daunting.

But since I’m likely to do this sort of thing quite a lot, I decided to spend the time learning how to do it (and share it with you).

The biggest problem with this is that you must be sure that both email clients are IMAP capable (some are not), and that both email clients are on the PC at the same time.

Normally, I will disable the POP3 (or IMAP) settings on the “old” email client by just changing the POP3 and SMTP server names from something like mail.isp.com to: mail.isp.comm

This means only 1 email client is actually receiving live mail.

After that, its a case of setting up the local IMAP server (hMailServer), then adding a new “local” IMAP account to both email clients, then transferring the emails/folders, and then remove the temporary IMAP accounts, and uninstall hMailServer.

I found that its actually easier than spending hours scouring the net, looking for the “right” tool to transfer between 2 different email programs.

So: download hMailServer, install it on the PC where you will be transferring emails (use the default settings), then:

When asked for a server password, just enter something simple (I use: 12345)

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At the end of the installation, run the administrator tool to setup the server settings:

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Hit the connect button to connect to “localhost”:

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From the “welcome” section, click “Add domain”:

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Enter any domain name (it doesn’t matter, so I pick: local.com), then I click Save:

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Then go down to domains -> local.com -> Accounts, and click Add:

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Create a user, give it a password, and click save (I called it “user”):

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Initially, I had some problems connecting until I realised I made a few mistakes typing the password, and the server locked the account. So it doesn’t happen again, I disabled the “auto-ban” feature & click save:

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Now leave the hMailServer admin panel (leave it running in the background if you like, or close it… it won’t matter).

Now we can setup the email client to connect to the new server. In this case I’m using thunderbird, but its a similar process with other email clients. Tools -> Account settings -> account actions -> add mail account:

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Enter the details for the server (remember, the password is the one you created for the user account, NOT the one for the server admin)

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Thunderbird then goes and tries to find this fake server, so I quickly have to hit the manual config button to stop the auto-config:

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Now I can enter the correct details for the server. Notice the server hostname is 127.0.0.1 (ie it will only look at the local PC). Hit re-test, and it will find the correct settings for the local server:

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Now you can click the “Done” button:

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You might get a scary-looking warning. Don’t worry, unless you doing this at an internet cafe, or via some other public internet connection (eg McDonalds):

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Hey, look, thunderbird now has an extra “user@local.com” account. You can now copy all your folders and emails from your standard email account to the local.com account… and its a LOT faster than using an internet IMAP server.

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Once you finish copying the emails, setup a similar account on your new email client (eg Microsoft Outlook), and then copy the emails from the local.com account to the new (presumably empty) email account.

Once the copy is complete, you can remove the local.com accounts from both email clients… restart them and double-check that you actually did copy the old emails correctly.

You can then uninstall hMailServer… but to be safe, I’d wait a week or two.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Melbourne Brisbane Computer Repairs, Website design & SEO

Melbourne Brisbane Computer Repairs, Website design & SEO

Link to Computer Help

Manually restoring corrupt windows 7 registry files

Posted: 20 Mar 2013 10:29 PM PDT

Its happened twice that I’ve received a non-starting windows 7 PC, only to find no hardware problem, and it quickly becomes obvious that the windows 7 registry has become corrupt, and windows 7 recovery is not smart enough to restore the registry.

And in typical Microsoft style, system restore also fails to work.

But I’m used to doing this in XP, where the registry backups are stored in C:\System Volume Information, and its a simple matter to copy and rename the 5 registry files back to c:\windows\system32\config

But Microsoft (in their typical “change for the sake of change” attitude) have decided to move it somewhere else.

I found some mention of a single copy of the registry files in c:\windows\system32\config\RegBack

But that doesn’t help if the backup also gets corrupted.

So far, I’ve been lucky that the copy in the RegBack folder has managed to fix the system… but its a concern to go from automatic multiple registry backups (with windows XP), to a single backup with windows Vista, Windows 7, and presumably Windows 8) … A decrease in reliability, for no noticeable benefit.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Melbourne Brisbane Computer Repairs, Website design & SEO

Melbourne Brisbane Computer Repairs, Website design & SEO

Link to Computer Help

has Exitjunction improved?

Posted: 10 Mar 2013 05:48 PM PDT

As many of you know, I tried exitjunction back in 2009, with disastrous effects.

This moring, I received an email from David Johnson, from DynamicOxygen (parent company of ExitJunction)… he said:

Hi Luigi,    I came across your review of our product ExitJunction  http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/2009/03/20/exitjunction-yahoo-google-and-adsense/  and just wanted to drop you an email.    I read your experience with ExitJunction and not really sure what happened  in your case in 2009 but I can tell you that I been with ExitJunction for  the past 14 month and never ever heard anything like that from any of our  publishers! We currently work with thousands of publishers and our service  continues to grow as can be seen from our traffic stats  http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/exitjunction.com    I would like to ask you to place ExitJunction code on just few pages of  your site and see it for yourself that we don't in any ways affect your  Google Rankings… I would hope that after seeing it for yourself you would  remove your negative review of ExitJunction since at current time the  information stated in your review dosent reflect the reality of our  product! If you have any questions please feel free to get in touch with  me and once again I fully stand behind our product experience since  nothing like that ever happened in the past 14 month I been with the  company…    thanks,    David Johnson  Client Services Manager  Dynamic Oxygen, LLC.  646 Maple St. STE 2B  Brooklyn, NY 11203  Office: (212) 937-7999  Fax:    (71 8)  228-5224  davidj@DynamicOxygen.com    http://www.DynamicOxygen.com    

So my reply was:

Hi David,

Thanks for contacting me.

I find it highly unusual that you have never heard about the problems with exitjunction, as the internet is full of reports about google traffic drying up after exitjunction is applied to existing websites. But then you work for DO/EJ, so I’d expect you to say that.

Your traffic stats really don’t show much improvement (hovering around the 20,000 mark):

Given the very frightening effect of using exitjunction in 2009, I am very, very reluctant to try it again.

If I start seeing reviews (by others who have no affiliation with EJ/DO) who report no ill-effect with their google rankings, then I will consider trying it again… if that happens, I will not try it on a few pages, but on the whole site, to do otherwise will give useless results.

My understanding is that Google will penalise anyone who tries to influence or alter the way someone naturally uses google… so if Google themselves state that they will not penalise the likes of EJ, then I will seriously look at it again.

Otherwise I really don’t have the time & energy to test EJ again, unless I believe that google will not do what they did back in 2009.

 

So, has anyone else received a similar email saying: “trust us, we are actually good people, and have always been good, and what happened to you must have been something from before 2012″?

And has anyone tried EJ (or DynamicOxygen) recently, particularly if you have some stats on Google traffic before and after using exitjunction?

Let me know, as I’d be interested to see if google will now allow EJ to operate unhindered.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

MY LINUX TODAY

MY LINUX TODAY


My New Project

Posted: 06 Mar 2013 06:18 AM PST

  I received my new Raspberry PI yesterday. Took me a few minutes to get it all figured out and Debian Loaded up but here we are.I am actually doing this post from it as i wanted to try out its...

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Sunday, March 3, 2013

MY LINUX TODAY

MY LINUX TODAY


Hard Drive Replacement

Posted: 03 Mar 2013 11:30 AM PST

Today I was in a bind with an OEM win 7 and a failing hard drive, LINUX to the rescue. I had a new Western digital hard drive for the swap, However the software they recommend Acronis True Image...

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Nita's Random Thoughts

Nita's Random Thoughts


Little Me Giveaway Event

Posted: 02 Mar 2013 08:51 PM PST

Little Me Giveaway Event

Announcing the Multiple Birth Program

Hosted by: Mom Powered Media

Prizes:

$250 Grand Prize

Five winners – $100

Twenty winners – $50

Event dates: 3/18-4/15

SIGN-UP HERE

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