Re[2]: Some ideas for improving The Bat!
Hello Marek, Sunday, August 27, 2006, 8:56:37 PM, you wrote: Idea #5: Optional fetching of images in HTML mail. *coughs* Yes, I know we get this frequently. But the people sending the mail just aren't listening to me when I point out how moronic their mail is. MM this feature is almost finished and development team prepares it for next MM beta cycle after upcoming final version, so wait :-) Well, that's excellent news. I knew I shouldn't have put it on the list, though. It was always going to grab the limelight over my other more evolutionary rather than revolutionary ideas. ;-) However, it is much welcomed. Almost overdue, one might say. At least I'll have the option. I do hope that they take on board the idea for the tabs, though. Again, I'd like the option to view an email how I want to - not have either HTML+images or no HTML at all. A lot of HTML mail that I get is quite sane, it's just the marketing crud that I want to be able to control more often. The tab idea makes it very simple to switch between a suitable mode... -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.80.06 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgpdX4pf9xP5E.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.80.06 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: TB! and Lotus Notes Domino IMAP server
Hello Raymund, Tuesday, August 1, 2006, 6:10:02 PM, you wrote: RT 1. How can I decrypt a Notes encrypted mail? You can't. The encryption is for Notes only. It's a proprietary implementation of RSA, using the RSA Inc. libraries. Domino/Notes can use the X.509 standard too, but the costs associated with a large X.509 implementation mean it's not very widely deployed and I doubt very much that you're using it. RT 2. Anyone knows how to put sent mails into the Notes sent folder? I'm honestly not sure. But remember that in Notes, the Sent folder isn't a folder - it's a view. I'm honestly not sure what effect this will have on the operation. I would need to do testing, but I'm afraid I can't do that until early next week at the earliest, as my test servers are currently tied up with project work. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.80.06 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgp4VEMCTZdqs.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.80.06 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: tiny blank spam messages... [correction]
Hello Michael, Monday, June 19, 2006, 3:41:18 AM, you wrote: MLC Egad! Sorry, I put that exactly backwards. That expression will match MLC all legitimate mails, but not the empty ones. Please use does not MLC match instead of match to get rid of the empty spam. By good fortune, I didn't see either message until quite a while afterwards. :-) Thanks for that. It works pretty well, with just two false positives amongst about 900, of which 100 were blank messages. That's two more than I'd like, but you've shown me the way and I hope I can tweak it from here. *grins* MLC Sorry also to break threading -- I am on a different machine now, so I MLC don't have the original messages with the References headers. (I MLC noticed my mistake while looking at the web archives.) Ah, nothing's perfect. You're only breaking threading for those weird freaks who have mail clients that do good mail threading. Luckily for you, everyone here is on Outlook. ;-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.80.06 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgppT7Z5Vty0i.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.80.06 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[3]: Tiny blank spam messages...
Hello Ben, Monday, June 19, 2006, 11:35:46 AM, you wrote: BA I have a filter that does catch most of them. recipient does not BA match [EMAIL PROTECTED] Though I would suggest that you use your own BA email addy for that Which will work for all my accounts except postmaster@ - because all unknown mail overflows to that one account. But yeah, I use the same on most accounts, and it works pretty well. It's just those nasty edge cases where a little more is needed... :-( Thanks for the reminder, though! -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.80.06 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgpUV6AldxXxI.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.80.06 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: Tiny blank spam messages...
Hello z5worg, Monday, June 19, 2006, 8:47:37 AM, you wrote: zzc I get them too. Would someone tell me what is the purpose of these zzc emails? I think that they're designed to test whether or not an address is active. If they have a return-path, that is. Otherwise, they're designed just to annoy - they slip past many filters, and make people start looking at other solutions. You notice those few tiny messages, but don't realise that another hundred or more were caught and dealt with. In a moment of annoyance, you might just make your defences that much weaker... -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.80.06 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgp4SyyybrJsS.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.80.06 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: Tiny blank spam messages...
Hello Alexander, Monday, June 19, 2006, 4:47:40 PM, you wrote: ASK As posted on countless occassions before: no problem here with K9. :-) *laughs* Well, I've had no problems with BayesIt!/Bayes Filter Plugin, except for these little empty messages. Which are more of an annoyance than anything else, really.. And even then, I seem to be finding more blank messages in my spam folder - perhaps my message base is finally catching up, and noting some of the common header flags that are tucked away in there? But maybe I'll look at K9 when I get a chance... ;-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.80.06 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgp7c2G24PBJw.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.80.06 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Tiny blank spam messages...
Hello TBUDL, Over the last week, I've been getting LOTS of messages that are, for want of a better word, empty. Blank sender, blank recipients (to/cc), blank subject, no body. (Either they're checking my address is live by waiting for bounces, or they're too stupid to set up their bulk mailing packages properly. I wouldn't like to bet either way, given how many $tokens I've seen in subject lines in the past...) They're very annoying, because they slip straight past both BayesIT! and Bayes Filter Plugin. They've only managed to catch one of them in the past couple of days, probably because these filters rely upon text being present in order to work effectively. I've tweaked the settings for the Bayes Filter Plugin DNS Blacklist, but I've had problems getting the right levels for that in the past - too many false positives, because many RBL servers are a little overzealous... I wanted to try and set up a rule for catching them and deleting them, but that's not worked either. A rule where: sender is AND recipient is AND subject is did nothing when I refiltered my Inbox, despite having almost thirty blank messages in it. Does anyone have any ideas? Has anyone else solved this problem? -- Best regards, Philip mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.80.06 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgpjh2HDvYBqP.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.80.06 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[4]: Bayesit or Bayes Filter
Hello Jeff, Sunday, August 21, 2005, 11:21:58 PM, you wrote: JG I found BayesIt very poor even after training. I have switched to K9 JG now and find it much better. And, for a flipside, I've found it great. As an example,one of my accounts had 68 messages in it when I returned home tonight. One of them was legitimate. All the rest was spam. BayesIt and Bayes Spam Filter, working together, automatically deleted 62 messages. They let through the one legitimate one. One ended up in the Junk folder, and four ended up in my inbox. The four in my inbox were all very short messages, and an analysis of my logs shows that it was Bayes Spam Filter that let them through - it's been running alongside BayesIt for a while now, but seems to take longer to train. In my experience, I've never seen something as easy and simple to set up as BayesIT, or as quick to get working - I installed it a long time ago, marked all my mail as ham and/or spam, and then started marking mail that got through. After a week, it was incredibly rare to see anything slip past. They key seems to be the training - but BayesIt makes that very easy. Sadly, it also doesn't make it very clear that you have to train it in both ham and spam... -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.51.10 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 Current version is 3.51.10 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: powerful search features like Gmail or Spotlight
Hello Roman, Sunday, July 31, 2005, 4:49:57 PM, you wrote: RK wouldn't it be nice if TB had powerful search features like Gmail or RK Apple's Spotlight? It would, yes. RK I know that TB's has a search feature, but it's slow since emails RK aren't pre-indexed for keywords. Personally, I find the speed of The Bat!'s search to be more than satisfactory - it's very fast, considering it's just a brute force search which opens every single mail and scans for the text string. Pre-indexing is difficult, though. The very first problem that springs to mind is IMAP - with IMAP accounts, you might not actually have a local copy of the text of the email to index. Then there's the question of what sorts of features your indexing and searching engine is to support. This can get, um, complicated. As a demonstration, allow me to introduce the much misunderstood product Lotus Notes. (Yes, yes. Quiet at the back there. Lotus Notes is not a competitor for The Bat! - The Bat! is better for personal email, Notes is better for large organisations. Trust me on this.) Notes has had full-text (index-based searching for years. Options I can choose when creating an index include: * Indexing encrypted fields * Indexing attachments * Using found text * Using file filters * Case sensitivity * Indexing break information Encrypted fields are the first problem for The Bat! - I'd expect it to offer the option (and a warning that it's ludicrously insecure to do so), but that means that the indexing engine must work only when you read the message - or it has to cache the credentials for PGP/GPG or whatever you encrypt with. That could get messy and draw flak from some paranoid quarters... Indexing attachments is harder than it sounds. The two sub-options there are simple - indexing with found text basically discards any non-text characters, ignores whitespace and then indexes the found words. This is fast, but if a word in a Word document has a soft-hyphen code in the middle of it because it's split across two lines, you'll not find that instance of the word in that document. To solve that problem, you can index with file filters, which will understand the format of the document and index just the actual text. They know to skip soft hyphens, bold/underline markings, and so forth. Unfortunately, file filters are complicated to write, and just when you perfect them the vendor of the file format has a tendency to release a new version of their program which uses a new version of the file format. :-( Case sensitivy is a simple option. It's generally bad, and should be ignored. ;-) Indexing break information is a fantastic trick. The indexing engine spots new lines and new paragraphs. You can then do a search using keywords like SENTENCE, PARAGRAPH and NEAR - the first returns only results with both words in the same sentence, the second in only the same paragraph, and the third is like an AND search - only returning when both word are in the same document - except it sorts the results so that messages with the words nearer each other are higher up the list. It's very funky. :-) Of course, I'm not suggesting that these features are in any way mandatory - the index breaks and case sensitivity are strictly optional. But you can hopefully quickly see that even the remaining features (encrypted mail, attachments) could be complex to implement, and a quick trip to Google will probably show up other potential features that I've not even touched upon yet. Like how to get a decent ranking of your results, for starters. And then, to be frank, there's the interface. A search dialogue box is fine, but what if I just want to search within the folder? I'd rather see the search interface implemented at the folder level, and provide searching across everything using a virtual folder which contains all messages. Searching within the folder just feels nicer than searching within a separate dialogue box - much more natural. Search engines typically work because they have a simple, easy to use interface which hides the power of their features. It's why Google is popular with both geeks and the technically illiterate - power with simplicity. But the in-folder search needed to provide it might require quite a change in the folder handling code of The Bat!. So if the complications of the index engine don't drive The Bat!'s developers to insanity, changing The Bat! to do the searches might well do it! ;-) I don't mean to sound overly negative, by the way. I love the idea of a more powerful, index-based search. I want a decent search capability. I just think that it's going to be the sort of change which sounds easy, but is actually major enough under the hood that you'd have to put it into a major revision of the product. I'd like to see index-based search in version 4, though - it would get my upgrade money for sure! RK Or is there any plugin or other third-party software that would do RK that with TB's e-mails? Google
Re[2]: multiple mail clients (was: spamalot)
Hello Mark, Friday, June 10, 2005, 7:19:54 PM, you wrote: MP Except for the very first time I haven't tried the plugins. They may be MP efficient for those that use one mailer only, but for me it's far easier to MP let all of them share the same K9 base, instead of training a plugin for each MP one of them... Now, here's something I have genuine difficulty dealing with... Why are you running multiple mail clients? I run with The Bat! as my mail client. I've tried Opera's M2, and it's nice but not quite polished enough. (Although there are some nice ideas there that The Bat! should certainly steal!) I also ran Thunderbird for a while to evaluate it, but found it lacking - a good replacement for Outlook Express, but my needs go further than Outlook Express. In both cases, it was just for evaluation purposes. To see if there's something that they do (or do better) which can drag me away from The Bat!, really. So I ran them alongside The Bat!, simply setting the accounts to download mail but not delete it from the server for n days in each client - which allowed for dual-running quite nicely. I can't fathom why you'd run multiple clients for a prolonged period, though. In fact, I wouldn't want my multiple clients to share the same spam filtering base, BECAUSE I was evaluating them. (For what it's worth for those interested, Opera's spam filter is excellent - after a little training, it becomes very accurate. After about a thousand messages, it's trained and doing very well. Thunderbird can only hope to get a better filter, as it didn't do nearly as well...) So, might I ask why you're running multiple clients? It surely can't be spam filtering sharing the same database - there must be something that The Bat! doesn't do which the other mail client(s) can handle. Hence my curiosity... Feel free to reply privately if you like. I send this to the list just because I hope that the answer might be useful for all... -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.5.25 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgpysa0fZrOvG.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.5.25 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: spamalot
Hello Kevin, Friday, June 10, 2005, 3:00:00 PM, you wrote: KC - From the messages posted here, both recently and in the past, I think KC its safe to conclude that 3rd party relay type solutions seem to offer KC better performance than the plug-ins. For those with a spam problem, KC its probably worth the inconvenience of running a relay. I would disagree. A few posters to this list have had problems with the plugins. Often, they've not marked any ham as well as marking spam, or haven't marked enough of either. But those are just common reasons for the enquiry - I'm not going to say that those are the only reasons for bad performance of the plugins. As it stands, I'm one of the (probably) many people for whom the plugins are working just fine. We don't post to the list because we have no problems. I personally use both BayesIt and Bayes Filter Plugin. BayesIT is near-perfect - it gets more than 99% of the spam. Bayes Filter Plugin isn't quite as effective, but that's more because I've only been using it for a while, and not trained it fully yet - it is improving, but I currently use it alongside BayesIT. I find it odd that you think because a few people have problems the system is flawed. Every relay/3rd party solution no doubt has a mailing list or forum, on which practically every user has a problem - or they wouldn't be there. By that measure, I can safely say that all 3rd party systems must be ineffective, because there are so many people having problems... ;-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.5.25 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgpjMbhX5F0nE.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.5.25 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: Bayesit - how does it mark a message as spam?
Hello Nick, Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 3:58:37 PM, you wrote: ND Aside from the fact that mails are put into a spam folder by ND bayesit, I can't find any other sign in the message. Is this so? As far as I can tell, TB doesn't mark the message at all - which I personally find quite disappointing. Each anti-spam plug-in that The Bat! uses keeps its own separate logs, which you can use. In the vase of BayesIt, the logs are here: \Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\BayesIt\ The file name will be bayesit.log. (I'm assuming Windows 2000/XP, by the way - no idea where it is on other platforms, but the filename will be the same and you could search on it...) I've used BayesIt for about a year now, I think, and it's almost flawless. I was getting only a couple of mails a day pass it by, and those were generally blank mails - no text to analyse means that BayesIt is somewhat hamstrung! Because of those blank emails, I added the Bayes Filter Plugin as a second plugin. You can find that here: http://www.lkcc.org/achim It's good, and I chose it because unlike BayesIt (as far as I know), it also does RBL lookups - with which I hope to catch those blank emails. I've had to drop my spam filtering options to use the Minimal score for filtering, and I now see more spam per day - but the figure is going down as I train Bayes Filter Plugin, so I'm happy to accept this for a while. I mention the second plugin because it shows the real problem with spam logs in The Bat! - many people will tell you where BayesIt's logs are, as I just have. And I can also find the Bayes Filter Plugin's own logs. But I'll have to read BOTH sets of logs to figure out what's going on definitively. Actually, I won't. I can read The Bat's logs if I like. CTRL+SHIFT+A will show me the logs for the account I'm in, and in there you'll see when The Bat! has had a message reported as spam by a plugin. It'll be on a line starting with the words FILTER (after the date and time,of course) - but you'll probably have to scroll far to the right to actually see if it's the Junk Mail filters or one of your own filters. With just the BayesIt plugin, it won't be so bad for yourself. You can read just the bayesit.log file, and that'll help you. It's certainly going to be much easier than reading The Bat!'s own logs... But I have two plugins. Each one might report a different score, and that makes it difficult to spot exactly what's going on... What was the score reported by the plugin APIs? Remember, with morethan one plugin, you have three possibilities: Use the maximum score, the average or the minimal. So if one plugin reports a score of 99 and one reports a score of 0, this is what those settings would report: Maximal: 99 Average: ~50 Minimal: 0 If BayesIt reported 99, and I'm using Minimal or Average (with a threshold of over 50), then I'd see in the BayesIt logs that it was spam but not realise that The Bat! never thought it was spam. This can get very confusing very quickly. Especially as, at the end of the day, what the plugin reports is ONLY important if oyu have just one plugin. Now, I'll grant you most people only have one plugin, but I like defence in depth and I think that multiple plugins is a good idea. It's just very badly supported by The Bat!'s logging mechanism. The Bat!'s log reader is a bit basic. I'd really like to see a much better log tool - one which allows me to see all log entries across all accounts, and also to filter based on account, action (fetch/send/filter etc) and to search for specific text (so that I can check my logs for messages from specific addresses, to see if a rule inadvertantly filtered it) and so forth. I'm not in a hurry to get such a feature, but in my opinion The Bat!'s logs will be unusable until such a feature arrives. As to your original question, I have no problem with the Plugins marking the message. But I'd rather that the actual problem was dealt with: decent logging. If I had good logs, I wouldn't even think to check the headers of the message to see what had happened... ;-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v3.0.1.33 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 pgpYwRqArIeV7.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 3.0.1.33 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: Bayesit training - how long before results?
Hello Christopher, Friday, August 27, 2004, 6:32:48 PM, you wrote: CB Hi List, CB I installed bayesit 0.5.5 about a week ago. I trained it up CB on the folder of junk mail I had collected, and on the non-junk. CB Then every morning, I do a manual 'mark as junk'. To date, my junk CB folder contains 1667 messages. The total from my non-junk folders CB is about 3000. CB Here is some info from the plugin: snips info I think you've not trained it well enough on what ISN'T spam. When I first trained BayesIt, it still had the ability to scan folders when installed. RitLabs asked for this to be removed, as you can't scan folders in SecureBat! that way - and they wanted the BayesIt plugin to work for both The Bat! and SecureBat. So now you have to train it yourself. This, IMHO, is not made clear. What's made even less clear is that BayesIt needs to know both what's spam and non-spam. Before you train it, you need to make a good effort to clean up all your folders of spam - move any spam to a makeshift junk folder. Then go into each one non junk folder, and train BayesIt on which mail ISN'T spam. Then train it on what is spam from your makeshift junk folder by marking all its contents as spam. I even marked my Sent mails as not-junk when training, on the egotistical presumption that nobody writes the kind of email I'd like to recieve better than myself! *grins* OK, so that's not quite true - my emails can be bad. But they do contain the kind of keywords that I wouldn't mind recieving, so they do make good stuff for marking as non-junk. Remember that BayesIt works statistically. It compares the contents of messages to both what your definition of normal mail is AND your definition of spam mail. Without both definitions, you may not get as good a set of results. I didn't realise this at first - I just marked mail as junk. Only when I marked mail as non-junk did I get anywhere - filtering then worked just fine! Here are my statistics for the BayesIt plugin: BayesIt! filter information Antispam filtering data: Spam frequency dictionary: * C:\...\spamdict.bye * Size: 15376 letters. * Capacity: 390982 words. Non-spam frequency dictionary: * C:\...\nspamdict.bye * Size: 24251 letters. * Capacity: 451531 words. Current active base: * Active current base contains 137896 words. * Status: OK Note that my figures for non-spam appear stronger. I now get very little spam sneaking past BayesIt - just the newish ASCII art spams, and the classic empty HTML message with a picture of the text. Both are understandably hard to filter, so I have no problems with this. I get one a day at most anyway. ;-) One caveat with this explanation, though - I recieve much more legitimate email than spam, because I'm on mailing lists like this one. If I were on no lists and got very little legitimate email, I suppose the stats could conceivably be the other way around. You want the stats to at least reflect the general direction of the spam/non-spam ratio in your mail flow, I suppose... CB Bayesit has yet to find a junk message on its own. The CB 'general numbers' are obviously wrong...Is that the problem? Do CB the dictionary sizes look right? I can't possibly say for certain, but they don't look like mine. And my BayesIt plugin is working satisfactorily. Therefore, I can only humbly suggest that you aspire to match my figures, using the methods I have outlined above. ;-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.12.00 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 1 pgpeP66nNmbZV.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.12.00 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: Anti-spam
Hello Adam, Tuesday, June 1, 2004, 9:10:18 PM, you wrote: A I am not using a recent TB version too much. But, it isn't clear, does A it have a complete solution against spam on board? It seems like you A have a couple menu entries. But you wonder, where is the intelligence? A It's not fighting spam already. The Bat! doesn't fight spam. It provides an interface for other products to fight spam through itself. The Anti-Spam plugin interface effectively allows plugins to look at email as they arrive, and use whatever rules they like to determine whether or not they are spam. The plugin reports a score of spamminess, and The Bat! then handles the spam according to the user's wishes (e.g. moves mail that scores over x to a folder, and deletes mail that scores over y.) A If you get a message like: A Cable_TV Filter Lets You Get It ALL_FOR_NOTHING, IF: b1hgq16776 A Then I guess you can suggest that this is a spam message. And later, A how is one to know if you get a message from a cable company, that it A isn't a newsletter about cable TV? That's down to the plugin, not to The Bat! - you could write plugins to handle this differently. Spam can be detected in many ways. A common method I use on email servers I maintain is to reject mail that doesn't have a valid domain in the from address - much spam comes from [EMAIL PROTECTED] - a completely random domain string. That's a good sign of spam. The most common anti-spam plugin for The Bat! (BayesIt) primarily uses a statistical analysis of the email - it looks for words that are common to spam, but not to legitimate email. In your example, the words all for nothing are perhaps important - if you don't get legitimate emails regularly that contain them, then they'll get assigned a greater weight of spamminess. The actual spamminess score of the whole email is calculated by looking at how many words in the mail are common spam words, and how many aren't - notice how many spams are very short? They'll score highly. Whereas that legitimate email from a cable TV company will be long - it'll have lots of details, some boilerplate legal stuff, and so forth. So the email as a whole scores much lower. Over time, the filter learns what the spam you receive looks like, and how it differs statistically from the legitimate email you receive. A Do anti-spam tools used in the Bat work with, or do they obsolesce A other anti-spam applications? Not necessarily. You can use systems like POPFile with The Bat!, but personally I don't see much value in doing so. Filters that sit in front of mail clients (like POPFile) take longer to train and are much less likely to build up a good base of statistics that show what your legitimate email looks like, especially if you don't receive much legitimate email when compared with the volume of spam. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.10.03 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgpWiH6I92O4G.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.10.03 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: [thebat] Re: Anti-spam
Hello Lou, Tuesday, June 1, 2004, 10:15:01 PM, you wrote: LY Tuesday, June 1, 2004, 4:27:30 PM, you wrote: LY At the risk of sounding argumentative, which is not my intent: ;-) LY Any antispam program, plug in or not, has to sit in front of the LY email, before the mail client decides where to filter it. Popfile is easy to LY train and here it is running in the neighborhood of 99.5% accuracy. I have LY magnets set for much of the legit mail which makes it much easier on popfile. LY I don't bother to check the spam filtered messages for most of my mailboxes, LY only the business ones and then only occaisonally. I've found that BayesIt is remarkably accurate, and I've not lost mail to it yet. It hasn't quite had enough 419's to spot them all, though - mostly because 419's are long, and therefore harder to spot anyway. But that's about my only real complaint - if you can call it complaint. LY I have never tried BayesIt, but will have to do so. Maybe I can get it up to LY 100%... Being a plug in makes it easier to install and set up, but does not, LY in itself, affect accuracy. My take is to try them all and then choose. Being a plugin does affect accuracy in a way. I probably wasn't clear enough - because you can select and entire folder and mark as Not Junk, BayesIt can build up a remarkably good picture of your legitimate mail. Most users of BayesIt seem to report that when they do look at the logs, they find that mails are very polarised - they're either scoring highly for spam, or not scoring much at all. Out of every 100 messages, I probably get only one or two that don't score enough to be deleted immediately (99 or higher on my system) or zero. Most users will have a lot of legitimate pre-filtered email. Being able to quickly teach your filters what that looks like makes, in my experience, for a more accurate filter. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.10.03 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgpaBqt9UkEya.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.10.03 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: Why should I use PGP ?
Hello Cyrille, Friday, May 28, 2004, 10:51:07 AM, you wrote: C Why should I use PGP ? Why not? PGP (or GPG) are mostly used by people for signing emails. If you want people to be able to say, with certainty, that an email was from you then the best way is to sign it. After all, I could easily set up my own SMTP server and spoof your from address if I wanted to - but I can't forge your PGP signature very easily. Such digital signatures are also considered legally binding in some territories, I believe. I must admit I've never used it for encryption - just signing. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.10.03 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgpUNUeTGJ96f.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.10.03 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: Anti-spam
Hello Adam, Tuesday, June 1, 2004, 10:42:02 PM, you wrote: A Hello Philip, A I was using the menu items for marking junk. But so far it hadn't had A a clear effect. It moved the messages I was on to a Junk mail folder. A But it did not act on later mail. Mark some mail as Not Junk. Just pick some folders that are representative of your mail, and that you know to be spam free - for instance, your Inbox, your Inbox Known, and perhaps your TBUDL mailing list folder. For each folder, select all emails and right click on them, choosing Specials - Mark as NOT Junk. BayesIt is a fine filter, but recent versions of it seem to need to know what both junk and legitimate mail look like for you. I found that BayesIt marked just about everything as junk, until I went through a few folders and marked the mail as Not Junk. A How can you tell what the score was given to an e-mail? There are some logs it produces - on NT/2K/XP systems, they're stored in \Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\BayesIt - look for BayesIt.log, and ~BayesIt.log - the latter is a temporary log which will be merged back with the main logfile when you close The Bat!... A Let's say I go to the Bat Preferences/ Anti-Spam. At the top, it says A Anti-Spam plugins. And in the white box, it says BayesIt! Does this A mean it is currently doing spam processing? Yes, it should be. A If I click F1 now, A it says: A The topic does not exist. Contact your application vendor for an A updated Help file. They should probably update that. It's not a problem with BayesIt, but with The Bat!'s help. ;-) A Now, if I move along, and manage to click Configure, I get another A menu of buttons. The top button seems to be asking me what language I A would like to use. Now, I guess that is very friendly. Although, spam A seems to be multi-national, doesn't it? And it doesn't matter whose A inbox it flies into, or what country they may live. It is the same A class of a thing in any case. Now, If I try this button here, I get a A screen and it says I can pick a language from a list. But there does A not seem to be a list from which a selection can be made. Is this the A same for you? Nope. What version of BayesIt is reported? (It'll be the second column in the list of Anti-Spam plugins) I'm running 0.5.4 A Is the base of statistics visible to the user? Not in any human-readable format as far as I know. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.10.03 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgpkBo4Gsd0a8.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.10.03 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: Yahoo SMTP does work with the Bat!
Hello Britt, Sunday, May 23, 2004, 1:21:31 PM, you wrote: BH I was quite sure that I had done this, since I tried out all the BH options before I sent my question to the list. But now I've tried it BH once again - and this time it works! (Have no idea why it didn't work BH before.) Thank you very much! No problem. As an aside, when I re-read my instructions I was suddenly remarkably happy that The Bat! has no grammar checker. It's bad enough using The Bat!'s proper name (with the exclamation mark) in a sentence - but having to use Yahoo!'s proper branding as well would send any grammar checker except a human into conniptions! (And this human is pretty close to them anyway!) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.10.03 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgpqpTzPxKgNc.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.10.03 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: Yahoo SMTP doesn't work with the Bat?!
Hello Britt, Friday, May 21, 2004, 9:40:52 AM, you wrote: BH This yahoo-address is not my ordinary address that I'm using BH in The Bat. When I started a new account there to be able to post BH to this list with The Bat, POP worked but not SMTP, so I had to BH post from another mail client or from the web mail. I thought it BH was something temporary with the server, but it seems not to be BH (the text below is copied from Yahoo). This is not a major issue BH for me at all since I'm normally not using this address in The BH Bat, but for somebody who uses Yahoo and only has The Bat it BH certainly would be. Does any of you have the same experience and BH have a solution? It's working just fine for me. Looking at the error message, the problem is clear: Errors Sending Mail (SMTP) The Yahoo! Mail SMTP server requires authentication. To learn how to configure your email program, please choose from the following supported programs: Let's ignore the big long list of programs - that's a distraction. The problem seems to be that you're not actually authenticating when sending mail. Yahoo!'s SMTP servers require authentication, probably to prevent abuse by spammers etc. With the Inbox of your Yahoo! account selected, go to the Account menu and choose Properties Go to the Transport section, and click on the Authentication... button next to the SMTP Server field. Ensure that the option Perform SMTP Authentication (RFC 2554) is checked. For Yahoo!, you should ensure that the option below titled Use settings of Mail Retrieval is checked - this will force The Bat! to use the Yahoo! password entered for POP3 retrieval, which is the master Yahoo! password - this just saves you from entering your Yahoo! username and password more than once. (And prevents typing errors from causing you any aggravation.) I've just happily sent a test message from my Yahoo! account to this account, and read the drivel I sent without problems - so this definitely works. ;-) The long list of programs that are supported mail clients more than likely refers to the help that Yahoo! can give you - they can't possibly give instructions for every mail client, nor can they teach their support staff every mail client. Therefore, they concentrate on what they see as the most popular mail clients. (How Incredimail got on that list I'll never know. *grins*) The omission of The Bat! is evidently a grave one, so I shall send them a snotty mail when I next come to renew my POP3 access with Yahoo! ;-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.10.03 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgpcw9KYfml6W.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.10.03 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: TB! annoyances
Hello Martin, Thursday, May 6, 2004, 9:05:59 PM, you wrote: MW Here are a few things that are hardly bugs but do nonetheless need MW resolution. I guess they're not as important as proper IMAP support, bug MW fixing etc. but nonetheless will lead to a more polished product. In no MW order of importance... An interesting list. I'd like to add my own items: 11. I'd like a memo present flag 12. I'd like a scheduled event flag 13. I'd like a known/unknown flag for addresses 14. I'd like a Full conversation virtual view Item 11: Memo present flag. Memos look good. I'd like to use them, I really would. I can see how they'd be useful. Especially as the text of memos can be searched separately from the body of emails, for instance. But I just can't use them that well unless I know memos are present on emails - otherwise, I'll probably never see my memos again, knowing me. So they're useless in the current implementation. I could add the Memo column to my views. But that shows the text of the memo. So for it to be anywhere near aesthetically useful, I'll want to assign it enough space in the view to show at least one word. Except most emails don't have memos - so that's a lot of space to dedicate to a field that's not used that much. The solution? When a memo is added, add a flag to the email saying it has a memo. This means that you can now show it as a flag in a similar way to the parked flag, the attachment flag and the flagged flag. That would be truly useful. This feature request truly comes into its own with the new virtual folders - because it's a flag, you can now quickly search large message bases for emails with memos (as opposed to doing a lengthy text-based search). So a virtual folder can be used to keep tabs on all your memos, making memos a truly useful feature - rather than something highly likely to be forgotten. Item 12: A Scheduled Event flag. See the reasoning for item 11, really. Another great feature in The Bat! that could make it truly exceptional, as current scheduling is a little flaky. Emails with events scheduled against them need to have a flag, so that it's easily visible. I know that the scheduler does more than just emails, but this would go some way to making the scheduler more visible. Also, if some work is done to make scheduled event details quickly visible, the scheduler would become more useful. I suggest adding a clock icon in the header information when you're previewing or viewing a message - clicking on the icon should show you the details of the event. But that's for the future - a flag that you can use in views or searches is the first step to really making the scheduler more visible and usable. Item 13: A known/unknown address flag Not for use in views, funnily enough. The idea here is more that when you're viewing a message, The Bat! should give you active feedback as to whether it knows the recipient via your address books - an icon seems like the best way, just showing the contact card. (And perhaps a contact card with a question mark on it if they're not in your address book.) Put the icon in the header information, preferably after the name on the from line. I don't think we need this in the to/cc/bcc lines, just the from line to start with. Clicking on the icon should take you to the contact's address book entry, or if there isn't one it should offer to create one for you. Item 14: A Full Conversation view. We can piece together threads in mailing lists fantastically in The Bat!, but private correspondance is a nightmare. I'm left to manually track back through conversations via open reply and guesswork. And as a slap in the face, The Bat! will thread my mails in the Sent folder, or their mails in my Inbox (or whatever folder) - but not all of the messages together! Perhaps I'm missing something, but I can't see a way to see the whole thread of correspondence between me and someone else if we're not using a mailing list. All that's needed here is a special class of virtual folder which take the message you have highlighted and searches for all messages related to it - and then threads them together for you. It would make tracking emails much easier. Notes: These are all just niceties. I can continue to not use Memos, for instance. It would just be nice to be able to use them. And the scheduled flag - well, I just don't use the scheduler right now. Instead, I flag messages and then use a virtual folder to show all flagged messages, which I then deal with at my leisure. So I have my own personal workaround on that item, and as I said I think it's more something to consider when the scheduler gets a little more integration into the rest of The Bat! - which it will hopefully get one day. The address flags are purely a nicety, based on me wondering whether or not I had added someone to the address book earlier today. I had to open my address book to confirm it, and at that point I wondered why The Bat! wasn't doing the work for me... And the
Re[3]: Version 2.1?
Hello Miles, Friday, April 16, 2004, 3:07:25 PM, you wrote: MJ One would think Ritlabs would have sent a correction with the new MJ date. It's as basic as it gets in term of professionalism and MJ after all, it should just be child's play, one or a few clicks MJ away for them, right? It would be nice, but if it's not a few clicks for them - and sending such a mass mail might not be - then I'd rather they were finishing the product. MJ Will Ritlabs EVER grow up and act as a respectable/reputable MJ company? This is getting old... With regards to releases, please give us an example of a software company that has grown up and become respectable/reputable. I'm trying to think of one that hasn't missed a release date ever. I can't. In fact, all I can think about is how the giants of the industry *coughs*MICROSOFT!*coughs* practically live on the vapourware of their next releases. Even outside the software industry, companies have troubles with release dates. And other problems, like keeping up with demand - are Sony or Hasbro less respectable/reputable because this Christmas' surprise must have gift just isn't available enough to meet demand? It seems like it happens every year, doesn't it? ;-) MJ Oh well thanks for the update Marek. How lucky for RT to have MJ people like you doing their work for them! As opposed to those giants of the industry, who get the computing press to repeat their press releases verbatim without checking facts, and fill their rags with screenshots of products you won't be able to buy for months? ;-) Sorry for this playful teasing - but I do think you're perhaps missing the most important thing - you never delay a software release unless there's a problem with it. I'd rather have a small delay than a product they knew had a fault. And more to the point, Ritlabs evidently had a date in mind and felt they could meet it. I just went along to look for some release notes, to see if I should upgrade or not. I can't see any on the website - but then, I'd rather not see release notes before the download. I'm a little miffed they've not appeared after the download's available, but at least I don't know what I'm missing right now. When the notes are available, then I'll decide if it's worth upgrading... -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.04.7 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.10.01 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: How is The Bat's IMAP support?
Hello Robin, Sunday, March 21, 2004, 2:26:34 PM, you wrote: RH I have not downloaded The Bat! yet on this computer, though I tried it on RH my last one, and did like it. I used it for POP3 mail. However, I do RH have IMAP capabilities with my webmail (Fastmail) and I have been told RH that IMAP is better than POP3. RH I tried Thunderbird, but it crashed on me and to me seemed quite buggy. RH So, I am looking for another client that could also be good with IMAP to RH try, and I once again looked at The Bat! RH Thoughts? I've not had any problems with The Bat!'s IMAP support, although there is a vocal contingent who apparently do. It seems to depend, more than anything else, on how hard you want to push IMAP. If you don't mind me saying so, you don't seem too certain on what IMAP is, or how it's different to POP3. So I'll try to sum it up as quickly as possible... IMAP allows you to access and manage your mail on the server, as well as on your client. It understands the idea of folders, and allows you to create them ON THE SERVER, and move messages into them as required. This is different to POP3, which really just has an Inbox. You pull all your mail from the Inbox, and usually use your email client software to move it into folders in your local mail store. Basically, there's not much incentive with POP3 to leave email on the server. You can do that, but most people don't - it's easier to have the mail locally, where you (hopefully) don't have a storage space issue. Remember, most commercial email providers allow you to store n Megabytes of mail only - usually a figure between 10 to 100Mb. Webmail on a POP3 email server is useful, but because everything's in one large single folder it can be hard to find messages. I get between 150 to 300 messages a day to this email account, making webmail impractical for me - it takes ages to find anything! If my email server used IMAP, I could use The Bat! to create folders on the server and move messages into those folders, without having to download them to my PC. That would make webmail usable for me. However, as I have a 50Mb mailbox limit, it would also only take a week or two to fill my mailbox - so I'd still need to pull mail down locally after a while. IMAP is a nice protocol. But my first thought is that before you switch to it, you need to check whether or not it suits the way you use email. Do you currently (with POP3) leave your email on the server? Does your email provider allow you enough space to do that for more than a week or so? (Given how much email you typically get...) If the answer to both those questions is no, then it's likely that IMAP is going to be useless to you - you'll end up setting up a complex server-side folder system which will just be wasted, as it doesn't suit the way you use email. (I have close to 300Mb of archives, even with The Bat!'s excellent folder maintenance - purging mailing lists of emails older than 28 days etc... - so I'd need a BIG mailbox for IMAP to work for me.) I hope those thoughts help you. :-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.04.7 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.04.7 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: How is The Bat's IMAP support?
Hello Allie, Sunday, March 21, 2004, 4:09:59 PM, you wrote: PS I've not had any problems with The Bat!'s IMAP support, although PS there is a vocal contingent who apparently do. AM Things have been very smooth here of late. No problems except for AM performance issues on a slow connection. I was thinking more of the hordes of comments that are left on Ritlabs' forums - it would seem that some are disappointed with the IMAP support. But as I said, it's working fine for me. :-) PS It seems to depend, more than anything else, on how hard you want PS to push IMAP. AM I'm not sure what you mean here. If you're genuinely having problems AM with TB!'s IMAP how does pushing IMAP help the situation? Are you AM referring to pushing for improvements? Sorry - sloppy wording on my part. for on how hard you want to push IMAP, you should really read on how complex and large your goals for handling email with IMAP are. The word push was used in a slang context, to denote how hard you were planning to push The Bat!'s support of the IMAP protocol to its limits. I can see why what I wrote must have been confusing. My apologies if this has caused anyone any inconvenience. ;-) AM The server space issue is an important one or else it could lead to a AM lot of maintenance issues, i.e., moving mail regularly to local AM folders. Indeed. The IMAP accounts that I do have are usually on unix machines that I have shell accounts on, so that I can log in remotely and manage web services and systems that I have some responsibility for. :-) AM However, TB! seems to have some interesting purging options here that AM I'll be shortly giving a try just to see how well they work with IMAP. AM You can have messages deleted during a purge operation, be moved to AM another folder rather than be simply deleted. I must admit I'm low-usage enough that I'm in no danger of wanted to purge mail from my various IMAP accounts. Partly because they only tend to get mail from the systems I mentioned earlier, and partly because I like to be able to read my mail with mutt when I'm logged in via SSH. But that's getting a little off topic, I fear! ;-) AM I haven't had the need to do this since my IMAP server is on one of AM my systems so my space issues are determined by me and they're AM currently 'unlimited' within the scope of my e-mail. It's great having that sort of freedom of space. :-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.04.7 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.04.7 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: MIME enabled or not?
Hello Admin, Saturday, March 13, 2004, 10:56:46 PM, you wrote: AaA Have just received this email message: AaA Your Email Client does not support MIME encoding. Please upgrade to AaA MIME-enabled Email Client (almost every modern Email Client is MIME-capable). Ah, I recognise that. You and I are customers of the same company, I suspect. :-) (I'm not naming names, to respect your privacy. I hope everyone else on the list can forgive the fact that it makes this reply somewhat vague.) AaA Before I fire off a rude email to the sender concerned could someone AaA cofimr that The Bat does support MIME encpding and maybe siomeone AaA could suggest the appropriate technical wording for the reply. Yes, The Bat! does support MIME. The problem is that they're sending you a multi-part MIME Message with a text component and a HTML component - and instead of putting a text equivalent of the HTML part in, they're putting this daft message there instead. I'd suggest you reply with: My client does support MIME, but I have chosen to not view the HTML components of MIME multi-part messages. I am disappointed to see that you don't provide a text equivalent in the text component of the message - and even more disappointed that you have placed a misleading 'error message' there instead. Could you please consider a text alternative in future emails, rather than this useless and misleading text? Or something along those lines. ;-) The message should have a HTML component as well, if this is the same email as the one I have. You may not be seeing it, depending on your options for viewing messages - go to the Options menu, then to Preferences. Then go to the Viewer/Editor section. There are preferences there for HTML mail and alternative text (Text and HTML) - there are four options available for each. The options are: * HTML Only * HTML and Plain Text version * Plain Text version and HTML * Plain Text version only I recommend setting both of these preferences to Plain Text version and HTML. The list looks a little redundant - the middle two options are surely the same thing? However, they define which version The Bat! shows FIRST. Because I have it set to Plain Text version and HTML, I get two tabs at the bottom of my message viewer - one labelled Text, one labelled HTML. For the message you describe, I see the text first but can switch to the HTML by clicking on the other tab. If I chose HTML and Plain Text version, the tab order would be reversed - I would see the HTML version first, and would have to click on the Text tab to see the plain text version. If you have it set to HTML Only or Plain Text only, you get no tabs - just whichever part of the message you chose. I'm guessing you've set this preference to Plain Text Only. Which is fine, until someone sends you a message like the one you received today. :-) I hope this helps you. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02.3 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.04.7 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: Perhaps a bit off-topic, but a curiosity question here ...
Hello Dirigo, Monday, February 16, 2004, 4:40:58 PM, you wrote: D Has anyone else experienced this type of notification re: thebat.exe I'm using the latest version of Sygate Personal Firewall (freeware version), and have not experienced these kinds of problems. The only time I'm ever told that The Bat! has changed is if I update The Bat! to a new version. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02.3 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.02.3 CE | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[4]: Bayesit
Hello Stuart, Friday, January 23, 2004, 6:53:12 PM, you wrote: SC BayesFilter SC Download: http://www.lkcc.org:8500/download/bayesfilter.zip SC SC BayesIT SC Download: http://klirik.narod.ru/usefuls/bayesit.htm SC SC VampireX SC Download: http://vampirex.fabiangonzalez.cl/ Thanks for the information - I'll try having a go with those over the next week. :-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02.3 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.02.3 CE | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[4]: Bayesit
Hello Terry, Friday, January 23, 2004, 7:13:11 PM, you wrote: T Thanks for your response, but I think you must have misunderstood what T I wrote. Evidently. Sorry about that. T I'm not using the beta, so I am on the right list. Ah - some of the replies were mentioning betas, so I just wanted to be sure. Sorry I couldn't help. :-( -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02.3 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.02.3 CE | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: Bayesit
Hello Terry, Friday, January 23, 2004, 10:58:14 AM, you wrote: T That's the same question I had. As I have SpamAssassin on the mail T server, most of my spam gets caught and filtered that way, but I was T hoping that this would catch the one or two that slip by every week. If SpamAssassin on your mail server is preventing spam mails from getting to your copy of The Bat!, then you should really disable it. Having two spam filters is not actually a good idea in most cases. If one deletes a spam or otherwise stops it from being seen by the other filter, then the other filter cannot evaluate it. Worse, if it if a statistical filter - a bayesian one like bayesit - then that filter will not learn about the spam's content and be able to update its filtering. The only exception for this that I can think of is the way The Bat! implements its plug-in architecture - which allows multiple filters, all of which report a score. You can then choose to act on the lowest (minimal) or highest (maximal) amongst the results, or to use an average from all filters. (See the anti-spam plugin filters preference page for details - it's not obvious at first!) This multi-plugin capability means that The Bat! would decide what to do after all filters have had a chance to look at the mail and report their findings. It also means that marking mail as junk would cause it to be analysed by multiple filters, improving the detection by all filters in the future. However, at the moment, I'm only aware of one free filter plugin for spam - bayesit - so this very nice feature of The Bat! goes unused as yet. Hopefully you can now see why the plugin architecture is so valuable, though. SpamAssassin should at most be marking suspected spam with some kind of subject alteration or header, and then you should let bayesit candle it as normal. If you're filtering on modifications made by SpamAssassin and not marking the filtered mails as junk for bayesit, it will never learn. To be honest, because of this I would tend to say that you should run only one anti-spam precaution - unless additional ones are also plug-ins for The Bat!. Anything else risks not correctly training the bayesit plugin. Of course, this could also be a failing in a beta of The Bat! - in which case, aren't you on the wrong mailing list? ;-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02.3 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.02.3 CE | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: 2.0 Underwhelmed...
Hello Maurice, Tuesday, December 23, 2003, 8:35:46 PM, you wrote: MS I will probably never cease to be amazed by the apparently MS omnipresent expectation that all software must be either self MS evident or otherwise self explanatory. It's primarily an internal IT industry expectation - take a person who's never seen a PC before, and they're just as likely to be perplexed or scared by the experience. But those in the industry can usually barely remember when they were in that situation, so it just doesn't enter our thoughts. However, once people have a little knowledge, they feel that they should be able to expand this knowledge quickly. So everything must be very visible. (I'll come back to this later.) Ironically, the one attempt to MAKE functionality visible - the Office Assistant in Microsoft Office - is almost universally despised because it's interruptive. So they're replacing such technologies with pop-up tooltips - witness the Windows XP I've hidden your System Tray Icons notifications - which tend to annoy just as many people. MS In most every profession where some kind of tool is used, it is MS accepted that initially people need to learn how to use the tool MS unless such use is trivial. Agreed. Training is paramount - without it, people are just working with assumptions and habits. Companies that depend on uninformed assumptions and habits tend to spend a lot of time trying to recover data, in my experience. MS Business e-mail is, in my opinion, not a trivial tool. Just like MS business correspondence is not a trivial tool in doing business. I've MS heard of secretaries who are required to follow a course in official MS Dutch correspondence which is an evening course of several hours per MS week for a duration of 39 weeks. For email, the basics for any package can be covered in a morning. A more advanced course can take a day. That gives everything you need for business use - you don't need to delve into the deeply technical for such a thing. A company I worked for did such courses, and had far fewer complaints from customers that had taken the training option than from those that hadn't. MS So, can someone explain why it is that a company pays money to have a MS secretary learn correspondence, but expects that same secretary to be MS able to properly use e-mail without any instruction or guidance? Or is MS it just that nobody cares. It's an assumption. In my work life, I work with Lotus Notes and Domino. It's a very flexible, powerful product. Yet many customers slate it because it's not like Outlook. They're familiar with Outlook. They want Outlook, because they THINK they know it. Take an untrained person, and they'll tell you Outlook is better. Put them through the training, and then ask them how to do what they've just learnt in Outlook. They're stumped. They have a basic familiarity with email that comes from Outlook. Therefore, they believe that the Outlook methods and interface are the best, most productive ways. I don't believe anyone on this mailing list would particularly agree with that - and I don't believe that Outlook is a better email client than The Bat! for most types of uses. (Let's not get into an argument on whether Notes is better. Let's just say that if Notes only did email, it would make things simpler - but then, it would also make Notes just another email client. *grins*) Returning to what I said earlier about a little knowledge... The problem is that with a little knowledge, people expect further knowledge gain to be incrementally easier each time - because there's a sweet spot between not knowing anything and knowing that little where the knowledge is gained very rapidly. When trying to get even more knowledge, the amount of effort required tends to increase - any student can verify this for you! As always, cost tends to annoy us - whether it's financial or time. It's not a battle any developer of any software package can win. :-( -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.02.3 CE | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: 2.0 Underwhelmed...
Hello Tony, Tuesday, December 23, 2003, 9:09:15 PM, you wrote: TM To use an analogy, the owner's manual for my car doesn't TM discuss how to drive, or what gasoline is, but it does tell me TM where the gasoline tank is filled on _my car_, and it does tell me TM about ways in which my car might handle differently from other TM cars I'm used to. A bad analogy. Because in almost every country in the world that provides and maintains a good infrastructure for you to use a car on, you're required to have passed a driving test. Therefore, before you could take that car out onto a road to fill it up - and thus encounter all the small differences in its controls and handling that exist between it and other cars - you have to have learnt something about driving the car anyway. You may not need to know what gasoline is, but the chances are that at some point the driving instructor will have pointed out what the gasoline gauge looks like on the dash of his car. (Or whatever car you're learning to drive in.) And although you're not required to know anythng about how the car works, basic functions like gasoline, water for the windscreen (sorry - windsheild - I'm British, please bear with me if that's wrong!) wipers and oil for the car are taken as read. The manual WILL tell you where to put water, oil, and gasoline. And amongst car owners, stories tend to be circulated about people that run out of such things - as either I'm so dumb - guess what I did stories, or as I know a guy... stories. So there is an urban grapevine that provides such information for the car owner. TM The same is true with the manual for a typewriter. It doesn't tell TM the user how to type, but it does tell the things about this TM particular model of typewriter that are different from what the TM user learned before. But a typewriter is a very basic thing. There are electric typewriters that allow you to compose entire paragraphs in a word-processor style before they'll print them - but those have manuals, which people will read because they're probably not familiar with them. And if they have used such an electric typewriter before and they switch models and do something wrong, they'll probably blame themselves for not reading the manual of the new machine. Eventually. ;-) Both these analogies have one thing in common - there are basics that are fulfilled in the case of a car or a typewriter that you either know or do not know. If you don't know them, you will be compelled to discover them. (In the first case, legally compelled.) You spoke a lot in your message of your expectations, and how The Bat! should say how it is different to the mail client you were using. A fine theory, but quite unscalable - when the manual is being written for just you, it's easy. When it's being written for five people - all of whom have used different mail clients - it becomes difficult. When it's being written for tens of thousands of people, many of whom come from different mail clients, it becomes nearly impossible. A manual must, because of this, take you from the basics towards the advanced - so that you do not have assumptions from previous software products that are actually wrong for this specific product. I agree with you that experimentation must not be necessary for users to learn software, and that most software documentation is bad. And I believe that we'd probably agree that The Bat! needs a better manual / on-line help. But I also think that the manual needs to be better organised from a complete beginner's point of view - when looked at from such a viewpoint, the current help is very poorly organised... -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.02.3 CE | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: Is everyone having problems with CE?
Hello Richard, Thursday, December 11, 2003, 1:28:39 PM, you wrote: RHS I've read some of the problems people are having with the new 2.02CE RHS release. I've never had any problems before when upgrading,but have RHS hesitated this time given the complaints; plus, I'm not having any RHS problems with 2.01.3. Is everyone having problems with the CE, or are RHS there some happy and bug-free users out there? I wouldn't say I'm completely bug-free. I've been hit by the now well publicised messagelist/folder view bug. Basically, I'd expect to have your column formatting in all your messages reset to something unusable. It's easy to reset - my account defaults weren't changed, just the individual folders. Select the folder and right click, and choose its properties. (Or just select it and hit ALT+Enter - it's faster, but took me ages to realise it!) There's a new option for Column Settings. Set it to Use Account Default Column Settings, or to View Mode Generic. As you move through your mail when it arrives (using CTRL+left or right arrows), do this to each folder. It's a small annoyance, but it's only got to be done once per folder. At the moment, I'd recommend going for the account defaults rather than the view mode. This frees you up to fiddle with view modes later on, and explore the feature fully. It also means that any minor niggles with your account default can be fixed across all folders by changing your account default settings - which will save a lot of time. Note that there's a button that offers to copy the settings to other views. This works, but not with the Use Account Default Column Settings option. That's why I've not told you to use it. ;-) It does work with View Mode Generic, but that doesn't leave you very free to explore the new feature in my opinion. That's why I recommend resetting each folder to the account defaults manually. However, I'm sure there are people on this list that will disagree - it's the way of any feature that gives you such choices! :-) I hope that helps. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.02.3 CE | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[3]: Is everyone having problems with CE?
Hello Jack, Thursday, December 11, 2003, 6:12:52 PM, you wrote: JM Okay, I may have found another one. I just downloaded and installed JM the CE and now I can't PRINT a message! Not in any view. JM I can still print in all of my other applications (Word, Excel, JM ClipMate, Agent, etc.), but not in The Bat!. It just feeds out a blank JM sheet of paper, after looking like it's about to print. JM I printed several messages just yesterday, in the previous version, JM and had no problems. I've installed no new programs, no XP updates, JM no nothing. JM Can anyone else confirm this? Nope, sorry - I just printed out both your messages without problems. The first time, I had the Message Auto-View on. Just to be sure, I then turned it off and printed your second message. I suppose you could try rummaging through the settings in the Printer Setup (Message - Print Setup) and just checking that everything in there still looks sensible... -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature Current version is 2.02.3 CE | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: Antivirus question
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hello Steve, Saturday, July 19, 2003, 12:32:59 AM, you wrote: SMK Grisoft's free-for-personal-use AVG runs fine with The Bat! on my Windows SMK 98SE systems. It's stopped quite a few viri (viruses???). Viruses. Virii is more commonly used in the virus writing and magazine community. The antivirus community prefers to use the word viruses. They claim grammatical correctness, but there can sometimes be a sense that they're just doing it to set up a culture barrier between themselves and the virus-creators. If you want to be taken seriously by those who are in the anti-virus industry, use the word viruses - not virii. Some of them get snippy about it. ;-) - -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v1.62r on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 6.5i iQA/AwUBPxiIPv5iYgfYHvp6EQJwpACeIR/zcZ3sViKSAQjbjiG2VRtloAkAoNn0 irJYk3QmmHEw7aI7zYbng9Fo =qqNF -END PGP SIGNATURE- Current version is 1.62r | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: Odd behaviour of the Reply feature...
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hello Peter, Sunday, June 29, 2003, 6:27:22 PM, you wrote: PS ***[29.06.03 19:21:39] PGP Signature Status: unknown PM I didn't find your key on the servers. Where can I get it to PM verify your sig? I'm guessing that you're using the MIT PGP keyserver - I usually use the certserver.pgp.com server. It turns out I forgot to upload my key to the MIT server. I've corrected that, so you should find it there now. If you want to do it all manually, you can point your browser at: http://www.philipstorry.net/philip/index.html However, my website is currently atrocious. I recommend you do that for PGP key fingerprint verification only. I'll be updating my sig when I have a page with suitable information for this purpose (like why I use PGP/sign emails, how it works, and so forth.) Hopefully soon. :-) PM With The Bat! this isn't necessary. You can set the wrapping in PM TB! and leave PGP to none, because TB! does the wrapping _before_ PM signing. Woohoo! Thanks - I promise not to doubt The Bat! again! ;-) Thanks also to Allie Martin, who also pointed this out! - -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v1.62r on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 3 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 6.5i iQA/AwUBPv9A8v5iYgfYHvp6EQJU7ACg6DsPSWY4m0ixmGs8ItsHA3ZHch4An15+ PEFx9Zuv5pqC7eZF1RTJZJM2 =z4/V -END PGP SIGNATURE- Current version is 1.62r | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: Odd behaviour of the Reply feature...
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hello Roelof, Sunday, June 29, 2003, 6:30:29 PM, you wrote: RO That's because the quoted text is not wrapped. When you want to RO wrap multiple paragraph quotes a simple %wrapped=%quotes won't RO suffice. You need to use a recursive wrapping macro as is shown RO here: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/Library.html#rewrap Hmm. Thanks for that info - I was making assumptions! Adding that to all of my templates would take me a while. I'll stick it on my to-do list, I think! ;-) RO Easiest would be to disable PGP's wrapping. I've done that instead. Thanks! - -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v1.62r on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 3 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 6.5i iQA/AwUBPv9BU/5iYgfYHvp6EQIQZACg06eHNrAGPUYj12ClgdCQx3nzVrwAnibB Hc70J1ZhiW2ufxkyiQdZ1B1j =tCXz -END PGP SIGNATURE- Current version is 1.62r | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[4]: Nod32
Hello Mike, Friday, March 21, 2003, 2:27:00 AM, you wrote: MA I must disagree. Amongst people who are aware, it probably is, most of MA the time. But the majority of people who do actually get AV software MA aren't clued up about viruses and the way they operate. These same MA people are more likely to import a virus through means other than MA mail i.e. it won't be caught by a mail scanner on an inward trip. MA Secondly, it's quite possible for the incoming scan to miss a virus MA due to it's newness, but for the scan to be updated before the virus MA is sent out again, and it will then catch it on the way out. That's MA just two reasons that spring to mind. I'm afraid I must disagree with you. This is what On-Access scanners are for. The user selects the attachment, it's scanned transparently when it's read, and it's then attached. If it had a virus, then the attacchment is quarantined or cleaned - if it's quarantined or access is otherwise blocked, the mail client returns an error when attaching. Otherwise, a cleaned attachment is sent. A scan-on-send is only useful it you forward a message that wasn't scanned on receiving - as it's likely any temporary files will already be MIME/UUEncoded and therefore not scanned by your on-access scanner. Given that this forwarding is the only vulnerability not caught by the on-access scanner, it's wise to look and see how much of a problem it is. You effectively cover this in your your scan before send might catch a new virus due to updates downloaded since incoming hypothesis. I find that this hypothesis slightly stretching credibility, to be honest. It's not that it's impossible - just that it's highly unlikely. The equivalent argument for travel would be: Don't fly without taking a radio - because between the time you leave your house and the time you board the plane, someone might broadcast a news article on how your plane or airline is somehow fundamentally unsafe. Yes, it's possible. But it's hardly likely. You heard the news at home. Not much is going to have changed - worldwide or locally - between leaving and boarding that airplane. And if the airplane/airline were defective, the appropriate authorities would intervene to stop the flight. In the scan before sending scenario, your AV package represents those authorities. And like those authorities, it needs to be updated with the news (AV signature updates) to be able to help anybody. But the fact is that the chances of: a) A new, fast spreading virus being active in the wild b) You receiving it, and wanting to forward it on (Leaving aside any issues of it looking suspicious etc.) c) Your antivirus vendor providing an update between you recieving it and forwarding it Are very slim indeed. So slim that, in terms or risk assessment, it's be the equivalent of insuring yourself against being savaged by sloths. Scanning your outbound emails will, in all likelihood, give you a false sense of security that prevents you from ensuring your AV package is suitable updating. And saying that you scan your outbound emails in your signature will give recipients false confidence too. I believe it's much better to scan your inbound mail only, and let each individual assume responsibility for the safety of their computer(s). That way, we all know where we stand, and we don't start on the but they said it was safe thread when something goes wrong. And let's not forget that The Bat! is quite a secure email client. It doesn't have scripting vuilnerabilities or other issues. So the only way for a virus to run from The Bat! is for a user to detach and run it - and at that point, the on-access scanner comes into play. Furthermore, such viruses tend to have their own SMTP engines, and will bypass The Bat!'s sending mechanism - thus bypassing your scan. Therefore, I believe that scan before sending is, at the end of the day, a waste of time. Of course, you can choose to continue this practice - but if you send me a mail I won't care if it was scanned before sending. I'm only going to trust it when my antivirus package pronounces it clean. And not before. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v1.62i on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 3 Current version is 1.62 | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re: Use MS Exchange public folders from TheBat
Hello Paul, Friday, February 28, 2003, 12:10:37 PM, you wrote: PS Is it possible to use public folders defined in MS Exchange?? I would doubt it. Public Folders on an Exchange Server can only be accessed in three ways, to my knowledge: 1. Via the proprietary Exchange RPC protocol 2. Via the NNTP protocol 3. Via the HTTP protocol NNTP and HTTP aren't The Bat!'s job, and the fact that the Exchange protocol is proprietary makes it difficult to implement. There's only one client on the market that has full support for that protocol - Microsoft Outlook. You can try using the MAPI interface to get access to parts of Exchange, but I'm not sure that Public Folders are included in that functionality. And you'd have to install Outlook anyway, to get the right MAPI version. Speaking of which, Microsoft changes MAPI almost on a whim - it is notorious amongst Windows programmers for being both buggy AND something of a moving target. NNTP would strip all the form information, so any custom folders would become useless. And it would require The Bat! to get newsreading capabilities. And HTTP would require Ritlabs to build a web browser - I'd rather they stuck to developing their already excellent mail client, myself. :-) PS At that time it didn't seem possible, has anything changed ?? Not really, and I doubt that it will - for the reasons stated above. By the way, this isn't an official answer - but as I have some experience with Exchange Server, I thought I'd chip in with my views and knowledge on the subject. I'll part with an opinion - Public Folders are probably something Microsoft wishes they could drop. They only put the feature in to Exchange Server to try and compete with Lotus Notes/Domino, and soon found that the architecture of Public Folders (and Exchange on the whole) was rather inadequate for that purpose. They've made several changes to Public Folders over the years (most notably in forms design and distribution), each of which has required companies to re-work any solutions they created with them. As a result, few companies use public folders beyond basic discussion facilities - which could easily be handled by other means. Most Exchange professionals I've ever dealt with dislike Public Folders, but it's a feature that MS have to continue offering because of all the hoopla they made when it first came out. Congratulations - you're dealing with a Microsoft Mistake every day! :-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v1.62i on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 3 Current version is 1.62 | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: Checking attachments by Antivirus: HOW ?
Hello Marck, Tuesday, February 25, 2003, 12:39:40 PM, you wrote: MDP ftp://www.ritlabs.com/pub/the_bat/bav/SophosNT.BAV MDP ftp://www.ritlabs.com/pub/the_bat/bav/Sophos95.BAV MDP ftp://www.ritlabs.com/pub/the_bat/bav/Panda.BAV MDP ftp://www.ritlabs.com/pub/the_bat/bav/Nod32.BAV MDP ftp://www.ritlabs.com/pub/the_bat/bav/BitDefSt.BAV MDP ftp://www.ritlabs.com/pub/the_bat/bav/AntiVirNT.BAV MDP ftp://www.ritlabs.com/pub/the_bat/bav/AntiVir95.BAV OK, I'm being stupid here. I can tell that Sophos is the top two, and that Panda is the third. The fourth has me stumped - NOD32? BitDefSt also has me wondering... AntiVirNT/AntiVir95 is for a freeware product, if I recall the names correctly. However, some kind of text file in that FTP directory explaining what each file is for would be welcome - it seems like a puzzle at the moment! I'm running Norman Virus Control, and I don't think that any of those are of use to me. But a text file there would tell me that without having to try each one I don't know about... -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v1.62i on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 3 Current version is 1.62 | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[2]: Checking attachments by Antivirus: HOW ?
Hello Marck, Thanks for the quick reply! I'll check out NOD32 when my NVC subscription ends - but I think I have another year or so to go there, so I'm in no rush. Wednesday, February 26, 2003, 2:32:03 PM, you wrote: MDP Not really. You download the BAV file that matches the AV software MDP you use. If you don't recognize the name then it's not for you. MDP Simple enough I should have thought. I suppose so. I was just thinking that less technical users might not find it that easy. Of course, I suppose the counter to that is that less technical users should not be nosing around on FTP servers for files they know little about. :-) PS I'm running Norman Virus Control, and I don't think that any of those PS are of use to me. MDP Correct. Ah well. It still picks things up when they're saved to the temporary folder. :-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v1.62i on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 3 Current version is 1.62 | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[3]: new feature wished
Hello DG, I don't wish to nitpick - I'm new on the list, and have only been lurking until today. But I did just want to make a couple of points... Wednesday, February 26, 2003, 11:10:35 PM, you wrote: DRS The header pane does not reflect actual information. Just sent DRS and received and it may be deceiving based on the MUA used. That's true, the headers reflect the time on the MUA, not the time on your PC. Either clock could be wrong or right. The recipient can make an educated guess at which is more correct, but will rarely have any proof. DRS I do this because I have quite a bit of business correspondence DRS daily and I want to insure, REGARDLESS of transport (MTA) and DRS display time, that once I affix my PGP signature, utilizing the DRS new or reply templates that I have here, that there is NO doubt DRS on the receiver end at what time I created the reply. So ... Created. Not sent. A very important difference, for some people. When I received this message, it said that it was sent at 23:10. That's perfectly correct. Yet your procedure adds the time at time of creation. From that, I can surmise that it took you eight minutes to create the reply. (Not necessarily an accurate time, especially as either machine - your MUA or PC - could be out by a minute or more, for all I know.) More importantly, though, The Bat! correctly shifted the first MUA timestamp to MY timezone when it displayed it in the message list. That's why I said 23:10 - I had to shift your in-message datestamp into my timezone manually in order to get the time taken when calculating the above. A trivial operation, but I could only do this because I'm aware of the fact you're in a different timezone after having looked at the headers to see what the time on your first MUA was. That's why I rely upon the MUA timestamps, as do many people - because good mail clients will adjust the times to suit the reader's timezone. I therefore have two suggestions: Firstly, consider stating your timezone after the time in your new message/reply templates. That will help prevent any confusion on your recipient's side. Secondly, at least one person obviously prefers to read the message, then worry about times. I doubt there would be a complaint if this information appeared in your sig, like this: Message created on Wednesday, February 26, 2003 at 6:02:17 PM EST The information will still be there, just at a slightly different location - and far clearer for all your recipients, who will then be able to differentiate between time zones AND the date/time created and the date/time it was handled by the MUA, as per your intentions. All of this was intended in a helpful, constructive and friendly manner, naturally. Do with it as you wish. :-) -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v1.62i on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 3 Current version is 1.62 | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
Re[4]: new feature wished
Hello Folks, One minor correction to my previous email - I use MUA when I meant to use MTA. All the way through the email, too! This is a sign that it is time for me to sleep. :-) Sorry for any confusion this generates. -- Best regards, Philipmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v1.62i on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 3 Current version is 1.62 | Using TBUDL information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
