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Okay, this isn’t new, but since I recently upgraded to Vista and had to reinstall MSOffice, and had to research it again, I thought I would share it.

There’s still a lot of people that either really like the older versions of MS Office or they can’t afford to upgrade.  Well most of you that use Office have noticed that the new file formats have an additional “x” on the file name: document.docx

There’s a simple solution to this, download the fileformatconverters.exe from Microsoft, it installs easily and then you can open the new .docx files with your older MS Office program.

Here’s the link to download direct from Microsoft.

Do you know how most spam gets to your inbox?  It is sent using an unsuspecting user’s email account.  Their computer has been taken over by a malware, trojan or virus that gives the spammers full access to their information and computer resources.

You can identify the source of the email by viewing the headers.  The key is to find the true email listed in the “Received from” code.  In the example below of a spam message, it falsely states that it came from “Mr.Alex Martinez.” <marcelolotteriaespanol@aiesec.net>, but the reply goes to mrjesuscarlosdept2610@hotmail.com, and if you look even closer to the headers in the “Received from”  it actually came from “authenticated user name@aiesec.net (I removed the actual name for privacy of the victim).

In this case, I will inform both the victim that their email account is being used for spamming and that their computer may be infected with malware/spyware/virus, as well as sending a copy of these headers to abuse@hotmail.com since the true return address is a hotmail account used for receiving the spam response. read more »

Once PHPList is configured correctly, it is a fantastic tool for email campaigns. Below are some notes from my own experience in setting up a 19,000+ name, email campaign.

Setting the batch size and send rate to prevent server errors.

Most servers have a very low email per hour (or per day) limit.  My server, Hostdime, has a 350/hr max, GoDaddy has a 500/day max (on a shared hosting account).   You should not use the max limit because this will prevent any other emails from being sent during that time-frame.

The default PHPList installation doesn’t limit the batch size or send rate.  You must make these changes prior to sending a message or you will crash your server and have to contact support to stop the process (and you may lose any email ability for that time period).

After you’ve gone through the installation and setup process, you will need to modify the config.php file.  Look for the following and max changes – carefully!

# define the amount of emails you want to send per period. If 0, batch processing
# is disabled and messages are sent out as fast as possible
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,0);

# define the length of one batch processing period, in seconds (3600 is an hour)
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,3600);

I found that sending a smaller batch size more often worked best for not putting lag on the server (it WILL affect your website if it is hosted on the same account).   I set my batch size to 40 and the send rate to 60, thus sending 40 emails every 10 minutes, totalling 240/hr.  This left 110 emails per hour for other purposes (auto responses, sign-up notifications, normal emails, etc.).

Here is a sample of the update I received in my email after I started the message process queue:

[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Started
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Sending in batches of 40 emails
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Sent in last run: 40
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Skipped in last run: 0
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Processing has started, 1 message(s)
to process.
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Please leave this window open. You
have batch processing enabled, so it will reload several times to send the
messages. Reports will be sent by email to yourname@yourdomain.com
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Processing message 8
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Looking for users
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Found them: 12080 to process
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] batch limit reached: 40 (40)
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Script stage: 5
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] 40 messages sent in 27.91 seconds
(5159 msgs/hr)

These settings have allowed my server to continue sending emails, uninterrupted, until all emails were sent.

For more information about setting the send speed or other PHPList help, visit this website: http://docs.phplist.com/PhpListConfigSendRate.