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I’ve been testing out Spambayes for the last week or so and I am becoming very impressed with it. It takes a while to ‘train’ after installation, teaching it what is spam and what isn’t and helping it learn from its’ mistakes. Certain spam goes to a ‘Junk E-mail’ folder, suspected goes to ‘Junk Suspects’, everything else to your Inbox. After downloading email, check the Junk E-mail folder for any false positives; click a ‘Recover from spam’ button and it will move the message back to your Inbox plus it will learn to identify the message as legitimate. The toolbar for the ‘Junk Suspects’ folder has two buttons available, ‘Recover from spam’ and ‘Delete as spam’. As the program continues to learn its’ identification becomes better and better.

I only had two problems with the installation. When it created the ‘Junk’ folders the preview pane was still enabled for both, so make sure you turn them off before accidentally viewing rendered html spam. The second problem was I didn’t have enough saved spam for it to build an initial database, so the training period would take longer than it otherwise might have taken.

I used Mailwasher before and found it worked rather well, but it was an old version that didn’t have any ability to learn (something I believe the newer paid version is capable of).

I checked out driverguide.com a few days ago and the driver I downloaded from them was the same one that was on my install cd. When it is ‘installed’ there is a ‘Mouse Suite’ listed in Add/Remove Programs, but there is no folder set up under Program Files, and the driver details point to a whole host of .dll’s in System32, but nowhere is there a .cpl for the mouse.

With a little registry diving, I found there were multiple mice set up, and I actually found “Optical Navigator Mouse” as a device name, but nothing that made any real amount of sense. I’m wondering though, if I could use a different driver — the Logitech mouse I use at work is almost identical to the IBM mouse (just not an optical). Can’t really make much more of a mess, right? And besides, that’s what System Restore is meant for.

The things I’ve tried so far: The default ‘Update driver’ replaced the IBM driver with Microsoft’s, disabling the extra mouse features. Updating the driver via manual selection (keeping the same driver but apparently with a fresh setup) gave me a systray icon again but still not the proper control panel; this also reset the mouse buttons to their IBM defaults but with no way to change them. Removed the mouse from the Device Manager and rebooted; Windows ‘found new hardware’ and put it’s own drivers on; installed the IBM drivers and still had the original problem. Disconnected the mouse, removed from DM and rebooted; the IBM driver would not finish loading without the mouse connected, but as soon as it was plugged in Windows set it up with the MS driver again.

I guess the biggest nuisance is that this mouse & driver used to work without issue, but I did a format & full system rebuild and this time around I’m having issues. In fact, I’ve rebuilt a couple of times since the original, just to try to get the mouse working right. One time it was a rebuild where I added the IBM drivers near the end of the process (XP, add SP2, add mobo and other system drivers, then mouse), another time I tried loading the mouse drivers immediately after installing XP and then added other drivers and updates. The only things I can think of that are fundamentally different between the original system build and the current are a BIOS update and a new video card.

I’m hoping to make all this moot with a new wreless keyboard & mouse set, but I still want to find a solution – just in case there are more issues ahead.

Wow, and to think that at one time I considered ‘Ask Jeeves’ to be somewhat respectable. Unfortunately, this EULA language has pretty much become standard — the company and all related parties can not be held accountable; even if they could they are pretty much absolved of any damages; and all rights to venue choice are forfeited should you still insist on complaining.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance… I guess that applies to dom too.

I only have the free version of Sygate, but right now I don’t see any significant reasons to migrate to a new firewall. I have a hardware firewall in my router, so the software firewall is only really necessary for watching outgoing traffic. SPF’s last free version has been very well behaved on my computer, and I still remember the troubles that ZA gave me on a fairly regular basis when I used it last (3 years ago or so; ZA caused system instability and was a real resource hog). I understand that security issues may be discovered with SPF, but what’s the chance that someone will write code to target a discontinued and diminishing-usage firewall?

Is there anything I’m overlooking?

(Edited by d_rasley on 05-May-05 15:01. Attached final version of code.)

That did the trick, thanks!

I just checked, and my main computer is at SP3 – yet still subject to the problem.

Thanks for confirming that I’m not seeing things; the second link exactly describes the problem I am having. It doesn’t explain why, on my own computer, I have one that suffers from this problem yet others that have multiple SendObject commands do work. Perhaps it is the structure of the macro? In the one that fails, the SendObject commands are run back to back, but the ones that work generally have intervening processes running: action query, SendObject, more action queries, another SendObject, and so on. The message length is not an issue, since they are along the lines of “Attached please find your weekly report, please call if you have any problems.”, well below the error-causing threshhold.

Is this still an issue with later versions of Access? The upgrade cost is a factor to consider, but when function and reliability become an issue then the cost argument can easily be overcome.

This problem first occurred on my main computer; Access 2000 SR1 and Outlook 2000 SP3, both fully patched and updated. The computer I was going to set it up on is Access 2000 SR1 and Outlook 2000 SR1a.

I just retested the macros after converting them to code and the tests ran without a hitch, on both computers. Is VBA more reliable than using the macros?

Before I moved the file from my computer to the one it would be working from, I was able to test it successfully; after the failure I came back to my computer and ran the whole process automatically without any problems.

When the first main macro failed (containing only the three report-emailing runmacro commands and a quit command) I modified them to first open the report, run the sendobject command, and then close the report. When run automatically, the reports would open and close, but with no action taking place in between.

I can try converting to VBA, but that can’t be a permanent change. The macro’s graphical interface makes it easy to make changes to the parameters, and there’s no one else available familiar enough with VBA to go into the code to make any changes that might become necessary.

If you want a controlled batch, try Batchrun from Outer Technologies. I’ve been using this program for over three years to handle some of my batches and found it very easy to use. Use the graphical interface to set up your different scans, set to wait until the previous one is finished, and then save the file to the ‘MalWareSearch’ user Startup folder.

I tried to use a macro to create the pivot table but couldn’t quite get it the way I wanted, but it did give me time to re-think my strategy. Instead of using the pivot table to calculate the totals, I calculated the totals and had them included in the data pulled into the pivot table:

Date	Customer	Variance
1/1/05	Cust1	1.00
1/1/05	Cust2	2.00
1/1/05	Cust3	3.00
1/1/05	Week Total	6.00
1/1/05	YTD Total	6.00
1/8/05	Cust1	4.00
1/8/05	Cust2	5.00
1/8/05	Cust3	6.00
1/8/05	Week Total	15.00
1/8/05	YTD Total	21.00

The detail data was pulled onto one worksheet. On a second worksheet the ‘Week Total’ was calculated using a SumIf formula, while the ‘YTD Total’ is a simple C2+B3 formula. A macro copies all the data (pasted as values) onto the sheet that feeds the pivot table. When the pivot table refreshes it treats the two Total values as if they were normal ‘Customer’ values, resulting in a table looking like:

Date	Cust1	Cust2	Cust3	Week Total	YTD Total
1/1/05	1.00	2.00	3.00	6.00	6.00
1/8/05	4.00	5.00	6.00	15.00	21.00

I’m thinking that this method could make it easy to build a pivot table with multiple total columns.

After reading the remaining product info for this new release, I noticed the following:[indent]

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The ALWIL Team has been constantly adding definitions for new viruses and new threats. These are not just computer viruses anymore – they include threats such as Trojan horses, Internet worms, and also spyware, adware, dialers and other types of malware. However, until version 4.6, the malware types were not properly distinguished from each other.

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[/indent]Is this a first for AV programs, to include non-viral malware in their definitions? It’s something I figured they could be made capable of doing, but had not noticed it with any other AV program until now.

I don’t think the commercial (ie, non-free) anti-spyware program providers will have too much to worry about with MS giving their prgram out for free:

• Freebies like Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D still leave market share for the paid programs
• MS can (and probably will) make their program available only to authenticated users
• If MS starts to bundle their program with Windows it will make a juicy target for antitrust lawsuits[/list]

I’ve been a fan of Proxomitron for a few years now, but lately I’ve been weaning myself off of it without too many drawbacks. This mostly started when I got my cable internet connection installed and I tested the speed at Numion.com — I tested before and after setting up the proxy and my reported browsing speed ‘after’ was about half of ‘before’ (still blazing compared to dialup). I still use Prox at timeswhen I really want the added security, but for the most part I am using Avant Browser. With it’s built-in popup and ad blockers it does most of what I used Prox for. I tried Firefox but it didn’t have a very comfortable feel for me, and I really disliked how it handled mail.