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"BEI does an amazing job of serving as our in-house IT contractor. Whether it’s an office move, upgrade or common helpdesk issue, BEI remains professional, committed, and serves our IT needs extremely well. By bringing in their trusted partners, BEI helped ..." Read More
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Republic Property Trust,
Property Management,
Washington, D.C. and Herndon, VA
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BE Eye January 2008
Tech Tips
for End Users
Excel – First Cell, Last Cell – Both are Important
If you spend time scrolling around your spreadsheets you’ll
like this tip. To select the first (top left) cell in a worksheet
use CTRL + Home. To select the last (bottom right) cell in a worksheet
use CTRL + End. Both of these actions will take you to the corner
cells of the range of cells that encompasses all the entries on
your spreadsheet. To combine these actions and select all your data use CTRL + Home, then
CTRL SHIFT + End.
Tech Tips
for Network Administrators
Follow the Bouncing Email
As the volume of email increases, so does the number of emails
being bounced, or returned to the sender without being delivered.
Other terms that mean the same thing include Non-Delivery Report/Receipt
(NDR) and Non-Delivery Notification (NDN). In plain English –
the email is returned to the sender without being delivered –
and there can be a wide variety of reasons. Interpreting these messages
can be difficult, so we thought we would offer some pointers.
More often than not, you’ll get a very un-user friendly message,
such as the one below:
Sometimes the format is a little friendlier, but still hard to
interpret:
(Note: The bounce above - both examples - is caused by sending
to an email address that does not exist.)
Whatever the tone of the notice, there are two major issues to
consider:
Hard vs. Soft Errors
A soft bounce is an email message that gets as far as the recipient's
mail server but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the
intended recipient. Causes include the recipient's mailbox being full,
the recipient’s mail server is too busy, the message being sent
is too large and is being rejected by a policy on the recipient’s
server, and blacklist (the message to the recipient is seen as spam
due to blacklisting of the sending server and/or content filtering
by the recipient’s server). Most email providers will repeatedly
try to re-send a message for a few days – after that if they
still cannot deliver the message it becomes a hard bounce. The major
thing to remember with a soft bounce is that it is deemed as temporary
– due to conditions that could change – and the message
may eventually make it through.
Another common non-delivery
message is one that implies a delay in delivery rather than the
email not delivered. Email servers have built in functionality to
be somewhat self-correcting. A general rule of thumb if a user gets
a message of this nature is to have them try to resend in an hour.
If it does not get through, and it is possible to wait, try again
the next day. If they still cannot get the message through, and
it is still possible to wait, try again in one week. If it delays
at that point, then the user should look at a different way to get
the information to the recipient.
A hard bounce means the sender’s mail server could not send
the email. An email falls into the hard bounce category when there
is no such recipient, an inactive email address, or an invalid domain.
The most common example of a hard bounce is when the recipient simply
doesn’t exist. When a hard bounce occurs the sender needs
to try something else since the mail system will not perform any
re-sends as it will with a soft bounce.
Sender’s Problem or Recipient’s Problem?
“Fault” can be difficult to determine. The easy ones include
User unknown, Host unknown (domain doesn’t exist), Mailbox full,
Invalid Mailbox. These clearly tell the sender that there is a problem
on the recipient’s end – although the problem is often
that the sender has typed the email address incorrectly! If the message
is identified as spam, it may be that the sender’s organization
(or ISP or spam filtering service has been tagged as a spammer (rightly
or wrongly).
Other non-delivery messages are a bit more vague.
A very common message is “Unable to relay”. Even though
there are multiple possible reasons for this type of message, we
are seeing more and more of these due to anti-spam methodology being
implemented by ISPs. These algorithms will perform “reverse
lookups” of the address sending the email (that is, the mail
system looks up the name attached to the sender’s IP address,
and the checks the IP address if that name, and they must match
or the email is rejected) or check to make sure the “From”
address matches an account on the email server or require you to
authenticate before sending the email (authentication requires that
the sender submit to some sort of query or test before they are
allowed to send email) . Some ISP’s will even require that
emails come from a specific connection provided by that ISP. Generally,
for this type of error, you would want to check your SMTP and relay
settings if this is happening on more than one email. If everything
checks out, you would need input from the recipient’s email
provider on the reason for the relay error.
One final note is to be on the lookout for bounce messages that
are not really bounced emails. This is when a user will report a
non-delivery message for either a) an email they are sure they did
not send or b) to an email address they know nothing about. These
non-delivery messages are caused by a virus that has infected the
PC of someone that has your user’s email address in their
address book. The virus propagates itself by sending emails from
the infected PC with the “From” address “spoofed”
or disguised by substituting email addresses from the infected PC’s
email address book. There will be an attachment with this type of
message that contains the virus. This is when it is important to
educate your users to NOT open attachments from any unknown source.
If they get a non-delivery for an email they did not send or to
someone they do not know they should immediately delete the message
and NOT open any attachments.
BEI Announcements
Upcoming Seminars
During 2008 we’ll be presenting a seminar every month –
alternating between two formats:
- Breakfast seminars in our Reston office on focused topics (February,
April, etc.)
- Lunch seminars in rotating locations in D.C. that deal with
somewhat broader issues (January, March, etc.)
Upcoming Seminars
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Breakfast – BEI Reston
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Lunch – D.C.
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Wednesday, February 13
Spyware
Protecting your company while living with the solution! We'll discuss the scope of the problem, tips, the impact of policies and possible solutions.
Details-----Register
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Wednesday, March 19
It’s
All About the Restore
Learn how to architect your network using storage arrays, removable appliances, backup software & offsite storage to dramatically improve your ability to recover from disaster—small and large.
Details-----Register
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Wednesday, April 16
Offsite
Backups
Cost-effective and easy-to-manage options for offsite backups
Details-----Register
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Wednesday, May 14
Microsoft
Data Protection Manager
Continuous data protection for Windows applications and file
servers, rapid and reliable data recovery.
Details-----Register
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Note: as the seminars include breakfast or lunch an advance reservation is required. Holiday Schedule
BEI will be closed:
Monday, February 18, 2008
New BEI Address
Business Engineering, Inc.
11190 Sunrise Valley Drive Suite 120
Reston, VA 20191
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