If your Mozilla Thunderbird is slow to open the inbox, or any other folder for that matter, there are two things that you can do to try to fix this problem.

Step #1: The first thing is to try to compact the folder. This should help if you have a large inbox. If you can’t even get to this step, or if it is just too slow, try step #2.

Step #2: The .msf “index” file is corrupted. If this file gets corrupted, you could see a slow initial loading of your inbox, messages will not open, you can not delete messages, etc. You may also see a message in the status windows when you open Thunderbird that says something about rebuilting index. The solution to this is to first close out of Thunderbird, then delete the inbox.msf file. If this is for a different folder name, you will see “folder name.msf” file corresponding to that folder. This file is located in your profile directory. For me this was: “C:\Documents and Settings\Dave\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\svxnp81c.slt\Mail\systembash.com”
But this varies because of the random profile string and your account profile name.
Delete this file. Make sure you leave the real inbox file alone – this is a file that is named “inbox” (or your folder name) without a file extension.

Re-open Thunderbird – the index will automatically be rebuilt and you should now have normal access to your inbox!

Problem: Checking the apache server status with the command “apachectl status”, “service httpd fullstatus” or by viewing http://server/server-status I get the message: “The requested URL /server-status was not found on this server” or your alternative 404 page not found error.

Answer: Assuming you have the module loaded and set up per the documentation of mod_status, this is this most likely a VirtualHost problem.

If you use NameVirtualHost *:80 directive, or any *:port, to run multiple name based virtual hosts, this configuration does not allow server-status on any of the publicly accessible addresses. This is because the first Virtual Host in the directive is considered the “Default Virtual Host”, any unknown entries on the NameVirtualHost space – in this example anything accessing port 80 on any IP address, will default go to this virtual host and hence you will get a 404 page not found error. Furthermore you can not place the server-status configuration inside of a VirtualHost directive to be read from a full domain name.

Solution: There are two basic ways to solve this. The first is to make the server listen on an alternative port (such as port 8080). Adding “Listen 8080″ to the configuration will allow you to access the server status from http://yourip:8080/server-status.

The second will allow the command ‘apachectl status’ or ’service httpd fullstatus’ to work properly but it will not allow external access. If you switch each * to the actual IP address to work from, then accessing from localhost (127.0.0.1) will work. So, you would need to change:
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
to
NameVirtualHost 10.0.0.3:80
<VirtualHost 10.0.0.3:80>
And then restart your server.

By that way, unless you need it, make sure to turn ExtendedStatus Off. This directive collects a lot of data from the site visitors and can slow down a busy server.

I recently had a problem where my Spamassassin install started thinking that a lot of spam messages were really ham (non-spam). Since these were getting BAYES_00 scores of -2.5 they were almost all getting through my spam filter. These particular messages all were regarding STOCK quotes and were pretty obviously spam just by looking at the text of the messages. Somehow my Spamassassin install thought that they were not spam because the messages were being passed as ham by the Bayesian filter. Since they kept getting past, the bayesian filter kept learning them as HAM.

In order to break this vicious cycle, you just need to clear out the bayesian tokens. It’s very easy to do. As root user, type:
sa-learn --clear
This starts you fresh. By default, Spamassassin won’t use the bayes filter until it has 200 spam and ham messages, so until you get to that level it will continue to learn based the other Spamassassin detection settings.

Ideally, I would have sa-learn train using these spam messages. But since I use Outlook, and there is no “easy” way to have it interface with sa-learn, I find it easier to clean out the bayes tokens every once in a while. SpamAssassin Coach is a plugin for outlook which should connect to your spamd server and “learn” a message as ham or spam. But in practice, it did not work for me. It looks like the project has a lot of potential.

For more information on how Bayesian filtering works, check out this wikipedia article.

Hey, Firefox 2.0 is out! Get it here. Improved tabbed browsing, additional customization, feed enhancements, and security improvements. If you haven’t tried Firefox before, there is no better time than now!

If you or your client is using an old-DOS based program to do work (for example, Wordperfect for DOS) – and you need to print to a printer which is shared on the network, you first need to map the printer to an LPT port. You do this by using the following command in a dos prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd):

net use lpt3 \\SERVER_NAME\PRINTER_NAME

You can then set up your dos program to print to lpt3 and it will be sent to that printer. To print right from the command line, you could use the following syntax:

copy c:\test.txt lpt3