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Home→Tags email

Tag Archives: email

cleanup the email buildup in cpanel

Computer Aid Posted on 3 December, 2013 by Luigi Martin3 December, 2013

Ive had this ongoing problem with emails on hosted domains that use linux cpanel.

I’ve had this issue for over 8 years, and across 3 different hosting companies, so it must be quite widespread, yet nobody seems to be interested in fixing it.

So what’s the problem?

While using a pop3 email account, the hosting server accumulates email files that get downloaded to the email client.

Even if the email client is configured to delete the emails from the server after download, the cpanel server still keeps these emails… indefinitely!

In the early days, I would routinely get warnings about my disk storage reaching maximum capacity (ie I was running out of space).

After some investigation, I found that emails were the culprit, and there was nothing in place to fix it, other than to login to the cpanel, and manually remove the large number of files.

I managed to create my own solution, using my unix knowledge:

I created a cron job, which would run daily, which would scan all the mail folders, and delete any files that were older than, say, 60 days.

So as long as I checked my mail at least once every 60 days, then my system wouldn’t delete any undelivered emails.

Since starting my own hosting company, I have found this technique very useful in preventing my own customers from having similar problems.

So exactly what do I do?

If you are familiar with cron and unix scripts, the command looks something like:

13 3 * * * find ~/mail -name "*.*.*.*.*" -type f -mtime +60 -exec rm '{}' ;

In simple terms, what this means is:

at 3:13 in the morning, every day, execute the command:

find ~/mail -name "*.*.*.*.*" -type f -mtime +60 -exec rm '{}' ;

And the command means: search the folders under the mail folder, and find a file that has 4 dots in the name (*.*.*.*.*)

the -type f makes sure it only finds files, and not folders, or other weird stuff.

the -mtime +60 means make sure the files have been modified over 60 days ago

the -exec rm ‘{}’ ; means use the rm command (ie delete) on each file found ( the ‘{}’ will substitute the file name), and the ; means this is the end of the -exec part on the command.

Try this at your own risk… this has the potential to delete your whole website, so be extra careful, and don’t just blindly copy/paste what I wrote.

I tested the command by using the ls command, instead of rm… that way I could see which files would get deleted, without deleting anything!

Besides the risk of not knowing what you’re doing, the only problem with this system, is that it doesn’t seem to work if you use IMAP eg it can happen if you use smartphones/ipads/tablets/IMAP email clients… particularly if you rely on the email programs “auto-detect” system, then you probably find that the cleanup just doesn’t work.

In this case, besides some careful customer education, the only option is to use an email redirection to something like gmail , so that you use the large gmail storage, rather than the more limited hosting storage.

Posted in Linux, Technical | Tagged buildup, cpanel, cron, email

Many people cannot type their paypal email address

Computer Aid Posted on 19 April, 2012 by Luigi Martin19 April, 2012

I’m supplying an abandoned accounting package called erecord, for a small fee of $14 (payable via paypal).

Over the last 2 years, I have had many hundreds of people download erecord.

And I am totally amazed at how many people just cannot do a simple task like type in their email addresses ( about 25% get it wrong ! ! ! )

What usually happens is: I get an email that someone like joe123@gmail.com has just purchased erecord.

Since the software is fully automated, I know that this person will get an email that gives them instructions on how to download erecord.

Then, after a few days/weeks, I sometimes get a brief email from the customer, saying something like:

I purchased erecord on date xyz

I have yet to receive the download instructions. Send me the download instructions ASAP

First off, I check that they actually paid: and often I find that the automated confirmation email I got was from, say, joe123@gmail.com, yet the “wheres my download” email might be from joe124@gmail.com

This is a simple (yet amazingly common) typing error. To correct it, I ask the customer to confirm their payment details, and then I send the download email to the new email address (and updating my website database with the new address)

Other times, its worse: the email arrives from joe.blue@yahoo.com, and the customer has lost all access to the old email in their paypal account.

That means that they have some serious problems with their paypal account, that needs fixing before it becomes a security risk.

However, I can still send the download email to the “new” email.

I’m still surprised at how often people make typing errors while doing financial transactions over the internet.

I’d hate to think what would happen if people had to enter the payment amount manually… id get payments varying from $0.14 upt to $1400 !!!

 

Posted in Technical | Tagged email, paypal

sending large attachments via email

Computer Aid Posted on 31 March, 2010 by Luigi Martin31 March, 2010

I saw a customer that was having many problems with sending emails.

Sometimes the emails would sit in the outbox for hours, until they get deleted.

I looked at many options, and could only see a problem with MS outlook: the automatic send/receive was scheduled to run every minute, rather than every 10 minutes. I changed it to every 15 minutes, as some of the attachments were quite large.

I didn’t realise at first, but I eventually realised that the attachments were quite large.

Given the nature of ADSL, receiving is much faster than sending… so while ADSL1 can receive at about 1.5Mb per minute, it can only send at 0.5 Mb per minute. While ADSL2+ can receive up to 22Mb per minute, it can only send at 1Mb per minute.

This is great for surfing the net (and receiving emails), as most of the traffic is in-coming.

But when you try sending emails, you are limited to 1Mb per minute… so a 22Mb file (which is very quick to copy onto a USB drive), will take at least 22 minutes to send… a 60Mb file will take at least 1 hour.

In this case, the customer had file that varied between 7Mb and 300Mb… all quite large for email… particularly when most ISPs will time-out an email, it it take longer than 30 minutes to send.

So what are the alterntives?

  • A remove internet drive (like dropbox). You get no email timeouts, but can still only send at 1MB per minute. Plus the person at the other end also needs to install the dropbox software… its all a bit clumsy, but can work well if you need to send large files to many people.
  • Write a CD / DVD and post it… a CD can store 700 Mb, a DVD can store 4,500 Mb (ie 4.5 Gb)… This is easily the cheapest solution, but it can take some time to “burn” each CD.
  • write to a USB drive and post it, or take it with you to transfer to another PC. USB drives can store up to 32Gb, are quite quick, but are small and easy (and costly) to lose.
Posted in Technical | Tagged email, large attachments

email: how to set the default browser

Computer Aid Posted on 22 October, 2009 by Luigi Martin22 October, 2009

I just had a situation, where I had changed my default browser (from Maxthon to Opera), and then found clicking on web links within an email would result in Maxthon displaying the web page.

I tried a PC restart, changing file type associations… but nothing would work.

I eventually found an interesting utility called DefaultBrowser, which fixed the problem quickly and easily.

I can’t be sure if its a problem with Opera, Thunderbird (email), or Maxthon… but it seems that changing your default browser isn’t as simple as it should be.

Posted in Technical | Tagged default browser, email

pocket outlook on wm6: inefficient email storage

Computer Aid Posted on 24 June, 2009 by Luigi Martin24 June, 2009

I have about 7000 emails (including sent emails) stored on gmail (in about 200 folders).

So I figure I’ll setup my smartphone to synchronise with gmail using imap. So that I don’t overload the phones tiny memory, I decide to download only the email headers (not the main email body).

This should let me see the structure of my email account, and only download the actual email if/when I need to.

It shouldn’t be hard, right?

wm6

Well,  my sent email folder has about 2500 emails, and in the process of downloading the headers, I get an “out of storage space” error.

A bit of research later shows I can actually move the downloaded headers to the 2Gb micro SD card in the phone. Of course you can’t do this without a registry hack… not something most users can do. Why does Microsoft insist on putting roadblocks in its operating systems?

Anyway, using the SD card will be a bit slower, but should prevent the out of storage memory problems.

While researching, I find something interesting: pocket outlook seems to store each email header in seperate file in the windowsMessaging folder… all up, over 3000 before I got the error message.

Now thats really inefficient. A perfect way to slow down the whole phone: dump thousands of files into 1 folder. I can’t see why pocket outlook can’t use a database file like outlook, thunderbird, and any other decent email system out there.

Now that emails are being stored on the flash card, the process gets much further (take a few hours longer to download headers), until I get another error. This time, I see the “Program memory” has dropped from about 25Mb free to less than 1Mb, so its another memory problem.

After this, pocket outlook will refuse to download any more emails, so its a case of delete all the stored emails, and try again.

I eventually get tired of trying to work around pocket outlook, and decide to try a third party email solution.

I tried flexmail, and it seemed a bit better and faster (at least it stores the emails in a proper database), but it also ran out of main “program” memory, despite flexmail (and the emails it synchronises with the server) being installed on the storage card.

However, as I download more email headers, flexmail slows more and more. I suspect its due to the flash card being slow.

But the nice thing about flexmail, is that it can be tailored.

So now the only path left to me it to trim down the number of emails I download. So I set flexmail to only download the last 60 days.

I clear all the email headers from the sent folder, and then configure only that folder, so that it downloads just the last 60 days… and then flexmail works beautifully.

Since Pocket outlook has similar functionality, I set it up to do the same thing, and then ditch flexmail… why?

Well, certain email shortcut buttons on the phone will start pocket outlook, even while flexmail is the default email program. So I go back to using whatever came with the phone, even if its not “efficient”, its a hell of a lot more convenient.

I cant help feeling like i’m in the old days of MSDOS, where you could only run programs in 640Kb, and to use any more memory, you needed to do all sorts of tricks, and even then you couldn’t be sure any application would work correctly in the expanded memory…

Many smartphone users are not technical, and they don’t care about the difference between internal 64Mb ram and a flash card… they just want it to work.

I havent tried any of the other smartphones out there (iphone, android, webos), so I hope they handle things better.

I’d say an average user won’t be able to use many of the wm6 features (particularly if they have a lot of emails), without hitting the “limits” of the wm6 architecture.

Posted in Technical, wm6 | Tagged email, pocket outlook, windows mobile 6, wm6

why do some people get this blog emailed?

Computer Aid Posted on 12 March, 2008 by Luigi Martin12 March, 2008

Soon after I first created this blog, I also connected it to feedburner, and activated the “email subscription” option.

I figure some people would like to read my posts without having to remember to regularly visit my website, or muck around with feed readers, etc.

since then, I’ve had 2 people send me some very exasperated-sounding emails eg:

can u STOP sending me messiges ok  it is anoying !!!!!!!
thanku!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Its probably someone playing a practical joke on them, as I cannot see how someone can go to the effort of subscribing to my email feed, and then not notice that each email has unsubscribe details within it. And given the infrequent nature of my posting (once every day or three), its nowhere near as annoying as some of the real spam emails.

Anyway I politely reply, saying that they should be able to unsubscribe themselves, but I’ve unsubscribed them anyway.

Posted in Hints, Humor, Musing | Tagged blog, email, unsubscribe

0X800CCC0F error while dowloading emails in outlook express

Computer Aid Posted on 17 November, 2007 by Luigi Martin17 November, 2007

A customer had problems downloading emails using outlook express.

OE would start downloading, I’d start the progress window, and I see its downloading message 1 of 25. Then it goes to message 2, etc.

At message 4, it stops, and gives an error 0x800CCC0F. A search on the net shows nothing useful, except to try reinstalling OE… but it seems that OE and IE are tied together, so you need to remove and reinstall both…

I try a few more times, but I get the same error, but at different points: sometimes with message 9, sometimes at message 6.

Each time, OE would start downloading the first message, as it wasn’t marked as having been downloaded… so OE accumulates many duplicate emails.

I figure: I’ll try using the bigpond webmail, so I can only make 1 email available at a time, then OE can “digest” the emails and I might pinpoint a corrupt email.

But I quickly find the bigpond webmail gives me a mostly blank screen…

OK, plan B: I try bigpond webmail on firefox… but that gives similar results.

Plan C: Install foxmail… but it just sits at message 9 and won’t go past it.

At this stage, its getting late, so I promise to test webmail from the office (to eliminate a telstra problem, or a local pc problem).

At the office, bigpond webmail works flawlessly. So I move some of the larger emails to a temporary mail folder. I then make an appointment to revisit, and prepare myself to reinstall OE and IE.

Once onsite again, I look at webmail one more time, but its the same blank screen. At this point, I close the webmail window without logging out… So I try logging in again, except I’m not given the login window… but instead I see the webmail inbox screen… fantastic.

After some experimenting, I find I can get webmail to half work by hitting the refresh button whenever I get a mostly blank screen.

So now, I get OE to download 2 or 3 emails at a time… and OE is able to download all the pending messages… no errors… Hmmm, I was expecting at least 1 error / corrupt email.

I decide to give OE a bigger test: I email a 1Mb attachment back to “myself”… and it also works perfectly.

So I tell the customer its all tentatively fixed… but let me know if the problem reappears.

Posted in Technical | Tagged 0x800CCC0F, ca firewall, email

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