Training the Junk Mail Controls in Thunderbird

Very often, a temporary folder will be set up to determine e-mails whether they are junk or not. These e-mails are those that cannot be determined automatically by Thunderbird and do not get processed by the message filters. It is extremly important to mark both “junk” and “non-junk” e-mails. This will improve the accuracy of the junk mail control feature very noticeably.

According to mozillazine.org, “Junk processing must be well trained for it to work correctly. Training involves marking many messages as “junk” and many messages as “not junk”. It is important to mark both types of messages, both good and bad, not just the ones that are junk.

Initially, incoming messages might not be accurately junked because you have not trained it enough.

1.Check your Junk folder to see if any non-junk messages have been detected as junk, and mark non-junk ones as not junk.
2.Bayesian filtering requires at least 100 bad messages be marked as spam and 100 good messages marked as not junk to function. To work best, it needs a few hundred of each marked.

– If you mark a thousand spam messages but do not mark legitimate messages, or very few, it won’t work well.
– It’s best to mark different types of messages good and bad – marking 500 messages from the same source is not as good as marking 500 messages from different people.

After an initial training period,

1.You should find that Junk Mail Controls are effectively detecting unwanted junk emails and keeping them from your Inbox. If it is not, see the tweaking information below.
2.You should occasionally train non-junk messages – doing it when you mark bad messages as junk is a good habit.”

Click here to see more details.

Windows 7 and Firewire Problem

The 1394 bus driver that is included with Windows 7 replaces the 1394 bus drivers that were included with earlier versions of Windows. See this site for details.

If your firewire connected devices do not work properly, you can try using other compatible firewire drivers that came with Windows 7 (other than the one selected automatically by Windows as the best driver). Note: this solution may apply to other versions of Windows as well depending on the specific OEM of the firewire controller and the specific firewire device that was being connected.

1- Click the Start Button, type devmgmt.msc in the “Start Search” box and press Enter.

2- Expand the “IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controllers” node in the device tree on the right hand pane

3- Right click the host controller node select “Update driver software …”

4- Select “Browse my computer for driver software”

5- Select “let me pick from a list of device driver on my computer …” and Check the box before “Show compatible hardware”.

6- Choose the second option—1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (Legacy), and click next to update the driver.

Installing Windows 7 on Dell Vostro 400

These are a couple of notes when installing Windows 7 on Dell Vostro 400 (E8200). The 28″ I-INC monitor was not recognized as a PnP monitor; therefore the native rsolution of 1920×1200 cannot be set even after upgating the nVidia graphic card (8800-GT) with the latest driver. The monitor needs to be changed to  a ‘generic PnP monitor’ via the Control panel before the desired resolution can be set. You may need to ‘add resolution’ in the nVidia control panel if the resolution is not already listed.

Creative Sound Blaster Live 5.1 sound card was not recognized by Windows 7. There is no update driver from Creative. Just install the XP driver; after Windows 7 complains about ‘no device found’, re-install with recommended settings and it will go through. 5.1 feature will not work (only 2-channel sound).

Update 2010-11-09: apparently the XP driver for Live 5.1 may cause Blue Screen of Death at random times. Try using a generic driver from kX Project  and see if the problem goes away.

Mouse Motion in Virtual PC

mouse_settings

Without the Virtual PC Console running, the mouse takes about 3″ of desk space to cross the screen. As soon as the Virtual PC Console is started (no virtual machines are running) and it has the Windows focus, the mouse takes 6 to 7″. Change the focus to another window, such as explorer, and the mouse is back to normal.

Solution: Logitech has a setting under the Motion tab (Control Panel>Mouse Properties) called ‘Disable acceleration in games’ which was checked. Changing this setting corrected the problem.

Performing File Transfers using the ISPF Work Station Agent

Introduction

If you’ve ever had to transfer files between a host mainframe and a PC workstation, you already know it can be time consuming and tedious. This is especially true if you need to transfer multiple members of a Partitioned Data Set (PDS). Don’t you wish there was an easy way to simply select the members to be transferred directly from a member list? If so, good news!

One of ISPF’s “best kept secrets” is the Work Station Agent, or WSA for short. It’s an executable file that’s downloaded from the mainframe and installed on a PC. Once the WSA has been installed, a “connection” between the mainframe and PC allows any of the following to occur:

Click here to read the whole article.

Open Text acquiring Vignette

Open Text said Wednesday it plans to acquire fellow content management tools provider Vignette for about US$310 million in cash and stock. The deal is expected to be finalized in the second half of this year.

The combined company will make Open Text, already one of the content management sector’s few large independent companies, even bigger. Open Text, based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, has 46,000 customers and reported $725 million in revenue for 2008.

Click here for more details.