Archive for Email

Change your Yahoo Password Now!

You may have seen reports the last two days that over 500 million Yahoo accounts were stolen from the company. The theft actually took place nearly two years ago, but it is only now being reported. You can read details of the situation here:

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/account/SLN27925.html?impressions=true

What does this mean to you?

HOW DO I CHANGE MY YAHOO PASSWORD!

If you have a Yahoo email account, you should change your password immediately. Here are the instructions for doing this: (please note, I’ve included some screen shots at the end of this post)

  1. Click on the following link, which will take you to the Yahoo signon page: https://edit.yahoo.com/config/eval_profile
  2. Enter your Yahoo email address, and press Enter
  3. Enter your current password, and press Enter
  4. Enter the Verification code (case sensitive) and press Enter
  5. You will then be prompted to enter a new password for your email account
  6. Finally you will be shown a list of alternate ways of contacting you (other email addresses or cell phone numbers). These would  be things you entered when you created your Yahoo account originally. Make sure they are all up to date.

CAN I STILL USE THE YAHOO WEB PAGE?

Yes. The Yahoo web site is still available for use. My daughter uses it for her “home” page!

SCREEN SHOTS OF THE LOGIN PROCESS:

Step 1: Enter your Yahoo email address

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Step 2: Enter your password

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Step 3: Enter your NEW password twice

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Step 4: Enter the verification code

Step 5: Confirm alternate contact information

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Configure Ricoh Aficio MFP to Office 365 for Scan To Email

I recently migrated a customer from SBS 2008/Exchange 2007 to Office 365 with AppRiver and BitTitan’s MigrationWiz tool.

Migration went like a charm … that is, until one of the employees tried to “scan to email” a document from their Ricoh Aficio MP C2500.

A quick search of forums suggested that a lot of people had been down this road before, and with a myriad of possible ways to configure or fix it. Quite often, the suggestion was to use a 3rd party SMTP  service.

I submitted a ticket to AppRiver’s support at 11:57am this morning and received a phone call from their tech support within 15 minutes. A quick remote connect session, and we had everything working within minutes.

Here are my notes for future reference:

First, the solution we followed

Second, gather the following information

  • Your public IP address to your office. You can use WhatIsMyIp.com if you don’t know it)
  • Your Office 365 MX record. It should look something like this: Contoso-com.mail.protection.outlook.com

Next, setup the Exchange connector within Office 365

  • Login to your O365 Admin Center portal (http://portal.office.com)
  • Click Exchange –> Mail Flow –> Connectors
    • Create a new connector with this information
    • Enter a name for your connector, such as “Ricoh Copier On Prem”
    • From: select Your Organization’s Email Server
    • To: select Office 365
    • Description: enter something like this: This is the connector that will allow traffic from the SMTP services for Ricoh
    • Enable the option Retain Internal Exchange Email Headers
    • IP Address: enter your public IP address

Next, let’s go to the Ricoh web portal to finish things up:

  • Go to your Ricoh’s web portal (local IP address, such as 192.168.1.xxx)
  • Click to login as the administrator.
    If you don’t know the login/password, here’s a web site that may help you:
    https://default-password.info/ricoh/
  • Click Configuration => E-mail (under Device Settings)
  • Enter the following information as appropriate:
    • Your Admin O365 email address
    • Protocol: SMTP
    • SMTP Server Name: your O365 MX name you looked up previously
      (such as Contoso-com.mail.protection.outlook.com)
    • Port: 25
    • SMTP Authentication: OFF
    • SMTP Authentication Email/Username/Password: your O365 Admin email address
    • SMTP Authentication Encryption: DISABLE

That’s all we did. Hope it works for you!

Tool to Analyze Message Headers

Microsoft’s Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a great resource tool for testing and running diagnostics against Exchange, ActiveSync, OWA, POP3/IMAP, Lync, and Office 365. It also includes Message Analyzer, which is an SMTP header analysis tool and makes reading email headers less painful.

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Microsoft’s Exchange Team has a good blog post on how to use the Message Analyzer feature.

For grins and giggles, I sent myself and email from my Gmail account to my business email account, and then processed the message header through the Message Analyzer.

  1. Open up the Message Analyzer tab of Microsoft’s Remote Connectivity Analyzer in a browser window.
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  2. Open up your email client and access/view the message header. Select and copy the complete contents of the message header.
    I have a separate post that explains how to view email message headers from Outlook 2010/2013.
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  3. Flip back to your browser, and paste the message header into the Message Header Analyzer area.
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  4. Click Analyze Header and you will get a Summary report, plus a list of Received Headers and other headers.
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Moving multiple folders in Outlook 2013

I was doing a recent migration of email from Windows Live Mail (WLM) to Outlook 2013. The built in transfer within WLM worked perfectly in moving folders over to Outlook with one exception. This customer has two mail accounts created in Outlook, and the folders being transferred over from WLM needed to go into the second (non-default) email account.

No problem, I thought. I’ll transfer them over to Outlook, and then drag and drop the folders from the default mail account to the second mail account.

But Outlook does not support selecting and moving multiple folders, and this customer had several dozen mail folders to be moved. I wanted to see if there was a workaround or a fix for moving multiple folders within Outlook, and I found Pandali Folder Master for Outlook utility.

I ran this on the customer’s Windows 8.1 laptop, and quickly moved the folders to the proper account.

In summary, I was very surprised that the WLM to Outlook transfer worked without a hitch, and that this utility program took care of getting multiple folbers moved to the right email account.

Changing Exchange Capitalization on Email Domain

I recently had a customer running SBS 2008 with Exchange 2007 ask me if they could have the domain name part of a user’s email address displayed with proper capitalization. As an example, instead of Joe@whitehouse.gov they wanted the email address to go out as Joe@WhiteHouse.gov.

This should be easy to do, I thought. So, I went into EMC and changed the spelling of the email to use capitalization, but it would never take hold. It turns out that simply changing the capitalization of the email address is NOT enough for EMC to recognize that a change has been made.

So here are the three steps required:

  1. Edit the email address for capitalization, but also make a change to the user (left side) part of the email address, then save
  2. Then re-edit the email address, fixing the left side of the email address
  3. Update the Offline Address Book (OAB)

So, let’s give it a try:

Step 1:

  • Go into EMC –> Recipient configuration –> Mailbox –> double click on the specific user –> click on the Email Addresses tab
  • Select the email address to be changed and click Edit
  • Change Joe@whitehouse.gov to JoeXX@WhiteHouse.gov and save

Step 2:

  • Select to edit the email address again
  • Change JoeXX@WhiteHouse.gov to Joe@WhiteHouse.gov and save

Step 3

  • From EMC, click Organization Configuration –> Mailbox –> Offline Address Book tab
  • Right click on ‘Default Offline Address Book’ and click Update
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  • Note: you call also do the OAB update using the following PowerShell command:
    update-offlin eaddressbook –identity “default offline address book
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These steps should be applicable to both Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010.

Stolen Email Passwords Again!

Yahoo reported today that usernames and passwords of some of their email customers have been stolen. Read the specifics in this ABC News Wire story.

Unfortunately, this is becoming a daily occurrence, and much like the person who kept yelling “fire”, we are slowly becoming numb to these warnings of security breaches and identity thefts. But we must not let down our guard.

So, what can you do? Here are a few suggestions, and by no means complete:

  • Use strong passwords – the password for your email account should (1) contain a combination of letters, numbers and special characters, and (2) be 8 or more characters in length. Why? Because it makes it that much harder for spammers and hackers to break your password. An easy to implement rule is to replace some letters with numbers or similar special characters.
    One example, if your password was “racingcars”, you might change it to “R@c1ngC@r$” – where I simply replaced the letter a with @, the letter i with the number 1, and the letter s with $.
  • Change your email password – if you think your email account has been compromised, go online to your email provider’s web site and change your password immediately.
  • Don’t click on links within emails – especially those that are mass emails sent from financial institutions, stores, or online web sites. Example: if you get an email from PayPal saying there’s an issue with your account, don’t click on the link in the email. Instead, open up your browser and go directly to the PayPal website.
  • Restrict incoming email – if you really want to cut back on junk email, many email programs, including Outlook, will allow you to set up a “Safe Senders” list. If a person is not listed in your “Safe Senders” list, then the email will be sent to your Junk Mail folder. Outlook will also give you the option to automatically add everyone in your Contacts to your Safe Senders list.
  • Learn to use the BCC: field – BCC stands for “Blind Carbon Copy”. If you are going to send out an email to a group of unrelated people, then list their email addresses in the BCC: field rather than the TO: field.
  • Never send confidential information by email – if someone needs your social security number, call them and give it to them over the phone. Don’t email it. Don’t text it. You have to consider the possibility that anything you put into an email could get into the wrong hands.

C’est la vie!