First of all an e-mail Catch All is an email account for your e-mail domain that all misspelled e-mails get delivered to.

So if my e-mail address was colin.diponio @ colindiponio.com

But someone sent an e-mail to colinduponio @ colindiponio.com

In my case It would  end up in my e-mail catch all.

Tip: E-mail addresses are like phone numbers one mistake and they don’t work.

You have two choices

1) Either send these misspelled e-mails to a site black hole and don’t worry about them.

or more sensibly

2) Get a human being to sort through these and manually redirect.

Tip: Most e-mail systems will allow you to create aliases for common misspellings.

Example: Say my e-mail address was published incorrectly in a printed news letter. I would put a redirect of the misspelling forwarding colinduponio to colindiponio.

Based on systems I monitor for my clients in the 20 to 50 users range I can tell you misspelled legitimate e-mails arrive daily. So having someone monitor these is important.

Tip: If you are unsure about what happens with misspelled e-mails in your workplace send a test e-mail from an external e-mail service misspelling your own name and see what happens. If you are lucky you will get a message your can understand like below “User Unknown”.

So the tip for the Small Business Owner is: It might be worth checking that e-mail catch all.

I am not a big fan of Microsoft Desktop Search but if you are running Office 2007 on Windows XP then you pretty much need it for basic things like searching for e-mails in Outlook.

There are other Desktop Search options (Copernic and Google Desktop Search) but better the devil you know.

Microsoft have just released Version 4.0 for all their major platforms (XP, Vista and Server).

Windows Search 4.0 includes the following improvements:

• Support for indexing encrypted documents of local file systems:-
• Reduced affect on Microsoft Exchange when you index e-mail in online mode, and there is no local cache (.ost) 
• Support for indexing online delegate mailboxes
• Support for client-to-client remote query to shared indexed locations 
• Improved indexing performance
• Faster preview updates for Windows XP
• Per-user Group Policy settings
• Windows software updates for Watson errors
• Support for the following new enterprise Group Policy objects

Download Links are available on the link below.

The 5mb download for Windows XP requires the system to reboot after the install.

Tip: The new version rebuilds the index so be you may not be able to do proper searches in Outlook until fully complete (see below). It will index quicker if the computer is idle.

Link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940157

Microsoft today opened their dedicated UK online store selling retail Windows and Office products.

This is a good news / bad news story.

The good news is you can now download at the point of sale. So if you need Office 2007 at 3am, well now you can.

The bad news is their online store prices are ridiculous.

Example: Microsoft Office 2007 Professional

Microsoft UK Online Store £449.99 for Download

However…..

Amazon.co.uk Boxed Retail Product is £349.98 (Sold by Amazon)

This is such a crazy world. The company that makes the software can’t sell it cheaper than a competing Internet retailer based on a non physical product.

Microsoft then have the front to charge you extra for shipping and handling if you want a backup DVD of your software.

I find it more or less impossible to recommend anyone purchase from the Microsoft online store based on their pricing model.

Pay more get less, this is borderline moronic.

No doubt there is some anti competitive shenanigans Microsoft has to observe, but really why bother. Another boxed ticked at Microsoft HQ I guess.

Link: https://emea.microsoftstore.com/UK/

PS

If you believe in conspiracy theories this news story is running in the the same news cycle  as Adobe announce a new online collaboration suite  over at www.acrobat.com

Check out this write up

Link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/adobe_launches_online_office_suite.php

I’m not kidding about the conspiracy either I monitor several Microsoft UK employees blogs and each one of them posted about the Microsoft online store one after each other like dominoes.

In this relatively tiny form factor Iomega has a generous 320gb 5400 RPM hard disk.

The great thing about these is they are USB powered so you don’t have any additional power cables to carry just the supplied USB cable. When you are connected to your PC the USB Port/Cable powers the drive.

I have issued these drives to many remote users over the years and not once had a problem which is saying something as they are portable and more likely to get bashed about.

This 320gb model has about 298gb of available storage. It comes formatted Fat32. Some of my files are large so I always format new storage as with the NTFS file system that can deal with them better.

Tip: As great as these drives are they are also a security risk. With server like storage capacities you could end up leaving the equivalent of your companies’ data in the back of a taxi.  Check out something like TrueCrypt for additional security. Link: http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php

The cost at £94 inc VAT for the 320GB version is reasonable but cheaper lower capacity models are available. (see Amazon, Dabs etc).

Grab one of these and go do some backing up! Just keep the drive in a safe place.

Yesterday I posted about Outlook 2007 search on Windows XP.

At some point I ended up checking out Microsoft’s Outlook Team Blog I have to say I was really impressed with the amount of good quality  posts and tips.

The page does take some time to load as its choc full of images and it does seem to have a bias towards Outlook 2007 (the latest version) however its well worth checking out.

Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/default.aspx