The thing to look for is to see where the original message was sent from … for example, the report might look like this:

Reporting-MTA: dns; mailserver.somedomain.com
Received-from-MTA: dns; pc123 (xx.xx.xx.xx)
Arrival-Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:51:33 -0500

The xx.xx.xx.xx will be the IP address of the sender, usually some poor hijacked/zombiefied computer in Thailand or Beijing.

Imagine my shock when I opened up the DSNs and they had MY IP ADDRESS listed as the sender. I started thinking this was some remarkable new spoofing technique because I knew my computer hadn’t sent the spam, that would mean my computer had been hijacked.

Knowing that our mail server logs never lie, I logged into the office through a VPN and started pouring through the SMTP logs. My blood ran cold when I ran across the entries showing that those messages had, indeed, been sent from my IP address. And to top it off, they had been sent using SMTP authentication. In other words, something had used my computer AND my password to send this spam.

I felt so violated.

I started doing research trying to find out what can infect Outlook like this and remain completely hidden. I searched for hours. I Googled nearly every permutation of “Outlook generated spam” and “Outlook is sending spam” that I could imagine.

There were several recent instances of others having this experience and I was becoming increasingly alarmed. What kind of super-virus had I become infected with? How could this have happened? I am normally quite paranoid and very safe regarding my online activities so I didn’t understand how I could have become infected … I was truly dismayed.

Some of the other occurrences I discovered included the following long threads (and none seemed to have an answer when I checked them):

• Tech Support Guy forums
• Bleeping computer
• PC review Computer News and Reviews

I went to bed exhausted and felt defeated because I felt sure I had somehow let my computer become hijacked. I started a full system scan using Avast Professional and went to sleep.

The next morning, I got up early to check the results of the scan and, of course, it found nothing, so I started hunting again for the solution. I had seen a mention of how Outlook handles read-receipts in one thread, but I had dismissed it as unrelated, but I was starting to re-read the same posts over and over again, so I decided to read it more closely.

The title of the thread wasn’t alarming at all: Re: Outlook 2007 IMAP Bug. As I read the article closer, I realized it was describing exactly what had happened. And more importantly, it turned out this was not some super-bug-malware or infection. It is just a bug in Outlook 2003/2007.

I hadn’t become a spammer, after all!

How the bug works
The bug essentially works like this: Someone sends spam to your IMAP account with a read-receipt request in it from a spoofed e-mail account. Outlook downloads it, but you don’t read it because, well, its dirty, stinking spam. Then, you quit Outlook without deleting the message.

At some point, you delete this message from the server using a different mail client, let’s say webmail or maybe an iPhone. The next time Outlook launches, it will see that the message has been deleted and, since there was a read-receipt request attached to it, Outlook generates a friendly “your message was deleted before it was read” message that is sent automatically regardless of your read-receipt setting in Outlook.

I have Outlook set to ignore all read-receipts (I find them rather obnoxious) but apparently Outlook ignores this setting when it comes to sending NOT-read-receipts.

It seems in the last couple of months, spammers have started finding ways to exploit this more and more.

So, I finally posted a note in the Microsoft Outlook forums trying to find a way to turn off Outlook’s overzealous notifications, so hopefully I’ll get answer. I’ll update this post if and when I do.

Updated @ 2008-10-27 8:59 p.m. — I have opened a support ticket with Microsoft (using e-mail). We’ll see if I get any response that way, as well.

I e-mail you. You e-mail me. It all works together.

Oh, so THAT’s how it works! Maybe you just have to know her, but this just cracks me up.

phpinfo() reported the MySQL client API version to be 3.23.49. Since it takes MySQL client version 4.1 or higher to connect to a MySQL 5 server with native authentication, I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to update just the MySQL client API on the older PHP server (I didn’t want to try to update the PHP yet because of several other things that might break.)

Then it hit me: all I needed to do was update the one login that the older version of PHP used to connect. So after issuing the following comment:

everything worked again!

(It is actually Stark Sands that plays Lt. Nate Fick, but c’mon, you can see the resemblance, right?)

While upgrading, I disabled all my plugins. After the upgrade, when I re-enabled all my plugins, I was prompted to re-enter my API key for the stats plugin. I entered (what must have been) the wrong API key because when I entered it, it threw an error. I then doubled-checked the key and re-entered it (apparently correctly this time) and it was accepted but duplicate site was created.

I’m not sure how to go about merging the stats and deleting the duplicate site, but it sure would be nice to be able to do that.

I’ve opened a trac ticket to hopefully find out what can be done to fix this. if you have experienced this, please go and add your comments to the ticket as well.

Here’s what the drop down with the duplicate sites looks like:

Updated @ 2008-07-29 02:14:10 p.m: There might be a workaround here.

Updated at 2008-07-17 @ 4:05 pm: It appears that it is working now! Wahoo! Resetting the sync history from the MobileMe control panel never worked, but I tried to reset my sync history from iTunes (Edit->Preferences->Syncing->Reset Sync History.) I then let the next automatically scheduled sync occur and it prompted me to choose what and how to sync. I told it to take my contacts on my PC and overwrite MobileMe and told the calendar to merge. When that finished, I logged into me.com and all my contacts were there! Next, I reset sync history again from iTunes and the next sync, I selected merge for my contacts and to overwrite MobileMe’s calendar with the one on my PC. That finished, and my calendar was updated, too. Keeping my fingers crossed!

At first, things seemed to go almost right. I followed the instructions to the letter … I synced my iPhone to my Outlook (on my laptop) using the normal, tethered way, then opened the MobileMe (MM) control panel, set up the sync (I’m just doing contacts and calendar) then clicked sync. After the sync finished, I logged into http://www.me.com and made sure my stuff was there. My contacts seemed to be all there, but my calendar had some issues. When I selected the calendar in me.com, it popped up the following error:

Calendar Error
MobileMe Calendar could not start because it was unable to load any calendars from the server. Try reloading Calendar. If this problem persists, contact MobileMe Support.

[Go to MobileMe Support] [Try Again]

Clicking Try Again just repeated the cycle. Clicking Go to MobileMe Support simply loaded the calendar … with my data apparently intact. Go figure.

Thinking this might just be a non-issue, I next set up my me.com account on my iPhone, then told it to use the push contacts and calendar from that account. So far, so good. My contacts all dribbled away (panic!) then started to trickle back in as they synced from me.com. I checked my calendar on the iPhone and most of my events and appointments seemed to be there, too.

Aside from the calendar glitch I saw every time I logged into the me.com website, things seemed to be working pretty well. The problem is I took it one more step. I tried adding my desktop Outlook 2007 to the mix, hoping to get the Holy Grail … a single, merged set of contacts and calendar, synced across all my devices. The problem was that I couldn’t get a sync to finish without erroring on my desktop. They errored out with the following informative message: “The sync failed because of an error. Please try again or contact MobileMe Support.” Thanks for that. After about half a dozen attempts, I decided to remove my desktop from me.com and cut my losses.

The problem was my contacts were a complete mess now in me.com and on my iPhone, with dupes all over the place. I blew away my contacts in me.com and went back to ground zero: I wiped out all my contacts in the me.com account and on my iPhone; then on my laptop (using the MM control panel) I reset my contacts to have Outlook overwrite MobileMe. That sync finished without an error, so I logged back into the MM website hoping to see my contacts again … but instead, it said simply “You have no contacts.” Whah???

The next step I tried was to completely start over. I removed my laptop from syncing with me.com, turned off push contacts and calendar in my iPhone and logged into the me.com website and deleted everything I could. I tried starting at the beginning, adding my laptop first as I did before, except this time the sync didn’t finish. It errored out with “The sync failed because of an error.” Gah.

Being completely insane and expecting different results from the exact same procedure, I did it again. The sync errored out again, but while it was running something new happened. I tried to open the sync preferences from the MM control panel, and applesyncpref.exe crashed. Several times, in fact. Over and over, I tried to get back into the sync preferences and it would simply go away each time.

After about two and a half hours, the background sync process finally seemed to finish. I was able to open the sync control panel and it said it had successfully synced. I then went back to the me.com website and logged in. Guess what? “You have no contacts.” And the same error when accessing my calendar. When I add a contact from the me.com website, it shows up temporarily, but then if I switch to the me.com mail then back to contacts, it says “You have no contacts.” So now, I can’t even add a contact to me.com from me.com. Indeed.

I have also spent hours trying to look for answers in the Apple discussion boards, but they are having as much trouble keeping those up and running as me.com, apparently. Numerous times when trying to click on a topic, I would get an error message asking me to contact the system administrator. Ironic that part of the error message said to try searching the forums, but when you clicked on the link you got a message that search had been disabled by the system administrator.

What a pedestrian, amateurish launch, Apple.

Keyboard error. Press F1 to continue.

There is a way around this, but at first it seems a little backwards. With a keyboard attached, you have to enter the BIOS (by pressing F10 at the boot screen) and first enable a power-on password. This creates a “Password Options” selection in the BIOS menu. Then, under “Password Options,” you can now enable “Network Server Mode” which allows the computer to boot without keyboard/mouse installed. I’m posting this just in case the original place I found the answer (in the old HP forums) goes away.

The father banned his 12-year-old daughter from going online after she posted pictures of herself on a dating site. Then after fighting with her stepmother, the father told her she couldn’t go on a school trip. The girl took the matter to court and — be afraid — seems to have won her case.

Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday that the father couldn’t discipline his daughter by barring her from the school trip.
…
Lucie Fortin, the lawyer representing the 12-year-old, said the judge found that depriving the girl of the school trip was an excessive punishment.

She said the girl has already been forbidden to use the Internet and her father also punished her by canceling her participation in an extracurricular event.

Please, please don’t let this foolishness come to the States.