Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Like many of us the age of the content in mailboxes is constantly aging the usefulness of aged content on expensive storage is an always a elemental question for those people who are grasping at trying to manage mail-store usage. If your still running Exchange 2000 then you maybe battling with a very finite amount of storage asking your service provider to please make it last another six months (why me!!). So if this is the case you need to arm your users (and yourself) with maybe a little more information about where the storage in your mailboxes is being used and where the growth curves have happened over the years they have been commanding the storage in their mailbox. So enter this script, what this script does is scans every single item in a mailbox and looks at the creation date of this item. It then aggregates the size of the item and the item count into one of 3 categories 0-1 year old , 1-2 years old and over 2 years old. The script then produces a little html report that sho...

Recently there has been a large increase in the amount of image based spam being sent out and also an increase in the amount of SPAM making it though SPAM filters because of the methods being employed such as randomizing images and also modifying images so they are difficult for any OCR based spam filter to decode the text. Stopping this at Edge device is the ultimate goal of any decent Sys Admin but this continuing war between spammers and those that create the software that can fight spam (and the accountants that stop us buying said software) means that we have to deal with the stuff that makes it though any defenses we might have and the inevitable complaints from the end users that stem from this. I decided to see if I could make a rule that at least could move any of these image based emails into a separate folder mainly for my postmaster account which tends to get hammered. Analyzing the basic image based spam message it consists of one inline gif image and a bunch of text. So ...

Geolocation as wikipedia aptly puts is the real-world geographic location of a computer based on its IP address. Many people use this for web site statistics for displaying where users are coming from. This information can also be very useful to actually tell you where your mail (and SPAM) is coming from. There are a lot of people out there selling and open sourcing geoip services, for instance awstats uses one of the open source variants to get the country information it uses in its report. Following some of these trails I found references to the IpToCountry.csv file which is a list of IP ranges per country that a few people maintain and provide (in slightly differing formats) for free as a download. The most up to date version in the one provided by Webnet77 which is the one I choose to use and is what this script is based on. Using this CSV file in its native format while possible with a little manipulation using the Microsoft text driver I found was very slow when trying to reso...