Infinite Loop » Microsoft http://tewari.us/blog Ashu Tewari's musings on work at Microsoft and life in Silicon Valley. Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:07:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 DEP, SpamBayes and Outlook http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/dep-spambayes-and-outlook/ http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/dep-spambayes-and-outlook/#comments Thu, 09 Aug 2007 17:48:43 +0000 Ashu http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/dep-spambayes-and-outlook/ I am a fan of SpamBayes.  Its one of the best anti-spam solutions on the client side.  In my outlook, my primary email is Microsoft exchange, then I use my personal tewari.us domain mails using IMAP (instead of POP, so I can maintain my folders) and I see my Windows Live Hotmail account using Outlook Connector. 

Problem is that Outlook 2007 works perfectly for blocking spam as far as Exchange and POP3 mails are concerned but it fails to deliver on IMAP.  Solution: SpamBayes’ Outlook plugin.  It works prefectly with POP3 and works perfectly with IMAP.  You just need to train it once and life’s all problems are solved.

This configuration has been working prefectly on my Home Desktop with XP, Laptop with Vista, but failed to work on one of my work computers that runs Windows Server 2003.  As soon as I installed SpamBayes on top of Outlook 2007, and start outlook, it would crash and blame the SpamBayes add-in for it.  Problem? that I diagnosed after ignoring it for few months: Data Execution Prevention.  AMD Athalon 64 bit and newer Pentium 4+ processors have the NX bit for virus protection.  This had been causing the SpamBayes add-in to crash.  Just go to “System Properties”->Advanced->Performance->Settings->Data Execution Prevention and add Outlook as an exception.

Things work like a charm now.  Good-bye IMAP spam.

]]> http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/dep-spambayes-and-outlook/feed/ 0 Save As PDF or XPS plugin for Office 2007 http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/save-as-pdf-or-xps-plugin-for-office-2007/ http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/save-as-pdf-or-xps-plugin-for-office-2007/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:51:17 +0000 Ashu http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/save-as-pdf-or-xps-plugin-for-office-2007/ Microsoft released a free addon for its Office 2007 suite of products which gives you an option to save a file in either Adobe’s popular PDF format or Microsoft’s new XPS format.  XPS is very good and is worth a try, but it will be a tough battle with PDF.  After downloading and installing this plugin for free, you get the option to choose between these two formats for exporting.  No need to buy Acrobat Professional anymore for daily PDF conversion related tasks.

]]> http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/save-as-pdf-or-xps-plugin-for-office-2007/feed/ 1 Like to watch Cricket in your office? Join Microsoft ! http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/watch-cricket-in-your-office/ http://tewari.us/blog/index.php/watch-cricket-in-your-office/#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2007 18:52:51 +0000 Ashu http://tewari.us/blog/?p=33 This is something unheard of; talk about benefits to Microsoft employees.  Few days back we came to know that Microsoft will actually be showing the World cup cricket tournament (about 51 matches, 8 hours each) in its Redmond and Silicon Valley campuses.  All the Microsoftie cricket fans were excited to know that.  And if that was not enough, yesterday we came to know that it will also be telecasted on the internal TV.  So instead of going and watching the games in the cafeteria or a conference room, we can actually watch them in our offices.  All the offices in Microsoft campuses have TV jacks as well as the regular data and voice jacks.  One can hookup a TV in the office and there are tons of external TV channels that you can watch, apart from some internal channels used for Microsoft specific purposes.

This is superb!! work and fun couldn’t be any closer.

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This year alone Microsoft US only has collected $64 million for different charity and community services. Microsoft SVC (Silicon Valley) with only 1200 full time employees has donated $1,764,089.00 just this year. In the company meeting we were told that in its life time Microsoft has donated more than $2.6 billion to the community.

Thanks Microsoft for caring.

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