Rogers, for what ever reason, uses Yahoo mail services. I certainly hope Yahoo gets a cut of Rogers income, because Rogers has a LOT of customers…. Anyways, it’s the combination of all three that led more to this rant/article 8-O  than anything else.

Her email has been working fine for a long, long LONG time, then all at once, it refuses to send any more emails, it recieves fine, but you can’t send anything out. I can log in and send, and I can send from other packages but Thunderbird wont send…. or to be more specific Yahoo wont let Thunderbird send anything…. all you get is this wonderfully cryptic email (with a link that doesn’t work!)

Transaction failed : Cannot send message due to possible abuse; please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html for more information

(If you want to avoid my rant and go right to THE SOLUTION at the bottom.)

Now I KNOW BETTER, but for some reason, while I was testing the email through Rogers portal (which of course worked) there was a little box that said, Click Here for live technical support and I did…. yeah I know. And while I could argue that I had a headache, was tired, and in a hurry, there really is no good excuse… I did it.

So up popped “Valentino” to walk my through my problems, thankfully, or probably because I was already online trying to chat with him, he didn’t start off by asking if my computer/monitor/router/modem was turned on.

Upon seeing the error he responded that the problem seemed to be between Thunderbird and Yahoo… ummmm that is what is being used at both ends yes…. and then recommends that if I turn off all HTML formatting and just send all emails in plain text (ie no pictures, bold, formatting, charts, etc etc.) that all would be well…   Okay so if I roll the clock back say 20+ years in email formatting it will work…. ummm NO. That wasn’t an option.

He then argued that he tried Google mail and other mail services using HTML and it worked fine, but her Thunderbird didn’t… it kept coming up with an error (the same error that I had already told him about by the way – which comes from Yahoo). So “obviously” the problem is with Thunderbird, which as far as he is now concerned is an unsupported program.

Now what is interesting is that he also randomly throws in a couple of links at the end of this bit, which ‘sort of’ hold the key and he ‘sort of ‘ addresses it. But without actually mentioning what ‘IT’ is.

So while I am going on about how this is not an option, ‘Valentino’ continues on telling me how I will need to change all email output to plain text in future…. finally he catches up with my arguments and says he ‘understands’ and is only trying to give me work arounds (without actually saying what it is I’m trying to work around) and gives me another ‘work around’. Now he wants me to change the white background on her email to a different shade of white, not much just a little….   I KID YOU NOT! Arrgghhhhh. I lose it

I am also beginning to think I’m talking to a machine, more that a person. ‘Valentino’s’ argument is that Thunderbird is an unsupported program and he is giving me a ‘fix’ for it. My argument is that the problem is at their end, and they need to fix it! I ask to speak to  someone higher in authority, ‘Valentiono’ says sorry, no , there is no one available for an ,unsupported program’… I give up in disgust and go look on my own…. Here is the full transcript, with all it’s warts, for your enjoyment/mutual frustration….

5:05 PM You have granted full permission to Technician. To revoke, click the red X on the toolbar or press Pause/Break on the keyboard.
5:06 PM Connecting…
5:06 PM Connected. A support representative will be with you shortly.
5:06 PM Support session established with Valentino.
5:06 PM Valentino: Hello and thank you for choosing Rogers Hi-Speed Internet. How may I help you today?
5:06 PM Rick: We are getting an error when trying to send email from the server
5:06 PM Rick: sorry – we are using Thunderbird and Yahoo is creating the error
5:07 PM Rick: Transaction failed : Cannot send message due to possible abuse; please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html for more information
5:08 PM Rick: By the way – that page doesn’t exist
5:08 PM Valentino: whast your email address and program that you are uisng
5:08 PM Rick: beetham@rogers.com and the email package is Thunderbird
5:09 PM Valentino: This issue appears to be something between ThunderBird’s HTML mail format and YAHOO’s servers. If you change your email format to plain text, it sends just fine. As a test of ThudderBird’s HTML format I sent HTML formatted mail via gmail, and hotmail with no issues.
With your forward-to or reply-to message open, go to
Options…Format and set to “Plain Text Only” (i.e., not HTML). If
you’re creating a new message, you have to set not-HTML by going to
Account Settings…Composition.
In summary: I was unable to send messages and got the “Cannot send
message due to possible abuse” message. When I made sure the message
was not composed using HTML, then the message sends fine. “””

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2441147

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120309234536AALeZkp

5:10 PM Rick: The email is addressed to two other rogers.com accounts and one bmtnet.com account all valid account holders
5:10 PM Rick: So you are trying to deliver the email? It’s got a Sending Messages window up now and is stuck at 79%
5:11 PM Valentino: you will need to that for all of them
5:11 PM Rick: Email seems to work fine with every email except that one – changing it to text only will destroy the formatting of the current message
5:12 PM Rick: Telling me I have to “dumb down” the email isn’t a solution – it’s a work around. HTML email should work fine… it has in the past
5:13 PM Valentino: i understand, its not a supported program but I am providing a workaround for you..you canalso try this one if you wish
5:13 PM Valentino: Changing the default background colour from #FFFFFF (white) to anything else absolutely works. I changed the value to #FFFFFE (only one value away from white) in Config Editor (Preferences/Advanced/General/Config Editor.)

msgcompose.background_color = #FFFFFE

This is a successful work-around that does not look noticibly different than a white background..
5:15 PM Rick: Again – no. There is a problem at YOUR end. Tweaking colors etc should not and is NOT a fix.
5:16 PM Rick: Sorry I’m stunned – i’ve worked in computers for over 25 years and managed some of the best in the business (support personnel) I would fire anyone that tried to tell any of my users that this was a ‘Fix’
5:16 PM Valentino: other programs works fine
5:17 PM Rick: And so does Thunderbird until this email – the error comes from YAHOO servers not Thunderbird – ergo….
5:18 PM Valentino: I apologize for whats happening, its not a supported program and i am giving you a solution that works, there is not much i can do regarding the issue
5:19 PM Rick: You really are quite useless then…. is there anyone else I should talk to or should I just wait until YOUR problem goes away?

5:21 PM Valentino: there is no one else for an unsupported program
5:21 PM Valentino: You can try removing and readding the account to Thunderbird. If it does not work, you would need to troubleshoot with Mozilla or try a differnt email client.
5:23 PM Rick: You really don’t know anything about computer support do you – of all the stupid answers. I can’t wait to write about this on my blog – it’ll go viral…. what a waste of time

5:24 PM Rick: Good bye 5:24 PM Valentino: You’re welcome and thank you for choosing Rogers Live Chat Support.

Well that was fun…. er not…. but you can see why it looks like it’s an attempt at an AI response. Also note that he tells me maybe I could deltee her account and re-add it, or maybe just go with another email client. Essentially just going down a list of things that would make the error code go away… ergo, in Rogers opinion, make things work… But here is the kicker, the problem isn’t and has NEVER been with Thunderbird but with Yahoo! See that lovely setting up above, where ‘Valentino’ recommended I change the background color a little – msgcompose.background_color = #FFFFFE

Well it appears that, for what ever reason, Yahoo servers randomly choke on the background color if it is set to all F’s in upper case when coming from Thunderbird…. silly, strange, but true. if  your settings in Thunderbird are msgcompose.background_color = #FFFFFF Yahoo will eventually declare all your mail as originating Spam…. if you change the settings to lower case f’s as in msgcompose.background_color = #ffffff everything will be fine!

By the way, for those less technically astute – it’s the SAME COLOR!!!!!!!

The answer was in the links that ‘Valentino” so randomly popped into the conversation. It’s a known problem with Yahoo servers which has been going on for a very VERY long time – go figure. You know a real person should have acknowledged that yes there is a problem at Yahoo and unfortunately this is what you need to do to fix it…. instead of telling a client that their software is unsupported and they need to send only in text format  – forever more! SAY WHAT!

By the way, the reason the change from HTML to plain text works…. no colors! What a simple easy STUPID workaround! May we one day be saved from stupid AI’s and help desk people who don’t know, nor care what your problem really is.

THE SOLUTION

You can go to the link  forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2441147 to get all the background on this if you want. But here is the work around for Yahoo’s screw up:

• Go to the Thunderbird menu bar
• Click on Tools > Options > Advanced
• In the General Tab press the “Config Editor” button
• Note the warning message and click that you will promise to be careful
• Scroll down, or search in the top window to get to the setting msgcompose.background_color
• Double click on that line
• Change the #FFFFFF to #ffffff ( the same color )
• Click on “OK”
• Close the Config Editor
• Problem Solved!

Oh, one other little tidbit, if you have any drafts pending, you will need to copy and paste them into a new email in order to get rid of the #FFFFFF that is embedded in the draft…

Strange but sadly true….

As you may, or may not know, Apple is launching some new products this week – tomorrow to be precise. And the rumour mill is running wild on what the new products will be. The fact is Apple NEVER tells until they are up on stage.

The odds are good that there may be a new iPad, a new iPhone and a new Apple TV. That is logical, based on the age of the previous products and technology advances since their release.

But what I want to rant about is the Apple TV, or to be more precise, I want to rant about what all the pundits out there are saying about it! It all comes from what Steve said, as quoted in his biography ( a great read by the way ) written by Isaacson:

“‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”

For starters I already have an Apple TV, and it works GREAT! I think, based on what Steve Jobs said, that the next version of it may very well be amazing! But I think that I can pretty well guarantee that the next version of the Apple TV WILL NOT have a TV Screen!

It boggles my mind how everyone is saying that Apple will be making TV’s! No!!  Why would Apple even want to get into that mess! LCD LED Plasma 3D etc etc etc… They don’t have to!

Let me explain…

This isn’t a scientific fact, but I would hazard a guess that over 90% of modern TVs out there are already being used with another box, be it a cable, satellite, or internet box.All the screen is is a display or monitor for “the box”.

When you change providers all you have to do is change the Box! Right now I have a Satellite, Apple TV, WDTV, DVD player, DVD player, DVD recorder all connected to a great little Sharp LCD display and thanks to my current Apple TV I’m thinking of cancelling my expensive Satellite feed!

Apple’s new TV will be a BOX, just like it’s predecessor. Now Apple “might” make an extra large monitor/screen available to use with it, but it’s box WILL work with 99% of the current TV’s out there now! That’s where the market is. All TV’s these days come with multiple inputs, the new Apple TV will just connect like all the other boxes, there is no reason to make a screen for it! Why should they, you already have a screen!

Why would they make a full TV (with screen) that might take you 10 years to decide to buy and what technology will be out by then that may take you away. Apple wants to see you buying their TV NOW and to do that it will be a box that you can connect to your current TV.

I’m excited, really excited, because once this new Apple TV arrives, I believe it will change the way TV watching works today.

Let me explain…  I don’t have a large commitment to my current Satellite service, I only buy the “essential” services, but it still costs me over $70 a month! I watch next to none of the hundreds of channels that they make available, before my Satellite I had cable, which was even more expensive with even more channels that I DID NOT WANT or WATCH!

The common complaint for most subscribers to these services is that they want to be able to pick JUST the channels they want to watch, they don’t want all the other stuff that’s out there! I think Apple TV, especially the new one coming out, is going to change all that…

On the current Apple TV you can subscribe not to channels but to SHOWS! Not only that, but you purchase them, once you have paid for them, you own them and can watch them again and again.

I’ve done the math, and if we just paid for the the shows we watch now, on the Apple TV we watch now, we could cut our current TV viewing costs down from over $70 a month to something like $35 a month! AND NOT MISS A THING! I won’t even need a PVR/Recorder/Whatever because when the show becomes available I’ll have it. If I hear about a new show I didn’t know about I can buy it and INSTANTLY have all the previous seasons episodes – I won’t miss another thing EVER!

If some, or even none, of the rumours out there come true about what the Apple TV will offer in it’s next release, there will be a revolution in TV viewing. The fact is, it’s already here and the big TV cable/satellite providers don’t even realize it! Oh and  it doesn’t come attached to a screen it’ll just be a little black box…

I guarantee it! 

How does this all fit in with Apple’s new release of IOS 5 and their new iCloud structure? The quick answer is that Apple never planned for it…. as a matter of fact, they never even planned for Windows XP to be around to support it… so for those of you who hoped you could interconnect all three together (as it’s so well advertised) – you can “almost” forget it.

The reason I say almost is because, although Apple is on record as not supporting Windows XP with the iCloud, I managed to actually find a “bit” of a work around for it. And that is what I am going to share with you today.

The workaround information is courtesy of a You-Tube video out there if you are interested…which I’ve embedded below. It can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwc-fioJB7o

The only thing that connected with the iCloud on my system was Outlook Express ( I usually use Thunderbird, but Apple only syncs with Outlook. ) make sure that it us installed and configured to work with your mobile.me email before proceeding. Otherwise the solution will hang looking for something to sync with. You may or may not have other Windows applications that might work with iCloud, but I did not and so I can’t confirm if they will work or not.

Some Important Pre-Requisites

• You will need a RAR unarchiver like WinRAR. WinRAR IZARC, which is free to use/evaluate for 30 days and can be downloaded here: www.izarc.org
• You will also need a special editor, called the ORCA MSI editor. It’s free, but hard to find. You can find a copy here: www.technipages.com/download-orca-msi-editor.html

 

Once the prerequisites are installed you are ready to proceed…

How to configure XP to work with the iCloud

• Download iCloud for Windows from the Apple site me.com/move and ignore their cautions about needing Visa or Windows7
• Right click on the package you downloaded in the previous step and extract all files using WinRar. You should have 6 or so files.
• Depending upon your version of Windows (32 or 64 bit) right click on the appropriate version of iCloud.msi and select “Edit with Orca”
• A Window will open. Left Click on the “Launch Condition” in the left hand column
• Then in the Right column click on the second line that says “VersionNT>=600 [ProductNameLoc” requires that your computer is running Windows Vista or newer”
• Then click on “Cut Row” and then hit save ( looks like a little floppy ) and exit the program.
• Now you are ready to install iCloud on your XP machine. To install it, just open the iCloud msi file that you just edited.

 

And that’s it – everything “should” work… at least in my case my email did – LOL. Good luck – let me know how things turn out!

Everyone who has looked at the history of Apple – in particular the Mac have learned about how Steve Jobs went to the  Xerox Parc laboratory in Palo Alto California and learned about a piece of hardware called a “mouse” and a user interface that used graphical windows that could be moved, closed, opened, re-sized, etc. Essentially not using a Command Line as everyone was back then with the Apple II and the IBM PC. The result was the Mac….

Here’s a great dramatization showing that event. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI from a movie I really love… “Pirates of Silicon Valley.”

Here’s an actual news expose, which shows almost the same thing…. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYkZUu9MUxs&feature=related

Steve Jobs loves to quote Picaso, who said: “Good artists copy, Great artists steal….”

Both of the above sort of infers that Apple might have stolen the idea, but in reality, according to Marc Bernstein (currently in charge of Xerox Parc) Apple shares were exchanged in return for the visit and demonstration…. and the rest, as they say, is legend and history.

Well I was reading one of my ZDNET news feeds today, about how the newspapers or news in “Print” is being slowly transitioned over to tablets and in doing so, may still live on. One of the amazing things, that I had not seen before (that I can recall – some of the people in the video look eerily familiar ) was an effort by the Knight-Ridder News organization to try and visualize what and where the future of newspapers were going.

In 1994, note the year, they put together a video simulating how people could use a piece of technology that they called The Tablet and showed what it might look and work like…. The similarities are beyond stunning!

I had a tablet computer some time around that time. It actually was a combination book/tablet in that the keyboard could be removed and just the tablet part could be used with a pen. I think it was called the Concerto.

It was no where near as thin or light and weighed a ton! It also wasn’t color! Nor was it any where near as capable as what is shown in the concept video (ie this technology didn’t exist back then, the functionality that you see is completely simulated).

There is no doubt in my mind that this was in fact the birth of the Apple iPad…. some 16 years earlier. Watch the video, it’s 13 minutes long (worth every second) and be amazed…..

They actually made an iPhone App, but it is pretty boring, it looks like it was designed for the original iPhone. It is just a list of news articles that one can click on to read, how sad that somewhere along the road, that after all that effort and research their vision and dream was lost. What an advantage they might have had…. similar to Xerox actually. Funny that….

Still I have to thank them for coming up with the idea, and I am sure Steve is too…..

Enjoy!

Unfortunately, due to the fact that I am not as active on the site as I would like to be AND that there is a LOT of garbage out there, I have to crank the security on this site way up.

As a result many of your comments, as innocent as they appear to me, don’t get through to my ok-ing them. I’ve pulled what I thought were the most valid of the bunch out of the cesspool and it is possible that there are a few other’s that I have missed. If I did, I again apologize.

This all has to do with the garbage out on the web these days, the spam robots out there are ferocious! When I first set up this site, it was literally buried by them. I would get hundreds of garbage replies a day and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep up with manually deleting the stuff out there. My only recourse was to tighten things up as much as possible.

Unfortunately, this usually causes any quick one liners to get put in the spam filter, but why the others about Gipp Forster or the CherryPal fell into it boggles my mind, it could be the ip address or it could be something else. I really don’t know.

I will try to take a much closer look in the spam sewer in future – in hopes of rescuing other valid comments, but until then, let me again apologize for missing your comments. They really REALLY are appreciated. Even if the computer doesn’t like them….

Rick