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With the on-going abuse to email based systems, we are in need of ways to validate the email addresses we’re handling.

We all know what an email address looks like, we see them and use them every single day. But how do you know if it’s valid or not? The next obvious question should be, what defines a valid email address?

This is what I intend on investigating.

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Today I received the following email from toby.yang@inveis.com…

[Note: If you also received this email, it's spam, my advice is to delete it!]

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This is something that people don’t seem to realise, and although I tell them over and over it seems to go ignored.

DO NOT PUT YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS ON YOUR WEBSITE

The reason is that spam bots crawl websites and gather email addresses, then place them into a list ready to spam.

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I have been interested in starting my own free email service for some time now.

Over the years i’ve seen free email services such as hotmail.com, yahoo, and now gmail.com, to name just a few of the many thousands out there.

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Fax to email is perhaps one of the most interesting, oldest and most overlooked technology.

These days although it seems like everyone has an email address, there are businesses that rely on their fax machine asif its their only means of communication to the outside world.

However, we can’t always be around to man a fax machine 24/7/365, so usually you’re left with a number of options:

• Wait until you return so you can check your fax machine
• Get someone else to check your fax machine, then send them to your current location
• Tell people sending the fax to send to a different number depending on your location at the time
• Tell them to scan it in and email it to you
• Tell them not to bother at all

As you are probably aware for businesses that are none stop 24/7, if you are unable to reach critical information it is possible to loose business.

There is really only one solution…

That is you must have a computer, broadband, a fax modem, a phone line, and a piece of software to tie it all together.

The software you require must do the following functions:

• Receive faxes
• Send faxes via email.
• Distinguish the difference between voice calls and faxes
• Act as an answering machine if a voice call is received
• Have some method of remotely accessing or sending voice messages

So far the only software I have found that will do this task is called FaxTalk, in particular FaxTalk Messenger Pro 7. This software is GREAT! It has the following features:

• Complete voice messaging and fax solution.
• Access contacts from Microsoft Outlook 2000/2002/2003 and Windows Address Book.
• Send faxes over the internet to any email address.
• Forward received faxes and messages by email.
• Access received faxes and voice messages in Microsoft Outlook.
• Receive calls and send faxes when logged out of Windows 2000/XP.
• Block the reception of unwanted junk faxes.
• Process received voice messages and faxes using notification rules.

And so much more, the list is endless! This is the ultimate solution.

However I didn’t stop there…

I also looked other fax to email solutions including fax gateways.

Tiscali offer a fax gateway to all of their members, and since its free to signup to Tiscali, its available to anyone. Once your signed up and logged in, you simply assign yourself a new number and you can receive faxes via email/webmail via your new number as of immediate effect.

There are many other broadband providers (such as Demon) that offer a similar service free providing you have a business broadband package with them, unlike BT, who simply are unaware of such a service.

Another fax gateway to have a look at is yac.com, apparently its free!

The Problem:

By default when you try and export emails from Outlook, there are NO dates.

I wanted to export emails in a certain folder from outlook so I could then import the data into a database such as MySQL for further manipulation.

When I tried to export the emails, outlook would NOT export any of the header details or even something as simple as the date/time.

The Solution:

I spent a lot of time trying to find a solution to this.

After much searching I found this solution…

http://www.topxml.com/snippetcentral/main.asp?view=viewsnippet〈=xml&id=v20020414223234

Summary
A set of short code snippets that I developed using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and MSXML4 that will export and import Microsoft Outlook objects including contacts, e-mail, notes, and task items. This is code snippet project still very much a work in progress and contributions are certainly welcome.

The code snippets I created here are written in the Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA, programming language included supported by all Microsoft Office applications. In this latest revision (as of February 2003), I updated the routines to include importing of certain Outlook objects such as appointments, contacts and notes. I have also improved the input error handling code. Next steps include more robust handling of fields containing no data. Having schemas associated with XML structured would also be good. Finally, if anyone has any ideas on how to do this reflectively, please let me know (maybe with C# in Outlook 11?).

If you are new to VBA, what you need to do first is read this.

Basically what you need to do is hit Alt+F11 to open up the Visual Basic Editor, then you need to use Tools | References to add a reference to the Microsoft XML library. You should be able to use whichever version is the latest.

All you do then is go down the tree to the left, and double click the “ThisOutlookSession”. Once this is complete, hopefully you should be able to simply hit Alt+F8 and choose the ExportEmailToXml.

Once this is complete, simply open the xml file into excel, and save as a CVS file, MySQL will easily be able to import CVS files.