The MyOffice Blog

There’s a new breed of laptops on the block … ulta light, ultra portable devices called UMPCs (Ulta-Mobile PCs)

I’ve been trying the new Asus EeePC 900 to see how well MyOffice runs on it … and the answer is ‘very well indeed’. My Eee PC came pre-installed with Windows XP so installing MyOffice was simply a matter of downloading the software from our web site.

The best part about the Asus is its size and weight. It weighs in at only 0.92kg and has an 8.9 inch screen making it really portable. Its definitely a competitor to my Pocket PC. Whereas the Pocket PC makes hard work of sending emails, the EeePC is a true notebook with a screen and keyboard large enough for ‘power’ use. And when it comes to travelling it’s certainly small enough to pop into a flight bag whereas I’ve never been happy about lugging a heavy laptop onto a plane.

It also has a solid-state hard drive which means that bumps and shocks are no longer an issue. Connection to the internet is either by wireless or the RJ-45 port.

I’ve been logging on to MyOffice for several weeks now and using it in place of a powerful desktop and I’m delighted to say that’s it’s really usable. I can’t have as many windows open as I would on the desktop but the 1024 x 600 displays all the MyOffice windows adequately. All the main windows (Diaries, Contacts, Emails, Tasks etc) display fully on the screen, making it a genuine alternative to a larger PC or laptop. By now you’ll probably have guessed that I’m impressed with my new toy … except that its not a toy .. its a real notebook that you can use all day.

 That’s the first of the lightweight UMPCs that I plan to test over the next few months. Next on the list is Acer’s Aspire and Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9.

In MyOffice there’s a feature called Draft Email Folders. This allows users to save a partially composed email as a draft and finish it at a later date.  Many users have realised that this feature can also be used to create template emails … but for those users who haven’t … this is how you do it.

If you have a standard format email that you regularly send out, just prepare the email and save it as a draft. This will pop the email into the Draft folder. You’ll probably want to leave certain sections of the email blank, such as the TO section.

When you want to send out this ‘template’ email right-click on it (in the Drafts folder) and choose the ‘Edit’ option. Now you can complete the email by entering the recipient’s name in the TO section or you might even want to enter multiple recipients. You can also personalise the email with the recipient’s name, etc.

Once you have your ‘Template’ email ready to send, just press ‘Send Email’. It’s as simple as that.

With practice, you can build up a list of Template emails in the Drafts folder and use them for a multitude of purposes.

So you’ve composed an email, and now it’s time to send it, but for some reason the email seems rather reluctant to go. Whilst I’d love to be able to claim that the MyOffice Outbox is just so homely and inviting that the email is reluctant to leave it, I can’t. It’s a rather stark place, devoid of scatter cushions, and the coffee machine’s been out of commission for years. Quite frankly, any emails in there are desparate to get out and get on with their journey, but something’s preventing them. Let’s have a look at what that might be.

Send Failed for message X of Y - Send Failed - DNS Error GetHostByName

Quite simply, the outgoing email server (SMTP) address is wrong. MyOffice has attempted to look up the name you’ve entered, and internet’s equivalent of the telephone directory has come back with “sorry, there’s no-one called that in here”. Your best bet now is to make sure you’ve entered the correct SMTP server address in the email account.

Send Failed for message X of Y - Send Failed - Error connecting to server mail.somedomain.com

If you’ve read my first post on email error messages, you may well remember the incoming mail server (POP3) equivalent of this has a whole series of potential meanings. So as to save you the pain of having to dig about for that post, I’ll recap them here.

The message itself means “I’ve looked where you told me to look, and I couldn’t see an SMTP server”. Discounting the Extremely Obvious (i.e. your net connection’s just gone down), there are four pretty common reasons why you’ll see this message.

Firstly, and perhaps most commonly, is an incorrectly entered outgoing mail server address or port. In short, this leaves MyOffice trying to talk to the wrong thing. If you’ve never been able to send email via the email account in question, this is a good place to start if you see this error message, so it’s best to check your outgoing mail server address and port at this point. If you’re still having trouble, then we can pretty much rule this one out, and it’s on to the next possibility.

Probably the next most likely cause of a failure to contact the outgoing mail server is “something” blocking the connection. In practice, this is most likely to be a software firewall installed on your PC. Software firewalls have come a long way in the last five years, but every so often we come across one that gets a little over-zealous in what it blocks. If you’ve got a software firewall installed on your PC, you’re seeing this error, and you’re sure you’ve got your outgoing server address and port correct, then it’s well worth having a look at the settings on your firewall to see if it’s that getting in the way of things.

The final very common (judging by our support records, at least) situation is that in which “something’s changed”. If you’ve been merrily sending email using an account, and that account’s suddenly decided it doesn’t want to play any more, the chances are this is it.

Top of the list of likely candidates for “changing” is your software firewall. When fiddling with the settings, it’s quite easy to accidentally change something and accidentally end up blocking a program from accessing the bits of the net it needs. Furthermore, software firewall providers have a habit of issuing regular updates for their products, and these can sometimes result in programs being blocked by accident. Make no mistake, these updates are Very Good Things Indeed - they mean your firewall provider’s on the ball, or at least trying to get there - but they can have the odd unforseen consequence. So, if you find yourself suddenly unable to send email on a given account, best give the firewall a quick check.

The next mostly culprit for a sudden “change” is the email server itself. In much the same way as I invariably forget engagements made by the missus (”We’re going to Bob and Freda’s in four weeks”), it’s extremely easy to have that email about changes to your email account your provider sent you two months ago. We’ve all done it. Well, I have anyway. So, if your outgoing email’s suddenly packed up and you’ve ruled out the other possibilities, it’s often worth checking your email provider hasn’t changed anything.

The final, and in the case of some email accounts (including my personal account… hey, it was cheap) extremely common, reason for the “Error connecting to server” error message is the temporary dissappearance of the email server itself. My provider’s server seems to go to sleep from time to time, but it always comes back after a few minutes. If you’re finding yourself unable to send emails every so often, there’s a good chance it’s that, and short of changing email provider, I’m affraid there’s not an awful lot you can do about it.

Send Failed for message X of Y - Send Failed - [A Three Digit Number] [An Incomprehensible Phrase]

In my post regarding incoming mail errors (POP3), I mentioned that outgoing mail errors were a bit on the wierd side. Well, here’s that wierdness. Put simply, we technical types rather like error codes. They’re a great way of communicating what’s gone wrong without ambiguity… providing whoever’s on the receiving end of those error codes has a nice lil’ list from which to translate them which, in reality, is almost never the case. SMTP status codes have been about for years, and they work the way they work because, well, that’s the way they work.

Let’s look at code 550, as that’s the one you’re mostly to encounter, and the one you can do the most to solve. In MyOffice, you’ll see this error returned from the SMTP server presented as ‘Send Failed for message X of Y - Send Failed - 550 Requested actions not taken mailbox unavailable’, or something very similar. The important part of the message is the number. Status code 550 means roughly “Hi, I’m an SMTP server, and I’m not going to do what you just asked me to do, and I’m not going to tell you why.” Not very helpful, is it? So it’s up to us to interpret that message.

The most common cause of a 550 SMTP code is an incorrect or missing user name and password. It would be nice to have been told this by the server, but we can’t have everything. So, if you’re getting a 550 code, it’s worth checking that you have the correct user name and password set up for your outgoing mail server, and that the ‘SMTP Server requires user name and password’ checkbox is checked in the ‘Servers’ tab of your email account details.

Another relatively common cause of 550 SMTP errors is trying to send an email using the ‘wrong’ email address. For example, if the email address for your email account is ‘fred@somedomain.com’, and your email account settings in MyOffice have that email address set as ‘bob@somedomain.com’, your SMTP server might take exception to you trying to pretend to be someone else.

Sadly, there are just too many SMTP error codes for me to go into in detail. It would bore both me and you rigid, and given that the only action you can take regarding most of them is shrug your shoulders, make a coffee, and call your email provider, it seems rather pointless spending the time explaining them. Thankfully, plenty of others have spent the time, so if you’re getting an SMTP error code you don’t understand (honestly, hands up anyone who does understand and hasn’t administered an SMTP server), and you feel like attempting a bit of self-diagnosis, this PDF from AnswersThatWork.com will give you a pretty good pointer as to what the problem is.

Love it or loathe it, email has become horribly important in so many aspects of our lives. For some, it forms a significant part of their business communications, for others it’s the driver for their social lives. Consequently, when the flippin’ thing doesn’t work properly, we get more than a little bit irritated, and what makes it worse is the irritating error messages we get back from our email clients - not just MyOffice, but any of them. They don’t actually tell us what we need to fix.

If you’re having problems receiving email in MyOffice, you’ll have noticed the unpleasent red crosses in the “Email - Send and Receive Status” window. The text next to those crosses is the error message. Here are some of the more common ones, a brief explanation of what they mean and, most importantly, some pointers as to how to get rid of them.

Unable to connect to mail.somedomain.com - Connection error - DNS Error GetHostByName

If you’re seeing something along the lines of the above, then it’s almost 100% certain that you’ve got the incoming mail server (POP3) address wrong. The message itself means, more or less, “I’ve spoken to the internet’s version of Directory Enquiries, and they don’t have any record of a Mrs. Gooseblanket in Rotherham”. Your best bet now is to double check the incoming mail server (POP3) address you’ve entered for the email account in question, as it’s almost certainly wrong.

Unable to connect to mail.somedomain.com - Connection error - Error connecting to server mail.somedomain.com

When it comes to errors encountered whilst attempting to receive emails, this is probably the most baffling, simply because it can be caused by so many different things. First off, let’s see what it actually means.

Sadly, it’s a great example of a completely honest error message. “Error connecting to server mail.somedomain.com” means exactly what it says. MyOffice has asked Windows to open a connection to the specified incoming email server and port, and Windows has come back with “sorry, I can’t”. Why sadly? Because it doesn’t tell us why.

Look at it like this. Your Aunt Maude writes her phone number down for you, and tells you to call her on Saturday. You call the number, and no-one answers, so what can we deduce about Aunt Maude from this? Well, she might have gone to the Bingo, she might have been in the bath (which you’ve just interrupted), she might even have given you the wrong number. We just don’t know. All we can do is guess.

The first possibility to rule out here is that of your mail server becoming temporarily unavailable. Mail servers (some more than others) have the irritating habit of dozing off for a bit, which means we can’t connect to them from time to time. If you see this message every so often, but things get back to normal after a few minutes, it’s entirely likely it’s just the mail server being a bit lazy. There’s not a lot we can do about this one.

If you’ve just set up your email account, and you’re seeing this message every time you try and receive email, then the chances are it’s either…

The incoming mail server address and \ or port are wrong. Check that you’ve entered them correctly and, if they appear to be correct, contact the person you got them from in the first place and make sure they haven’t given you duff information.

…or…

There’s ’something’ preventing MyOffice from making a connection to your incoming mail server. Whilst there are a whole load of possible ’somethings’, by far the most likely is your software firewall. Okay, so unless you’re genuinely familiar with how it works, delving around inside your firewall’s settings can be a bit daunting, but it’s certainly worth making sure it’s set up to allow MyOffice access to your mail server. To be honest, it’s probably worth it from a ‘learning experience’ point of view as well, as the chances are your firewall will end up blocking other things you want to allow through in the future, so being able to set it up to work the way you want is a good thing all round.

If you’ve been receiving emails on the account in question just fine up until now, and all of a sudden it’s stopped working, then we’re into a slightly different set of possibilities. Assuming it’s not just your email server having a sleepy period, we’ve not got to work out what’s changed to stop you seeing your email server, and by far the most common ‘culprit’ (well, that’s what our support records seem to suggest anyway) for this is the software firewall. Sadly, as per the paragraph above, it’s going to be down to you to delve around in your firewall’s settings to try and allow MyOffice access to your mail server.

Unable to connect to mail.somedomain.com - Connection error - ERR Unknown user or incorrect password

The good news here is MyOffice is managing to connect to a POP3 server. The bad news is it’s not being allowed to use it. As the error message suggests, our first port of call here is going to be the user name and password for the incoming mail server. There’s a pretty good chance one or both of these is wrong.

If you’ve definately got the correct user name and password, and you’re still seeing this message, then it’s worth checking the incoming mail server address and port. Why? Well, it’s entirely possible that you’re actually connecting to the wrong server in the first place.

One thing we can certainly rule out here, you’ll be pleased to know, is your firewall. Error messages starting with ‘ERR’ are actually from the mail server itself, so if you’re seeing those, then MyOffice is definately able to make contact with ’something’.

Email. Simple, isn’t it?

Let’s face it, POP3\SMTP email is a really very simple concept to grasp, isn’t it? It’s been with us in various forms since the early 70’s, so surely we must all know roughly how it works, mustn’t we? Well, no.

For those of us of a non-technical persuasion (i.e. most of the earth’s population), email is generally a mixture of three experiences. Either…

• We’ve arrived at a new job, been given a logon to the company’s systems, et voila, email!
• We’ve popped the CD that came with our ISP’s welcome pack into our home computer, answered a few questions, followed a few instructions, and hopefully ended up with our email account working happily away in (usually) Outlook Express.
• We’ve headed to the website of one of the numerous free email account providers (e.g. Hotmail), answered another ream of questions, and been given a URL, user name and password, via which we can access said email account.

At no point during any of this have we ever had to actually do anything especially ‘technical’. This is a good thing. After all, computers are supposed to make life easier, not force you into the 21st century equivalent of welding the sills on a Ford Capri in a desparate attempt to get it through the MOT.

Unfortunately, life with email only stays easy if you keep your setup the same. If you’ve decided to give the MyOffice email client a go, then I’m affraid there’s just no alternative but to have a minor brush with the technicalities of the situation. Thankfully, unlike welding up a rusting 1970’s coupe, the basics of setting up a POP3\SMTP email account are extremely easy to grasp, and won’t end up in bits of molten metal on the garage floor and a minor upholstery fire.

Setting up your POP3\SMTP email account in MyOffice

In order to get your email account(s) up and running in MyOffice, the first thing you’re going to need to do is find out the following bits of information.

• Your email address. Not difficult, one would hope.
• The address of your POP3 server, sometimes called ‘Incoming Mail Server’, or even just ‘Mail Server’.
• The port number of your POP3 mail server (you may not be able to find this).
• The user name and password associated with your email account.
• The address of your SMTP server, sometimes called ‘Outgoing Mail Server’.
• The port number of your SMTP mail server (you may not be able to find this).

Okay, so that sounds like a potentially daunting list, but in reality, it isn’t. The addresses and ports for your POP3 and SMTP servers are almost certain to be included with the documentation you received when you signed up for your email account in the first place. There’s also a good chance your user name and password will be included in these as well. The big challenge is, if you’re anything like me, actually finding the bits of paper in question. If it turns out you didn’t receive any paper documentation, then it may be that you received the settings by email, in which case it’s a matter of digging around in your inbox for the email in question. If all else fails, you’ll need to contact the people who provide your email account and ask them. They will almost certainly be able to give you direct answers with regard to the information you require.

If all else fails, you may well be able to get most of the details required (you won’t get the password, for obvious reasons) from your existing email client (e.g. Outlook Express). For example, in Outlook Express, you can find most of the information required by selecting ‘Accounts…’ from the ‘Tools’ menu, and double clicking on the email account in question.

Once you’ve got a pretty complete list of the details you’re after, it’s time to fire up MyOffice and get on with the business of setting up the email account. Assuming you’ve got most of the above details, the following steps should get you up and running in no time.

If you haven’t already done so, run the MyOffice windows client.

Open the ‘Email’ window, either by clicking the ‘Email’ button on the toolbar, or by selecting the ‘Email’ option from the ‘Window’ menu.

From the ‘Tools’ menu, select ‘Email Accounts’ to open the ‘Email Accounts’ dialog and press the ‘New’ button.

The first tab of the ‘Email Account Details’ dialog is called, somewhat unimaginatively, ‘Details’, and is extremely easy to fill in. The first field - ‘Account Name’ - is what you want your email account to be referred to within MyOffice. Personally, I name them after their purpose. Consequently, mine are called ‘Work’, ‘Personal’ and ‘Customer Services’. The next field is called ‘Your Name’. This is what will be displayed next to your sent emails when they’re received. The ‘Email Address’ field is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the email address associated with this email account. Lastly, we have the ‘Reply to address’. If you want recipients of your emails to send their replies to a different email address, enter that email address here. If not, leave it blank, and replies will come back to the email address specified above.

Once you’re happy with the contents of the ‘Details’ tab, click the ‘Servers’ tab, and we’ll enter the information we obtained about your email account earlier.

The details tab is divided into two sections - the ‘Incoming Mail Server (POP3)’ section, and the ‘Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)’ section. Let’s deal with the top section first.

In the ‘Address’ field of the top section, you’ll need to address of your POP3 server. Next to the address field is the ‘Port’ field. If you’ve been given a port number that’s different to the supplied default (port 110), then enter it here.

Below the ‘Address’ and ‘Port’ fields are the ‘User Name’ and ‘Password’ fields. You’ll need to enter the user name and password for your email account into these.

In the ‘Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)’ section, you’ll see that only two of the fields are enabled. The address field should be filled with the outgoing mail server address you obtained earlier, and the same goes for the outgoing mail server port if you were given one. Don’t worry if your POP3 server address seems to be the same as your SMTP server address; some email providers have both at the same address, some don’t.

Below the address and port field, there’s a checkbox called ‘SMTP Server requires user name and password’. If you’ve been told to use a user name and password for your SMTP server, click this checkbox. If not, best to leave it unchecked for now as we can always come back and enable that later if needs be.

Now click the ‘OK’ button. You’re done. You should be set up to send and receive emails using MyOffice. Then again, you might not be. Quite apart from good ol’ human error, it’s possible some of the settings may need a little tweaking. I’ll cover common error messages and how to handle them in my next article.

With the price of fuel going up and up more people are looking at the feasibility of working from home. Every day we get enquiries from users who don’t want to do the daily commute to the office. In some cases they are questioning the very need for an office!

We made the decision several years ago to move out of our expensive offices and ask all the staff to work from home. That decision probably saved us at least £50k a year and our employees were delighted that they didn’t have a daily commute. Of course, we had an ulterior motive …. we wanted to test the viability of working from home using the new collaborative software tool we were developing called MyOffice.

The reason MyOffice is so robust is probably down to the fact that we all use it every day, day in, day out. We figured that if it worked for us it would probably work for the vast majority of SME’s.

Like other small businesses we rely heavily on email … and the email client in MyOffice allows you to log on from any PC connected to the internet and do your emails. I can see all my sent and received emails no matter where I am in the world. When I’m abroad I tend to use the Web Browser version because it works from internet cafes, hotels, airport lounges etc. Back in the UK I have the Windows Desktop version of MyOffice installed on all the PCs that I regularly use … and when I’m on the move I use my Pocket PC (HTC TyTN).

Some users I talk to solve the problem of doing their email from different locations by dragging a laptop around with them wherever they go. That’s fine if you have other data that you need on your laptop … but if you only need emails, contacts, files and tasks then its a bit of a ‘heavy’ solution.

Then there’s the issue of backing up your data. Most users don’t do this and when they lose their PC or it crashes, the problems really start. If you use a product like MyOffice you get all your data backed up automatically at the server end.

So, to those people who are looking at the rising cost of fuel this morning and considering working from home I have one piece of advice … just do it … either a few days a week of full time like we do. You’ll never look back.