I found this more than hilarious and surprising that it wasn't even registered until 2000.  But if you ever send email with this domain or put your address as this, well he gets it.  From the Washington Post:

When businesses want to communicate with their customers via e-mail, many send messages with a bogus return address, e.g. "somethinghere@donotreply.com." The practice is meant to communicate to recipients that any replies will go unread.

But when those messages are sent to an inactive e-mail address or the recipient ignores the instruction and replies anyway, the missives don't just disappear into the digital ether.

Instead, they land in Chet Faliszek's e-mail box

Amazingly banks and numerous companies do just this

In a blog post cleverly titled "What's in Your Return Address Field," Faliszek posted another bank screw up last month after he began receiving replies from Capital One customers inquiring about various details of their accounts. He says Capital One appears to have used donotreply.com as the return address for automated payment transfers and debits set up by customers.

Every time the client goes into a standby (not hibernation but definitely where Windows closes the screen down and stops spinning the disk, the error shows.  I let  a machine sit and then logging in gave this

Our customers have forwarded a blog posting from Mayflower Software that suggests you remove DNS blacklists and then let their software handle everything for spam.  While there is one valid point, adding an immeasurable load to your Domino server is not something I suggest.  many of the comments on the blog post reflect that fact as well.

I hate to discourage the use of any technique that can stop spam, but I think DNS blacklists should no longer be used by Lotus Domino (IBM Domino) email administrators.

So then jump down to the comments and see what others have to say:

Blacklist can produce false positives but really have positive impact on load. Especially when our SMTP server have limited bandwidth and ratio rejected/accepted messages is high as on our server (we have over 90% rejected connections). Then disabling DNS blacklist does mean that our load on line will be 10 times bigger which is of course unacceptable.

So to our customers that saw this, I write my opinion here.  While someone may be blocked accidentally for whatever reason, there is the phone.  The load that could come from this on your server is not worth letting a Domino based spam solution solve.

I was forwarded this article, which I am not buying, and you can't even see the whole report without purchase.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 27, 2008--Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server 2007 is repeating history as it mimics the allure
and pitfalls of Lotus Notes, according to research released today by
CMS Watch, an independent analyst firm that evaluates content
technologies.

Why are they comparing this just to Lotus Notes?  How does Notes compare to Sharepoint ?  What happened to Quickr?  We don't compare Quickr to Exchange

I say go out and read the rest of the summary.
 
The Report is available for purchase online from CMS Watch at
http://www.cmswatch.com

In big meetings we make sure we never brought cell phones in, not even on vibrate mode.  But now, what the heck, go topless.

Frustrated by distracted workers so plugged in that they tune out in the middle of business meetings, a growing number of companies are going "topless", as in no laptops allowed.  Also banned from some conference rooms: Blackberrys, iPhones and other personal devices on which so many have come to depend..

Seems to be a pleasant way to actually get things done.  Anyone going to try this?

Sounds like VGS once again to me....

Another interesting bout with unknown causes of server setup failures on an additional Domino server.  We were setting up a hosted server, that was to get the necessary data through a private connection with an address supplied by the IT team at said company.  We could hit that IP address over port 1352 successfully, so all was good there.  However, the server setup would always stop at 20%, which normally means that it cannot connect.  Yet even a simple telnet showed that it connected fine.  So as we were about to cheat and have them zip and send names.nsf and some other stuff to set the server up locally and then let replication take over, NotesPing was quickly tossed on the server to some interesting results.:

Determining path to server XXX.XX.XX.94
Available Ports:  TCPIP
Checking normal priority connection documents only...
Allowing wild card connection documents...
Enabling name service requests and probes...
Checking for XXX.XX.XX..94 on TCPIP using address 'XXX.XX>XX.94'
  Connected to the wrong server SaidServer2/SaidDomain using address XXX.XX.XX.94
  Connected to the wrong server SaidServer2/SaidDomain using address XXX.XX.XX.94
  Unable to connect to XXX.XX.XX.94 on TCPIP (Connection denied. The server you connected to has a different name from the one requested.)
Checking low and normal priority connection documents...
No default passthru server defined

So NotesPing showed us that the server they gave us as an IP address and name, was not the right one for one of the two variables for the setup.  Correcting either the IP address for the SaidServer or the server name for the IP address solved the issue.

Some of you hopefully read the posts and technotes regarding the new filtering rates that AOL has deployed against chats coming through the Clearinghouse.  Well I started getting emails and pings asking what it all meant.  So to honor everyone's requests, I did some digging around with AOL people to get some answers:

• The rate limit numbers are not linear
• The rate limit numbers are built dynamically with an algorithm, meaning each company will be different
• If you run a bot that does heavy traffic, like an automated helpdesk or query bot, through your Sametime Gateway into the Clearinghouse, you may contact AOL to have it provisioned

So as you see there is no hard numbers per customer, per connected Sametime Gateway.  It is a dynamically changing rate based upon your normal usage.  Now I know they do not have 40 guys that are there doing simple math charts.  Which means that if you suddenly spike the amount of traffic you are sending through the gateway into the AOL Clearinghouse, you might get limited down until they figure out what is going on.  Meaning you might end up calling them.  So if you are implementing a new bot, I would get in touch with them and get it provisioned first

Make sense?  If not let me know.

Get yours today hot off the presses!

IN THIS ISSUE
* From the Editor: Chris' .4630821 VGS
* From the IDoNotes Mailbox: Bringing Together Multiple Sametime Services
* Part 2 of 3: Domino Monitoring and Reporting
* Quick Tip: Can Both Lotus Sametime and QuickPlace/Quickr Be Installed on the Same Server?
* From the IDoNotes Mailbox: Websphere Books For the Sametime Gateway and Sametime Advanced

Some of the IBM bloggers (Chris Pepin and Adam G) have recently posted on how strong and wonderful the external Sametime server, known as extst.ibm.com,  for IBM is.  Now let's clarify a few things.  First, it is not a Sametime Gateway server.  It is an old Sametime 3.1 server as shown in this image here:


If it was a Sametime Gateway, then everyone would be firing up gateway servers to connect to it, you could not use your Sametime client directly. So moving on.  I am able to log into this site via the web interface (HTTP), I am able to chat via the old Java connect client.  But I cannot log in via the Sametime Connect client, for about the last two years.  This has been pointed out in the partner forums for a long time, and each time the upgrade and fixing of this service gets pushed for numerous reasons.  Adam once again mentions a quarter and change freeze.  What happened to all of 2007 and 2006?  That freeze gets mentioned over and over.  That must be one of the coldest server rooms in existence.  Yet the demo servers in DFW get upgraded on a consistent basis.  Chris pointed out that it worked for Sametime 7.5, yet that was a select few.  Many people got bumped somewhere along the road and the excuse was also made of compatibility issues.  So we have compatibility, freezes, finance and a ton of others for the past few years.

I am one of the lucky ones that do communicate over the Sametime Gateway.  I am on BleedYellow.  But to have a public facing Sametime server that doesn't work right for years is not a good experiment..  Mitch (a hosted blogger here as well as a large customer reference at Lotusphere) even comes out with a blog comment on the state of the server.

So I will go out on a limb here and make a theory. No insider knowledge, just a theory.  Many of the employees do not want you contacting them directly, bypassing support.  Many of them would get understandably overwhelmed with pings form all over.  I really try to be sparing in contact because I know how my chats can be overwhelming during the day sometimes.  So having this take it's little time, and having sites like BleedYellow and demo3.DFW.ibm.com make it an extra step for an IBM'er to log in.  Adam does a good job of being online all over, but he is product management and wants the exposure.  Developers really do not.

I am plaing around with the cube, but it also lets you add any TV show via RSS feed, so I could grab my shows from Hulu. Interesting experiment to getting prime time shows online with no TiVo in the middle

They are not federating the two services, rather Google grabbed onto Open AIM and said why not log in from our interface into both.  So Google Talk becomes a consolidated IM client.

I have gotten plenty of emails and pings looking for clarification or thoughts so it is faster to put them out there.

Let's conquer the easy one first, AOL.  In the recent technote #1296449, IBM announces that AOL has finally taken the same approach on the Clearinghouse that they do with the normal public chat  servers, which is to limit your chat rates and also strip filter URL's that point to executables to provide some security.  After talking to AOL yesterday, they have no hard number to give on what rate flow they watch for.  But, if your site runs a Sametime bot accessible via the Gateway that is hit a lot, I would imagine you will see that slow down considerably.  What I didn't understand is:

•  without any numbers, how can I scale a large user site that is forcing all users through the Gateway now instead of letting them load AOL.?
• will each user count or the total number of chats through the gateway itself?
• will presence awareness be affected by this?
• will a user get blocked for a certain amount of time, or throttled as they do in the public client? (if you want to test this go run AIM and send a ton of chats at once and AOL will warn you that you are being slowed down)
• will the URL's be replaced with text about the blocked URL or will the sender be notified?

I am sure I will think of some more.

Now for Google.  This is a huge hole on the Google side, no the Sametime Gateway.  let's be clear there.  IBM technote #1295505 and 6.  Basically anyone that you know (company) that has a Sametime Gateway that connects to Google Talk can be temporarily shut off by registering their domain in the small business services.  While Google is working on the way to clean this up, it makes for a weird issue that can't be stopped dead until then.  It is more of a nuisance since you can go in and take back over control if someone attempts this.  But you may troubleshoot in the wrong place.  A quick way to check if a domain is set-up in there is to go to the partnerpages and add the domain name to the end.  If it says not found, you are good to go.  If it attempts to log you in, get to finding out who is trying to mess with you.

You can read the press release right here.

I am curious about some of their statements that they make

Due to a very bad UPS device, thrown circuits for protection and gremlins, we had a hard crash on some servers this morning.  So here is what we found out.

All the Domino servers restarted successfully as a core, but any server that had HTTP in the servertasks= line would not fire up the task after the hard shutdown.  We had to manually go in and start it to clear the alert.  This was on all the servers 7.x and higher (sorry no older ones to test on)

hmmmmm

Kevin Cavanaugh, Vice President Messaging & Collaboration, Lotus Software Group, gets on the phone with me to discuss another one of the big Lotusphere 2008 announcements:

• Lotus Foundations
• The reseller WMS7 is already rolling out the Lotus Foundations sales and is taking your orders :-)
• We talk about the link to Lotus Bluehouse that was hinted to in the last podcast
• We definitely talk about how the inclusion of Lotus Symphony makes this a killer SMB solution
• Also, Kevin mentions ISV enablement and other software ready to run on Foundations

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IdoNotes is now part of the Techpodcasts network

Thanks to my wonderful (NITIXBlue) Lotus Foundations reseller, I have my hands on a Mark I server running silently away.  However, moving an existing Domino server onto this new box is proving difficult.  Due to how they have tightly tied Nitix to the Domino install, moving over an existing server seems to break a list of things, while still letting Domino work successfully.  Well you would think everything.  here is part one of the saga.

So if I register a user, even with the cert having the same password, it will only create it in Foundations, not in Domino.  Let the games begin.

I think this could be a big hit at Lotusphere as we all crowd around Ed and Alan to keep our scores up on our devices. However, you should also lose points for bad signing at Kimonos.

I just presume most of you see, read or subscribe to the LotusUserGroup.org Sys Admin newsletter.  But as I sat here writing the March edition, I realized you may not.  So get over and catch up darnit.   There was a Blackberry series last year and right now is the middle of a monitoring series.

What are you waiting for?

I know I slipped this out at 1am, but I wans't expecting that much demand on knowing about Bluehouse.  So thanks to everyone that already grabbed the episode and just wait until the next one that is recorded.  Probably out Monday.

Martha Hoyt (picture) and Satwik (Satwik Seshasai) get on the phone to discuss another one of the big Lotusphere 2008 announcements:

• Lotus Bluehouse
• Ed Brill mentions it from Lotusphere
• Interesting, there was tons of blogs and such, but no real "press release" that was just Bluehouse that I could find. Some mentioned it, but nothing dedicated.

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IdoNotes is now part of the Techpodcasts network

Talking to Sean today, we found that hotel rates are always silly, mainly if a bunch of people are going.  So drop us a comment here or email if you are interested  in ganging up on a hotel for a better group block rate

Here is what Mike Rhodin held up at Lotusphere (covered in yellow construction paper) as a Lotus Foundations server/appliance


Here is the picture of what a current Lotus Foundations server looks like when it gets delivered:


I am betting the later one will be the little small box that Mike held on stage. But the good news... this box rocks so far (waiting on 8.x to be issued), but it seems to do everything. Look for a list of blog posts on it.

UPDATE: It seems that was a basic 5 user box running mail for client access only, no web. I have had some pings questioning my expectations and what I thought that box was, I will clarify in another posting.