Oh no! My email address got blasted out by my new friend, a business associate, or maybe Mom. What to say?

The premise here is that email blasts occur regularly and usually it involves a sales deal, an event of some kind, or around a cause.  Chain letters are another notorious source for guilt-tripping the recipient to forward it out to all your friends or else be a real lousy individual; and these actually still work year in year out.

The blast can be done safely if people still feel compelled to send such multi-recipient messages out to people who are otherwise complete strangers of each other.  How?   Use the BCC field of course.  Well that of course assumes you knew about BCC.  If you didn’t this post isn’t for you though; rather, it is about you.

My dilemma as a responsible technology professional is to advocate for safe usage of the internet, for people to maintain privacy, and for their identity to remain secure from SPAM’rs or worse.  Often I am doing this with people I’m often barely acquainted.  The internet and email is not as intimate as a face to face heart to heart chat.  It’s a touchy thing to only have email to have these ‘talks’.  So what has been done is that after a blast offense occurs I’ll send an email back to the originator with a scripted reply message.

This blog is written because, I want to know what other people say. Do you say anything at all?  How does my message stack up against what you are saying?  Please comment away as I’d like to make it effective and brief.  …so here goes:

Thank you for considering my interest and sharing this information with me.

I’ve got a small request that I hope you’ll honor.  As a technology service provider and small business owner, information security and privacy are key issues that I must guard for my own sake and for my clients.  Please understand that by including my name and email address in the ‘To’  or ‘CC’ field populated with many others that some of them may again forward the email much like you have.  If they do then my email address and identity get circulated.  This then exposes my email identity as well as any others in the To and CC fields to future SPAM and other undesirable unintended consequences.

The good news is this is an unnecessary risk; so I have an easy fix and request.  In the future when and if you send an email to me along with an audience of others (a blast message) please add me to the ‘BCC’ (blind carbon copy) field and not to not to the “To” or “Cc” fields; in practice it would be a good neighborly thing to do this for everyone who’s a recipient.  This on the net is called good “netiquette” and an overall appreciated best practice by anyone who’s ever received SPAM or who has had their identity stolen (I have).  As for what address to put in the “To” field just insert your own email or any secondary email address.  It is important though that the address be valid or else this is a criteria which SPAM filters will trigger and the email may not reach some of your BCC recipients.

The Infancy of SBS and Dr. Seuss – Hear a Who? – Codename Historical Factoid

Did you know? …

SBS was once known as SAM or more correctly “Sam”.  This is much the same as “Cougar” was to SBS 2008 or also recently how “Longhorn” was to Vista

SBS was also once known as “Horton”. Do you hear a ‘who’? I do, I do.

in honor and memory of recently deceased radio legend Paul Harvey:
“Here’s the rest of the story.”

After being offered the opportunity via a MVP Summit 2009 proxy to submit requests to the SBS Team in Redmond I took the chance to expand the scope of some of my questions to learn a little about the history of the software product.  Yesterday I had just read something that I wanted to clarify.  Was this story truth or a myth or urban legend?

A recent SBS article I web-stumbled upon was claiming this historical name was once due to intensions to distribute it through SAM’s Club and for it to be so simple as to not require any technical skill to install.  So I wanted some answers and I got everything I wanted “in spades” and from a DIRECT source.  …let me explain

First, I’d like to thank MVP Kevin Royalty for acting as a researcher and go between.

****key in some 2001 Space Odyssey music and dim and then ever so slowly raise the lights to dramatic effect****

(Narrator deep dramatic voice)
So originally SBS is an idea and then it became a reality.

In the beginning …a guy named Keith Logan came up with the SBS idea.  Also Paul Fitzgerald coworker with Keith Logan , SBS Dev Team founding and current member, was directly involved with the genesis of the SBS product at that moment of inception.  Here’s his very helpful emailed response (sparingly shortened and chronologically re-ordered) today that was given to me:

From: Dale Unroe
Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009
To: Kevin Royalty

Yesterday, I stumbled onto a story that stated that historically the very first version of SBS was in fact something called SAM because it was to be solely distributed through Sam’s Club and wasn’t to require any technical knowledge to install.  Can you verify if these are the facts?  What can you uncover while there in the bowels of the SBS secret archives?

From: Paul Fitzgerald
Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009
To: Kevin Royalty
Subject: RE: sbs was “SAM”?

4.0 was called Sam.  (as in Sam I Am the Dr Seuss book. The original creator of the SBS idea was a guy named Keith Logan and he was a Dr. Seuss fan

4.5 was called Horton (again in the same Dr. Seuss theme)

There is some truth to the sam’s club thinking but the code name was really from Dr. Seuss.

From: Kevin Royalty
To: Paul Fitzgerald

May I pass this on to Dale?

From: Paul Fitzgerald

Sure.

 

********Wow!! – so there we have it and right from an SBS inception & development member Paul Fitzgerald – SBS was named “Sam” and not “SAM”.

having just found this today I laughed out a loud – woohooo
…and so perhaps Google, like Horton, gives a ‘who’ too!

<roll credits and raise the house lights>

***and that smashes the weakly researched story and busts this short-lived myth***

BTW – I didn’t mention SBS 2003 codename ‘Bobcat’, also SBS 2000’s codename  is nothing as there never was one given which was common to the Windows 2000 product family

Technology and the Lord of the Flies

Ever felt like you as the admin become feared and resisted rather than appreciated? You’re no longer the helpful heroic huckster but rather the dark shadowy guy behind the curtain who magically does stuff and changes stuff and generally is a menace to the peace of the norm?  …who has imposed over the threshold of tolerance of mild mannered meandering innocent users such that courteous, collaborative, and professional relationships turn dark, cynically saturated, and ugly?

It’s the island of the Lord of the Flies and the savages are yelling out ‘Piggy’.  They want you at the stake and the bonfire is alight.

… well you have my sympathies

 now buck up and get back to work

Our job is fantastic.

RWW Exclusions SBS 2003 – Leaving Desktops With Local Access Only

If you have a desktop you do not want accessed through the RWW portal there is a simple way to do this.  You add the computer name to the “ExcludeList”.

This applies to SBS 2003 not SBS 2008 (see Andy’s comment).

It is a subkey in the Windows Registry found here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\RemoteUserPortal

Under this you will see a String Value ‘ExcludeList’

You should add desktops with no spaces and separating multiple names with a comma:

Rosetta Stone discovered – Microsoft Speak unraveled

Speaksy English?  YES! – TYVM Eric

What did he say? Deciphering “Microsoft speak”

On Friday, there was an email thread going around amongst some Partners trying to decipher what an answer they had received from Microsoft really meant. Why? Because the people from Microsoft responding to the question fell into the trap of using “Microsoft speak” or “the excessive use of acronyms to see who can say the most with the fewest letters possible.” I’ve even heard rumors we have some teen cell phone texting champs on campus to help us get even more efficient and completely rule out the use of any full words… No, just kidding! 

Well, to try and help out, I thought I would take the acronyms included in that email, as well as several others, and post the REAL meanings up here so that they can hopefully help you in the future in the event one of us Microsoft folks start throwing out random multi-letter acronyms again in a conversation (and let me apologize in advance on behalf of all of them). Of course, you could just slap us and say, “ENGLISH PLEASE!” to snap us out of it. (Maybe you better skip the slapping part since I am not sure who from Microsoft you may be speaking to)

…translations, babble and more here:  ->Microsoft SMB Community Blog