Sometimes, when a user is using Outlook Express to receive an email that was sent from Outlook, the email attachment may seems missing from Outlook Express. If you check the size of the email, it is quite large for a plain text email and the attachment is actually there but you just can’t see it. This is a common problem with Outlook when it is set to compose email in Rich Text format.

Solution 1:

There are two ways to solve this issue. The easier way is to ask the sender to configure his/her Outlook so that emails are composed in either HTML or Plain Text format.

1. In Outlook, click on “Tools” > “Options”

2. Under “Mail Format” tab, change the message format to either Plain Text or HTML.

Solution 2:

The second option is to use other program to extract the attachment from the email.

1. In Outlook Express, drag the email to the desktop. You will have a .eml file.

2. Open the .eml file with Winzip and extract the “winmail.dat” file.

3. Open winmail.dat with fentun.exe and you should see the original attachments of the email. (You can Google on fentun.exe and you should be able to find a download link of the utility.)

Before you actually start building a website for your client using Joomla, you first need to understand the requirements and have a general idea of how to meet those requirements. So you will need to sit down with your client and ask him a number of questions to help you gain a better understanding of the website. The following is a list of questions you should ask.

1. What is the purpose of the website? Is it for selling products? Is it for selling products and services? Or, is it for conveying information?
2. What are the big sections on the website? (e.g. Home, Products, News, Contact, FAQ)
3. Does it support multiple languages?
4. Does it have restricted areas where only registered users can view the restricted content?
5. Will it send out newsletters to subscribed users?
6. Is there a theme color representing the company?
7. Are contents updated frequently or are they pretty much static?
8. Will there be any video streaming contents?

This is just a very short list of the questions you can ask but they are some good questions to get started. Some questions will lead to more questions, depending on the responses. For example, if the purpose of the website is to sell products online, then you will need to ask about the payment and shipping methods, return policy, customer information, and so on. Remember, the more information you can gather and the more specific the information is, the easier for you to build the website. The gathered information will determine how to configure Joomla, what plug-ins you need to use, what kind of template to choose, and so on. So it is important for you to spend the time with your client to discuss all the requirements of the website.

Research Domain Names

At this stage, you should also ask your client what domain name they want to use. Most likely it is somewhat similar to the company name. You should provide a few choices for your client to choose from. However, before providing the list to your client, you should first research on the availability of each domain name. If a domain is already taken, then don’t include it on the list. To check the availability, you can search for the WHOIS record of a domain using some online WHOIS lookup tools such as the following:

http://www.internic.net/whois.html 

http://whois.domaintools.com 

You can simply enter a domain name in one of these sites to search for its WHOIS record. If the WHOIS record exist for a specific domain, then it means the domain is already taken and it will tell you who the registrant and registrar are. If the WHOIS record doesn’t exist, then it means the domain is available.

A couple years ago, when I was working for a web hosting company, it was may first time to get to know about Joomla and what content management system (CMS) is. I was amazed by how easily it is to setup a CMS website with just a few clicks. The installation process was so similar to installing a program on Windows.

Meeting Business Requirements

Since then, I have been playing around with Joomla and I have even used it to setup a few websites for some business clients, making some money out of the small projects. There are a lot of plug-ins for Joomla that can meet specific business requirements. For example, a wedding centre has asked me to setup a website for them with the following requests:

1. able to sell wedding gowns, tuxedo, invitation cards, decorations, and other related products
2. able to post customer’s wedding photo in categories
3. suitable for marketing to different ethnic groups
4. easy communication with customers
5. able to play music album online

With Joomla, it is capable to meet all of the business requirements above with its built-in functions as well as 3rd-party plug-ins.

1. Using Virtuemart for Joomla, I could setup an online shopping cart that has full range of features including shipping and payment modules.
2. Using Easy Gallery, I could setup a photo gallery capable of dividing the photos into a category tree.
3. Using Joom!Fish, I could setup a language selection function that will translate the website into different languages to target different language-speakers.
4. Joomla already has a built-in form for users to submit questions directly on the website.
5. I could integrate Youtube videos on the website.

As you can see, it is easy for anyone to start a website development business using Joomla even if you don’t know any programming. Although you will probably not be making a thousand dollar website (if you are, then you can contract someone to help you out), a few hundred dollars per project should not be a problem.

In the next few weeks, I will show you how I would start a website project after getting a job order and walk you through the way to meet the typical business requirements of a website.

One of my clients has a standalone storage box that is capable of acting as a FTP server for file sharing. He wanted to set it up so that his clients can upload files to him using FTP. His storage box is plugged behind a wireless router that is connecting all the workstations in the office. However, he is not able to setup his FTP server so that people outside his office can connect. He has tried many settings, such as opening all the required ports, putting the storage box in DMZ, and enabling/disabling passive mode. However, the closest outcome is that the FTP client is able to login but can not list any remote directories.

The problem is that internal IP addresses are being forwarded in the FTP connection. Therefore, the FTP client can not establish the connection correctly. To resolve this problem, some FTP client has the option to ignore the FTP server’s Passive IP address (ie. the internal IP). This will allow the FTP client to establish the connection with the FTP server correctly. Unfortunately, not every FTP client has this feature so you will have to look for one that supports it. The gFTP program in Linux has it and its pop-up tip explains the problem clearly.

If you know which other FTP clients can ignore the internal IP, then please share the info with us.

One of my client had a problem where he couldn’t visit www.hotmail.com and www.yahoo.com. Both sites were timed out after waiting for a long time. He tried loading both sites in Firefox and Internet Explorer and both didn’t work. Other websites loaded fine though. There were other user accounts on his computer and he tried using them. Other accounts were able to load hotmail.com and yahoo.com without a problem. At first, I told him to try clearing the temporary internet files in both browsers but the problem remained.

Flush DNS Cache

Another possible solution was to clear the DNS cache in Windows. So I typed “ipconfig /flushdns” without the quotes in command prompt to flush the cached DNS entries. However, it didn’t stop the problem. Upon further testing with trace route, I found out that the DNS resolution was not a problem. The trace route tests were able to complete successfully. Therefore, the cached DNS entries should be correct.

Double Virus Scanning

As a last resort, I decided to take the hard drive out and scan it with NOD32. Right away, it found about 30 threats and deleted them. I then put the hard drive back and tried visiting www.hotmail.com again with the problematic user account. This time, hotmail.com loaded fine in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. However, yahoo.com was still unavailable. Then I installed avast! 4 Home Edition on the computer and performed another virus scan. It detected a trojan still running in the memory and suggested to restart the computer to do a startup scan. I followed and it removed a couple of trojans. After that, yahoo.com was able to load too.

If your computer has a similar problem where you are not able to access some big sites such as Yahoo, MSN and Google, then it could be affected by a virus or trojan. You should perform virus scan using a few anti-virus software. A last note to make here is that my client already have the AVG Home Edition installed but it didn’t catch the virus or trojan.