So Helpful
I love Hosting Matters.
However, sometimes I could do with less aggressive scanning of my e-mails. Mail that passes through their servers gets scanned for viruses, potentially dangerous attachments, and even phishing.
It’s the middle one that gets me. I routinely e-mail myself files from work to home or vice-versa, from my e-mail account to my very same e-mail account. Wasn’t I surprised when I sent myself an MDB file (Access database) and had it stripped and replaced with a warning on the other end. Documents, spreadsheets… no problem. So an MDB or an EXE has to be renamed, even if it is inside a ZIP file.
Sunday I e-mailed myself a bunch of stuff from the office. Most of it I also had in a position to be burned onto a CD. That all came through fine. I also zipped the source directory for a program I wrote for my timekeeping. It caters to my big client’s desire to have the time broken down by category. That’s a pain, but then it beats making a several page, itemized invoice that lists a description of everything I did.
That didn’t come through. I renamed the obvious MDB and EXE files, zipped the whole directory, mailed the ZIP file, and had it nuked by the mail scanner. Probably there was a zip within the zip that contained something eeeeevil, or perhaps now VB source files are considered a danger to society. Sigh…
At least it wasn’t urgent. Starting with everything from April 1 onward, Deb is going to enter my time for me, if not do the bills too. I need to tweak the program, install it for her, arrange for the database to get backed up from her machine to mine regularly, and away we go. My problem lies in not recording what I do and potentially losing revenue. The way I had things setup, there were two computers from which I could record time at the office. I’d get busy and not bother a lot of the time, then catch up later. It was also easy to miss forever anything not leaving an e-mail trail or not inherently memorable.
What brought this to a head is the client who calls me on my cell phone regularly. I never get that time recorded, because I can be anywhere. He called when we were in the recovery room for the first couple hours after Sadie got evicted. I started sometimes remembering to e-mail myself a note to record the time. If I could do that consistently, then record it regularly, I’d be golden. Since I can e-mail from the cell, or from a client via the web interface, I am well covered.
So everything I do will now e-mail to an account setup for the purpose, which creates a nice archive because we’ll leave the mail on the server for an extended time. Deb will check it every day or two or three, enter what’s there, and at the end of a month I won’t be trying to figure out and enter what I did. If I could have her do the actual billing, it would save me basically a day each month, and a task I dislike enough to procrastinate at dangerously.
But I digress.
It’s cool and makes the net safer for HM to do those scans, but boy is it annoying when I lose something legitimate.
On another note, I may be quiet the rest of the day as there is waaaay too much to do, starting with looking into the aforementioned client’s internet connection being down.
You might want to check to see if Hosting Matters will let you disable their scanning service for your emails, or configure it for your setup to a degree.
At the minimum, any company that performs the service you mentioned should have a system in place so that you can fetch the offending message attachment via web or similar. With the caveate that it is User Beware when you do so of course.Posted by on 04/04 at 03:12 PM
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