1. Newsletter Editorial

Season's Greetings.  I hope you are enjoying a well deserved end of year break and looking forward to ringing in the New Year with friends and family.  DonationCoder, on the other hand, never sleeps and is packed with nerds and geeks who enjoy nothing better than celebrating the holidays up all night typing in the glow of their liquid crystal displays.  To prove that point, we've got one of our biggest newsletters ever today.  If you absolutely must engage in a "real life away from the computer" please be careful out there and make sure to buckle up.

If you're celebrating a holiday with kids this month, regardless of which one, chances are the kids have convinced you to let them open at least one present a little early (otherwise their brains might explode from the anticipation).  Well I sympathize so I made available a brand new program as an early release for supporting members of the site.  It's called "Point Motivator" and it was born out of discussions on the forum about creating a general program that can motivate you to do things you want to get done.  Basically it lets you create a set of activities that earn you various points and then track your progress over time.  As I said, it's available now as an early download present for all supporting members of the site, but will be made public in January for our NANY 2008 Challenge.  It comes with a sample set of items but I hope people will share their item definition files on the forum with each other, and I'd love to hear if you find the program useful.  Thanks to everyone on the forum for helping me come up with the program name.

-Mouser, your host for this week's newsletter

• Read about and download the preview release of mouser's Point Motivator - supporting members only
• Read about the upcoming N.A.N.Y. 2008 Challenge

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There, fSekrit 1.35 has been released!

After a relatively short beta period, this Christmas 2007 release sports the following features:

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Version 1.35 - December 23, 2007 - 100kb/50.5kb

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• fixed: file->export appends ".txt" instead of ".exe" if no extension given.
• fixed: file->new now clears passphrase and read-only state.
• fixed: menu items are now properly enabled/disabled depending on read-only state and whether text field is empty or not.
• added: drag&drop support: you can now drop a text file onto the fSekrit window, and fSekrit will load the dropped file.
• added: right-click popup menu with edit actions
• added: redo support
• added: unicode text support (only the note text, not filenames yet)
• added: now everything sensitive is always wiped from memory after use, as far as it's possible (with the exception of the RichEdit control).

http://www.runscanner.net/

RunScanner is a completely free windows system utility which scans your system for all configured running programs. You can use runscanner to detect autostart programs, spyware, adware, homepage hijackers, unverified drivers and other problems. You can import and export your results and let other people help you to solve your problems.

Very comprehensive autostart list
*Scanning of 80+ hijack locations ,Host file editor
Covers everything from autoruns, HJT, silentrunners and more. Malware will find it harder than ever to hide.

Easier to use
*Online malware analysis of results
*Verification of file signatures (Microsoft signed, Other Signed, Whitelisted by online database )
*MD5 hash calculation of files + online file rating
*Online lookup of scanned entries. (Runscanner database + Google)
RunScanner makes it easier to determine which entries are likely to be malicious.

It's already December and I would like to archive my old Emails at the end of the year. I got about 4.5 GB of emails from the last 10 years - which make Thunderbird really slow. I would like too keep all the mail from 2007 in the client and archive older mails in some (still accessible) way. The problem is that Thunderbird keeps all mails in the MBox format what basically means one large file per folder.

I thought about these options:
1) Create a Filter to get all older Emails in a separate folder. This Folder could be compressed and backup'ed right away. MBox is plaintext so it is some way of search able but not really good readable and 100MB+ textfiles are slow when opened in an texteditor.

2) Just like 1) but transform the the MBox into Maildir - which stores mails as individual files. This solves the search and open issue but makes it really hard to find replies and followup's

Both "solutions" lacking the ability to handle attachments.

Any Ideas?

Want to visualize your network traffic?

VisualRoute: http://visualroute.visualware.com/

Caveat: when running Lite for the first time, it notifies you that updates are available and offers to download a newer version for you.  Surprise!  The "new version" downloaded is really the 15-day trial version.  Ha ha, got you, sucker!  Luckily the 15-day limited edition installs alongside the Lite version, so it's easy to uninstall without corrupting Lite.  But still... a teeny bit deceptive, methinks.