I don't mean safe for your health, we already know that devices cause 'Blackberry thumb'. I'm talking here about security concerns an administrator might have when attaching these devices to your network. So far Blackberries don't have AntiVirus installed, but there isn't any virus that can infect a BB device (yet), even so viruses should be scanned at gateway level before they reach the device anyway, to minimise the risk of a virus being forwarded on to a machine that can be infected.
Aside from viruses, up until recently it was assumed that Blackberry devices were the safest possible thing you could attach to your network and use to read e-mail, but now some clever hackers have developed "Blackjacking". Have a look at the link below which shows how to compromise a company network using a Blackberry.
http://www.praetoriang.net/presentations/blackjack.html
Of course to do this, you need to covertly acquire a Blackberry device, and this method will only work until the Blackberry administrator kills the handheld from the server ... which I would hope would be fairly instant if they are on the ball.
It's an interesting read, and the moral of the story is clear - be alert and wipe your devices as soon as they are lost. If you are a Blackberry user, you should notify your admins immediately if you notice your device is missing. If it's wiped and then found by you again, it's a simple 5 minute task to restore it back to the same condition again.
Technorati Tags: Blackberry, Security, BES, Blackjacking
One of my new Blackberry users complained that deleted items were not syncing properly on her device. After much troubleshooting and even doing a wipe and reload, I realised what the problem was. She was a shift+deleter in Outlook.
In order for deletions to synchronise to a Blackberry device, you have to use the delete key on it's own, or just move the items into the Deleted Items folder. This is because the BesAdmin account needs to keep track of your messages as you move them around your mailbox, and if you shift+delete it, BesAdmin doesn't know what happened to the item and it does not delete on the device. This is yet another reason why shift and delete is bad, and should be discouraged among Outlook users.
Technorati Tags: Blackberry, Deletions, Sync, Outlook
ActiveSync certificate problems are well known to the Windows Mobile community. If you have certificate problems on Windows mobile 2003, you could disable certificate checking using disablecertchk.exe, but this does not work on WM5 and you have to export the certificate and install it on the device to get around the 0x80072F0D problem:
If you are the Exchange administrator for your domain and you have several hundred devices to configure, instead of visiting each device to install the certificate, you could prevent this problem by installing a certificate on the OMA-ActiveSync website that is already in the root store.
This can be found in Start > Settings > Certificates:
Installing a certificate from any of the vendors in this list will avoid the problem described above. They may cost you 20 bucks $150 more than your normal provider, but it could be worth the money if it saves you hours of hassle and extra work.
Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile, Certificates, 0x80072F0D, WM5, disablecertchk
ExMerge is probably one of the exchange administrators most used tools, but is a pain to use if you are working with large mailboxes, as it uses Outlook 2000 PST files which corrupt when they reach 2Gb. ExMerge also does not work with Outlook 2003 PST's ... I'm sure (and really hope ) this will be addressed in Exchange 2007.
So, if you find yourself in a situation where you want to move the contents of a 10Gb mailbox to a another mailbox, and you don't have any tools such as Mail Attender for Exchange that can do it for you, you have to run ExMerge several times using date ranges to ensure the PST's don't exceed the 2Gb limit.
In my particular situation, I have a folder in a mailbox containing 300,000 items that I want to move to a journal mailbox to be picked up by a mail archiving system. I can't move them across manually using Outlook, because it fails when you drag and drop more than 2000 items, and trying to navigate around such a massive mailbox anyway is too slow to mention.
One of the vb experts here helped me write a macro to complete this task. It can be run from the Visual Basic Editor in Outlook. To run it use Tools - Macros - Visual Basic Editor, and click Yes to enable macros. Modify the code below so that Mailbox 1 and Mailbox 2 match the names of the mailboxes you are working on. Mailbox 1 is the source mailbox, and Mailbox 2 is the destination. You must then open both of these mailboxes in your Oulook profile before you start the macro.
Sub move_messages
()
Dim objExch2003 As Outlook.MAPIFolder, objErrors As Outlook.MAPIFolder, objInbox As Outlook.MAPIFolder, objJournal As Outlook.MAPIFolder, objJournalInbox As Outlook.MAPIFolder
Dim objNS As Outlook.NameSpace, intcount As Integer, i As Integer, objMailItem As Object
Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set objExch2003 = objNS.Folders("Mailbox - Mailbox 1")
Set objJournal = objNS.Folders("Mailbox - Mailbox 2")
Set objInbox = objExch2003.Folders("Inbox")
Set objJournalInbox = objJournal.Folders("Inbox")
Set objErrors = objInbox.Folders("Errors")
Do While objErrors.Items.Count > 0
For i = 100 To 1 Step -1
Set objMailItem = objErrors.Items(i)
objMailItem.Move objJournalInbox
Next
Loop
End Sub
After you start it your Outlook will appear to crash - this is normal and it is really working in the background. You can use ESM to watch the number of items decrease in Mailbox 1 and increase in Mailbox 2.
Technorati Tags: Outlook 2003, PST, Macros, ExMerge, Exchange 2003, Exchange Administration
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