how not to compete with free

A while back I got an e-mail from Adam Osborne asking me to delete this blog post. [Note that the Adam I reference there is not Adam Osborne.] His primary bone of contention was that when people search for Defrag.NSF, a product he created and sells, my post is the third listed in Google. I'm sympathetic to his plight, but frankly that's not my problem.

Adam went on to say my post referenced DominoDefrag, and he objected to that because:

History shows that DominoDefrag has systematically implemented similar features as those contained in Defrag.NSF, even to the point where it implemented an algorithm that we had a patent for.

This pissed me off for a few reasons. First and foremost, Adam's inability to compete isn't my problem. Secondly, if you have a legal claim you need to take it up in a court of law. And finally, if you read my post you will see that I don't mention DominoDefrag. That's because I wrote this on 23 March 2009, three weeks before the DominoDefrag project was established.

Since Adam did cite a legal issue I asked if he had documentation of the infringement. He conceded he did not and cited legal costs as a deterrent. At this point I could have walked away, but my sense of fairness was tweaked. I thought the author of DominDefrag deserved to know that these accusations were being made. I looked up the project on OpenNTF and contacted  the project leader, Andrew Luder, to get his take on it.

Andrew was surprised because he thought this matter was resolved in September 2010. That was when he had his last correspondence with Adam. He admitted he had unknowingly infringed Adam's patent, which was only applicable in Australia. As soon as he was notified he destroyed that version and switched to a different technique. Andrew was astonished that over a year later Adam was still crying foul. He copied his lawyer on the e-mail thread, who advised Andrew and me that the matter was legally resolved. Since I didn't even mention DominoDefrag in my post I was clearly not at fault.

I am sharing this because Adam tried to bully me and slander Andrew. I won't tolerate that.

How to connect a new user to an existing mailbox in Exchange 2003

We hired a new PC Tech and today he was fixing one of his mistakes. He sent a laptop to a user after having Ghosted it but without running Sysprep on the computer before he created the image. It caused all sorts of annoyances. In the process of fixing this mistake he made another. Instead of deleting the computer account from Active Directory he deleted the user's account. He didn't even think it odd or say anything when it prompted him to delete the user's mail.

It took a while but I finally found a way to register a new user and get him connected to the existing mailbox.

1. Open Exchange System Manager and navigate to the old mailbox. Right-click and select Delete. It's okay, it won't really be deleted, it just gets flagged for deletion. It would have to sit like this for at least 4 days before it really gets deleted, unless you have changed the interval from the default. The important part is Exchange will remove the existing ownership information to you can reassign it to another user.
2. Register the user from the Exchange server. Go through the setup as you would for any other user, including creating a new mailbox. You need to create it in a different message store than the existing one, though.
3. After the user is registered and the processes have run to populate his SMTP and X400 addresses, right-click the user and delete his mailbox. This time it will really delete his mailbox, and that's okay since it was just temporary.
4. Back in Exchange System Manager, right-click the old mailbox and select Reconnect. Enter the user's account name and click OK.
5. Give it about 10 minutes you should be able to get to the user's existing mail.