Andy Kemp

We recently switched our mail provider at work from Messagelabs to MimeCast. We had been using Messagelabs for several years with no real problems. Messagelabs offer an Anti Spam and Anti Virus email scanner and then delivers mail to your mail gateway, they stated in our contract that it would protect our system 100%, however they did actually let one virus through, thankfully we had MailSweeper which caught it. The increase of menacing bugs and threats that wonder the World Wide Web means that security services forever have to change and evolve too, always adjusting to the capability of the bugs. Even mobile phones with broadband are not safe. Like O2 phones that are equipped with the latest functions that enable people to send texts, surf the web, capture images, tune into music and check their email. It will not take long till a Virus creator can completely shut mobile phones down. However with speedy upgrades of handsets just now every unit should be able to counter the viruses with security systems and mailsweepers.

Any way our setup was very much like the picture below:

Our MX records were pointing to the Messagelabs towers, it then delivered the emails to our MailSweeper Server, which then delivered to Exchange. We have journalling enabled so as soon as the email was delivered to Exchange it was also dropped into the CryoServer mailbox, which then keeps a copy of the email indefinitely.

We have never had a problem with MailSweeper and it always gave us piece of mind as it sat in the DMZ and screened all emails in and out of the company.

February this year we decided to switch over from Messagelabs, not that it had been a bad service, far from it we were happy with the service, but because they only offered the same service as they had always offered us. MimeCast however offered three services in one package (Anti Virus and Anti Spam, Archiving, and File Type Blocking), MimeCast Multi. It also offered us a BCM (Business Contingency Managment) Solution.

The beauty of this product meant that we could cut costs and save some money on maintenance, support and means everything is in the one place.

So the setup we have now is like this picture below:

We had to open our firewall to talk to MimeCast direct from our Exchange Servers on port 25 (smtp) For Exchange and Port 110 (pop) for the journalling option, and we also needed to open up port 389 (LDAP) so that the MimeCast Towers could talk to our Domain Controller so we could enable our users to log on to the MimeCast if they ever needed to due to exchange being down.

One of the other features that made us decide to switch to MimeCast was the ability to be able to log on to the MimeCast Towers using a web browser.

The first part of the switch over was for changing our outgoing email Internet connection to deliver via MimeCast and not MailSweeper and Messagelabs. We let that run for several weeks and then changed our MX records to point to MimeCast instead of Messagelabs.

We have been using MimeCast for 2 weeks with email going and and out through it and we have so far had no problems with the service.

OK so I have been playing around with vista for some time now but only ever installed the x86 build, so I thought it was about time to install x64, So my PC was needing a rebuild so I thought what the heck I'll throw Vista 64 bit on it . Well all went well and no problems were encountered. Most of my hardware was detected except my Sound Card but I managed to find a 64bit compatible driver.

Well Got vista installed and running, Installed office and then some other tools on it, next thing was to install the Admin Pack, so I did what I had posted earlier and that went ok. The next thing was the Exchange System Manager..... so I copied the files across and then tried to register the maildsmx.dll file. Tried being the right word! it would not register. After a couple of minutes thinking I started to think that our exchange system is 32 bit so the dll is more than likely 32 bit so I did a quick google and only found posts saying Exchange 2003 cannot be installed on a 64 bit environment. So I thought that I would cut my losses and re-install Vista as 32 bit.

So Here we go with a 32 bit install now

OK So I have had no real problems on my Vista Laptop now for quite a while but strangely enough, when I want to print something from excel and want to set it to one page wide etc... excel crashes, I first thought that it was a problem with Office 12.... Well after the application crashed I then went into printers and none of my printers were listed strange one hey! (to be honest I have not tried the page setup in Word).

Ever since I have tried that my Spooler service has continued to crash, is this a bug with in Windows? or is it a driver incompatibility?

My printers are shared off of a network print serve that is running on Windows 2000 Server. so I think my first point of call to investigate is the drivers, the printers that I have installed are a RICHO Aficio 2238C RPCS and an HP LaserJet 8150 Series PCL 5e both these printers are running off a windows 2000 server with 2000 drivers so I am thinking that this is where my problem lies.

Every time I right click on one of the printers I get the Spool Service error and I then have to go into Services Manager and restart the Print Spooler, so I think that the next time in my Test is to remove the printers and clean out the registry and remove the drivers and then get the latest drivers for those printers installed on my vista laptop and then try connecting to the printers.

Firstly I removed the RICHO Printer from the installed printers and tried the Excel Spread sheet I was working on and went to the print preview and the page setup and it seemed to work ok, so the next thing I thought I would do is get the latest drivers for the RICHO and see if re-adding that printer would work.

OK so I hit a small hurdle trying to uninstall the original driver for the RICHO,  I right clicked in the printers in vista and went to server properties, selected the driver I wanted to uninstall but the remove option was grayed out.

What I then remembered is that everything is a bit more secure in Windows Vista and there is the Run as Administrator Option, even though you are logged in as an Administrator you still need to run things with elevated privileges.

You then have the option to remove the Driver by clicking on remove.

That is your print driver removed. You then need to install the new driver and then connect to the printer again. Once I installed the new Driver I went into the Excel Document I was working on and tried the page setup and I had no problems what so ever.