Searching for my lost shaker of salt

I was wondering why there wasn’t the steady stream of spam or occasional inquiries coming from my new blog… it wasn’t set up right!  So I apologize to anyone who has tried to contact me and thought I was blowing you off.

The issue is an odd setting.  When I filled out the E-Mail section of the settings screen, I filled in what I expected:

The error message is wonderfully cryptic:

Could not connect - Mailbox name not allowed. The server response was: sorry, your mail was administratively denied. (#5.7.1)

Inquiries from GoDaddy support was less than inspiring, basically saying there was a problem in my code.  Great.

So I tried every single e-mail account and password I have with GoDaddy and continued to receive the same error message.

On a whim, I changed the first e-mail address, where the messages should be going.  I changed it to one of my GoDaddy accounts.  Bazinga!

The issue is GoDaddy doesn’t allow relays to “free” e-mail providers like GMail, Live, AOL, etc.  So by keeping that e-mail address, using SMTP server relay-hosting.secureserver.net on port 25 with no other settings, it works fine.

Windows Live Writer is a great free tool for authoring blogs.  Aside from a nice WYSIWUG editor, it also handles the uploading and resizing of images, making this a painless process.

Setting it up this time was a little more challenging before and I didn't see any good guides out there, so I felt it needed capturing for others who may be having problems.  This wasn’t an issue for me with earlier version of WLW (circa 2008) but is with the one I just downloaded via Windows Update.

When configuring your blog account, select “Other blog service”

Now add the URL of your blog, including “metaweblog.axd” along with your BE.NET admin account.

WLW doesn’t detect the blog type, so tell it to use the MetaweblogAPI.  You again type in your URL with “metaweblog.axd” appended to it for the Remote Posting URL:

Give your blog a nickname and you are all set. 

Yes, this works as I am typing this post with WLW!!

This past weekend I finally upgraded my laptop from Windows 7 release candidate (build 7100) to the letterbox version (ultimate). Somehow I manage to find an excuse to reload my operating system every 6 months or so, so I have the pattern down pat. Image the hard disk, write down all my installed apps, copy over the data folders, export bookmarks, e-mail settings and rules, etc. Then wipe the drive and install clean. I will say that the Windows 7 install process was probably the most smooth I've had to date. I was reinstalled and fully patched within an hour, taking only another two to reload my apps and copy over data.

The only hitch was on Outlook 2007, which I use with my GMail account. It installed fine. I changed the data file over to my backed up copy and all my e-mail was fine. But for some reason, every time I would connect to GMail and download, it would download two copies. Reading online I found posts that suggested you check the box to leave mail on the server, which was already the case. I deleted my GMail account and recreated it in Outlook, still nothing.

Then I noticed something... it wasn't downloading e-mail for every folder, just the ones with rules on them. Bingo!

Sure enough, as part of my restore process I reimported my Outlook rules for moving things to various folders. That, it turns out, is now unnecessary. In prior versions of Outlook (and possibly pre SP2) the rules were stored as part of the application and didn't carry over with the data file. That's no longer the case; your rules are now stored in the data file and backed up when you back e-mail up. Kinda cool. So once I removed the duplicate rules everything started working as expected.