Back when Windows 3.1 came out, it shipped with "display" fonts -- these were bitmapped fonts and the precursor to True type fonts -- who knew they'd still be vital in Windows Server 2003.

A client had a problem with their Great Plains installation -- the fonts went all screwy and while they could still make out the display (barely) they couldn't print checks since the Mekorma font they were using wasn't playing nice.

Clicking on the start menu revealed the username to be in the Marlett font, a font Windows uses for drawing parts of its UI (the X in the close box, the minimize and maximize symbols, etc.).  we've seen this problem before, and it's usually fixed by running TweakUI and reparing the font folder.  Reboot and voila.

So we do that and the checks can print, but the display font is still not right in Great Plains.  Everywhere else in Windows it's fine, but Great Plains is still hinky.

We try all sorts of things -- we delete all the fonts and reinstall them from the c:\windows\fonts folder of a sister Windows 2003 server; no dice.

We troll Great Plains newsgroups, we repair the font folder, we do a repair installation of Great Plains, nothing does the trick.

It has to be a font issue, but which fonts?

We have the Great Plains consultant send over his theory -- a Helvetica font set.  Does nothing.

Over at Experts-Exchange (a site well worth the subscription), one of the Great Plains MVPs who was helping us out posted a screen shot of her splash screen, and when compared to ours, I thought to myself "that looks like MS Sans Serif" -- a system font from way back when.

Windows XP brought along a new set of fonts it used in its shell, and MS Sans Serif was deprecated in favor of Verdana, Tahoma and the "modern" UI fonts Microsoft was putting forth.

I opened up a share on a Windows 2000 box, and there was a whole bunch of .fon fonts that weren't on our system.  So I copied them over to a temp folder and tried to install them onto our server.  Only 3 showed up in the list, and there were a dozen or more in the folder. 

Ah!  They were hidden.  I uncheck the hidden attribute and reinstall the fonts.  All of them show up in the list.

I select all, click OK, I get a few "a version of this font is already installed" errors, and then they're done importing.

Now, MS Sans Serif is in the list of available fonts, and lo and behold, our screen is back to normal.

Many thanks to Victoria Yudin who helped us with this issue.

In what is becoming a series, we'll further tweak our code to allow for filtering of the query.

In the original code, we open a query directly as a recordset. This fails if the query requires some parameters.

(I'm not going to demonstrate a way to get user input and use that as the parameter. You should be able to copy and paste the code from the original user input sections of the code and modify as needed.)

To start, let's discuss the query and it's parameter.

In our original code, the query was just pulling a list of email addresses. For this, let's filter that list of addresses by domain.
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If you're worried about this <scary voice>virus of doom</scary voice> that everyone's gone mental over, you might want to pop over to The Conficker Eye Chart that the Conficker Working Group has put together.

Basicially, the eye chart is a page that loads images from sites that Conficker actively blocks.  So, if you can see all the images, you're not infected.  Pretty clever.

If you are infected, you might want to drop us a line.

Perhaps the most popular article on the site explains how to send email to a bunch of people using Access and Outlook.

It has garnered its fair share of comments and emails, and one came in today that I figured I'd share and then elaborate on.

The mail reads (in part):

I have a following question: How to modify this module to be able to send messages to various mailing lists that I predefine in respective queries? In other words, I have in my database 3 categories of customers (in 3 different queries) and I want to address them with a different message. Do I need to create 3 macros running 3 modules each referring to a separate query with a given category of customers or is there another way to do it?

You don't have to create modules for each list, you just need to be able to tell the macro which query you want to use before running it.
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Talking about SMTP Connectors in an earlier post got me to thinking of another way we use the SMTP Connectors in Exchange.

A client has a (horribly behaved) legacy piece of software that, when faced with a customer with no email address on file, sends an email to an address it makes up in a legitimate domain.  So, for a long time, they were bombarding this innocent third party domain with mail that was destined to go nowhere.  

This was eating bandwidth, processing cycles and the like, so we tried to put an end to it by appealing to the developers.  They were not interested in fixing the old program, it would continue to spit out its bogus mail.

We created an SMTP Connector in Exchange to handle delivery to the legitimate domain.  (It should be noted that the domain probably wasn't legit when the program was written, but with the .com explosion, it became legit.  It's also not a domain anyone would be sending mail to in the normal course of business... it's not like this is for AOL.COM or anything...)

We set the connector so in the "address space" we listed our desired domain.  We checked off "Forward all mail thru this connector to the following smart hosts"

... and this is where we get tricky ...

... we put a non-routable IP address in the smart host field.  (And remember to enclose the IP address in brackets - i.e., [10.99.99.88] )

On the Delivery Options tab, when it asks when it should deliver, we tell it to "Never Run"

And that does the trick.  We no longer pester the legit domain, we don't eat any bandwidth, everyone's happy.