The last several days, my brothers and I kept receiving a ton of strange e-mails from my Mom. These messages were coming in small chunks of 62 k in size, totalling 48 individual messages. At first I blew it off think my Mom sent something by mistake. We kept receiving these messages (all 48 of them) twice a day for three days. So I sent an e-mail to my brothers telling them I would fix her PC.
I live about 5 hours driving time away from my parents; so making a quick stop to see what’s wrong, get a free meal, and have a little chat is not an option. So I had my Mom do a little trouble shooting for me with the directions I gave her over the phone. No problems found. While we were troubleshooting, I asked Mom a few questions about this issue; when did this start happening, did one of your friends send you some spam or a virus, were your friends experiencing the same problem as you. All of her friends are having the same problem as my brothers and I. What I needed to do was sit in front of the PC try a few things and see what I can do. I tried to run Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection, but it would not connect even though Mom enabled it for me.
Then I remember a tool my friend told me about called LogMeIn. Setting up an account only took a few minutes. After going through the e-mail verification, I had my Mom connect to the LogMeIn website, gave her my username and password (temp password that I am not using anywhere), and install the local client software. Since I was using Windows XP to help trouble shoot her problems, I used Internet Explorer to connect and take control of her PC.
I had Symantec Client Security conduct a full scan and then opened her e-mail application. The first test was sending a small text only message to myself. E-mail received correctly. So then I sent an e-mail with a 1.5 MB attachment. Bingo! Outlook Express stated it was going to break apart the message into 62k chunks, do I want to proceed. NO!!!! Since I didn’t know where to find the settings quickly, I Googled “Outlook Express break apart messages larger than” and found plenty of web sites to correct the problem. Here are the steps to resolve this issue:
- From the Menu bar in Outlook Express, select Tools then Accounts
- Click the mail account and then the Properties button on the right
- Click the Advance tab
- Under Sending, remove the check mark from “Break apart messages large than…”
- Click the OK button and then click the Close button.
I sent three e-mails over 10 MB in size to myself as a test. All messages arrived as they should. I disabled Remote Desktop Connection before disconnecting.
Somethings I noticed about using LogMeIn. Although I can connect from with Ubuntu Linux using Firefox, many features were not available to me; turning off the client wallpaper (even though it was checked), the screen refresh was painfully slow, and I could not get the remote connection to open in a new window or tab. This might be due to the fact LogMeIn uses ActiveX. However while writing this blog I found something that I might try out regarding using Linux with LogMeIn. Running the same software under Windows was a completely different experience. Everything worked as it should.
I like this product and would recommend it to anyone who needs to connect remotely.
Drahusz 