Uncategorized – Page 2 – Wingrove-Services

Why did this end up in my junk mail?

In this case my client had subscribed to a third party website newsletter. It was a UK Government website, so one might reasonably suppose they know what they are doing. …. which turned out not to be the case.

The newsletter which was sent out quite frequently included lots of links in it to other websites. It also showed the sending domain in the message, let’s say in this case it was finance.gov.uk. So the incoming messages appear to come from the domain https://finance.gov.uk. However they were going into the recipients junk email folder. Why?

Analysis

The sender was using a third party bulk mailing service called Send Grid. Send Grid is a legitimate sending source for bulk mail, this is what they do. However in the case of finance.gov.uk they did not change their settings to tell a receiving mail server that mail may also be sent by sendgrid.com. The fix required is at the senders end which of course you have no control over. (But you could be nice and let them know, because the same may be happening everywhere.)

Creating an icon for your website

I had a message from an organisation that I am hosting requesting an icon visible on smart devices. I have been using “favicons” for some time on sites. These appear in the tab of your browser window. I demonstrated how to create a particularly ugly looking one on this site. (see image below, and link to the article)

There are a number of different sizes used by various devices. Where they may be of great value to you is on a smart phone or tablet where someone saves your website home page on their device. We tend to be guided by visual clues, so if there is an element of your branding in a button, then this will guide you in making a selection. There are a range of predefined sizes for a simple icon depending on what the target device is, Android is apparently different to iOS, and there are a range of sizes that need to be seamlessly catered for. This is what this particular client was looking for.

Featured Image on Posts

This is only of interest to Divi template based websites. If you use this facility in your template and it is not Divi based, take care to check what it does before you accept using it. Different templates work in different ways.

Many of the latest Divi based designs I have been building for both Home-Starts and other groups have at least one news page, often more than one. For example a summary on the home page of the latest six news items is useful, and a fully featured news page as well for everything.

Filtering News

You can do this on other sites, but within the Divi environment it is very easy to use: you can have a fundraising page, and at the bottom of the page have a Fundraising blog. This is an automatic feature where any new posts which you categorise as Fundraising will appear there. They will also change over time as you add more content.

Divi Booster Malware Message

3rd September 2018

If you monitor the messages reported by WordFence, it has been highlighting a malware detection in Divi Booster. Divi Booster is a plugin which I have added at most Divi based installations as it offers some useful additional features. It is a premium plugin I have paid for.
The author of Divi Booster has checked what WordFence has been reporting and it is due to URL deep in the code to do with an obscure tablet browser. Unless you were looking through the code Divi Booster, which I doubt, you would not have been aware of it, or even seen it.

The offending URL has been removed from the plugin by the author, and I am currently upgrading all sites affected. Bottom line, don’t worry about it, however it is good that WordFence is in the background protecting all sites and causing authors to review and change their plugin code.

This URL has the details in. At the time of writing everyone has been upgraded to the latest version. Divi Booster Malware Feedback

Webmail Guide

Following some interaction with one group that is moderately new to webmail on this system I have written the following guide which covers these areas for anyone that is interested:

Creating Mail Folders to manage your email on the server
Changing your password
Setting up an Out of Office Message
Setting up an Email Signature
Sending Pretty Emails (with formatting turned on)
Setting defaults for the mail application
Cookies
Which Browser to use.

You can download the guide by clicking on the button below.

Download Webmail Guide

Windows Update

Unfortunately this just missed the newsletter. It is Wednesday 15th August 17:15hrs.

Microsoft has just released a set of updates for August that cover 60 vulnerabilites. 19 of which are considered critical. If covers MS Windows, Edge Browser, Internet Explorer, MS Office, ChakraCore, .Net Framework (used my many applications), Exchange Server, MS SQL and Visual Studio (also used by many applications).

It is highly recommended that if you are using a Windows computer that you upgrade your system. You can do that by going to the start icon (bottom left of your screen), Settings, then look for Update and Security.

Also bear in mind that one of the updates is for Outlook and we already know that issues have been created in Office 365, so if MS Outlook stops working after you do the update. You need to reset your password through https://stackmail.com as previously discussed in another recent article.

I subscribe to Hackernews (not as bad as it sounds) which often flags up issues. As this patches 19 critical vulnerabilities I thought it is was worth flagging up.

You can read the article here if you are interested.

YOU CLICKED!

YOU CLICKED ON THE LETTER

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