Ameol FAQs General	< Previous  |  Next >

Q) Is there a manual for Ameol2?
A)A. The most up to date version of the Ameol2 manual is available from cix:cix.support/files.

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Q) How can I reduce my chances of receiving spam?
A)Here are some of the ways that spammers get hold of your details and what you can do to help prevent it.

How do spammers gets your email address?

Random addresses, spammers will often send random names and words @domain to see if they get through. There is not much you can do about this one other than to choose a fairly obscure email address when you first sign up. The @cix.co.uk domain has been around for many years and is very well know so unfortunately it is often targeted by spammers.

Robots, these are programs that trawl the Internet looking for email addresses. If you post your real email address on a webpage, guestbook, blog or newsgroup etc. then you can expect to end up on a spam list. Try doing a web search for your email address, domain or "nickname@cix" and see what it turns up.

Outlook viruses, one of the biggest problems these days are viruses or trojans aimed at the Microsoft Outlook software. These infect your computer and collect the email address information from Outlook and send it to a spammer for inclusion on their lists.They can also open up your PC so that it can be accessed remotely by a hacker and used to send out spam. This will often result in your account being suspended by your ISP until you clean your machine of viruses and trojans.

Websites, some greeting card and post card type websites that ask for your friends address, may also be gathering them and using them for spam lists.

Replying to a spam Just about all spam comes from a forged email address, which means that all the bounce messages and abusive replies go back to a completely innocent person, however some very cunning emails are sent out, maybe with no content or just a cryptic message designed to get the recipient to reply with a message saying, “Was this really for me?” or similar. This confirms your address as genuine and you are now on a spam list, you should never reply to a spam or unexpected email. The same applies to the Unsubscribe links often added to the bottom of a spam.

Group mailings You should not send multiple mailings with all the recipients email addresses in the To: or CC: field, that is what BCC: is for.If you send an email to a group with a list of addresses in, they will end up in the other recipients Outlook and are likely to get harvested by spammers at some point.

How can you reduce your chances getting spam?

Choose an email address that is not too easy to guess if you can or register your own domain name so that you can set up your own email aliases.

Do not publish your email address anywhere on the Internet. This includes guestbooks, blogs etc. and even your own website, you can use web response forms instead.

Be wary of greeting card and postcard type websites that ask for your own and your friends email addresses, they may well be gathering them.

Do not post messages in newsgroups using your real email address.

Never reply to a spam or unexpected message.

Never select the unsubscribe links in a spam, if you didn't sign up for it in the first place it will simply confirm your address as active and you can expect even more spam.

If you use Outlook make sure it is set to never open attachments without warning you. This setting is usually found under Tools | Options.

Never open attachments or files that you are not expecting, remember they may not actually be from who it says.

Be wary of every attachment, even those you are expecting, do you know that the sender has anti-virus protection? Just because an email has a message at the bottom saying that it has been scanned for viruses, doesn’t mean that it actually has.

Consider using a different email client other than Outlook, Ameol for instance does not suffer from the same vulnerabilities as Outlook. Most virus software is designed to attack Outlook as it is the most common email package. See http://www.ameol.com

Make sure that you have up to date Anti-Spyware software, virus protection and if you are on broadband you should also have a firewall or NAT modem/router as spammers will often hijack your own PC and use it to send spam if it is unprotected. You may also find more useful information in the cix:virus conference.

Avoid dubious links and websites that may download spyware code to your PC without you knowing.

Keep Windows up to date with all the latest security patches, sign up for Windows Update to alert you when new security patches are released.

If you have your own domain name ask your ISP if they support Sender Framework Policy (SPF) and if so set up records for your domain, this will save you being bombarded with thousands bounce messages and abuse if a spammer tries to use your domain for spamming.

On a more positive note, entering your real email address into a form on genuine, reputable business websites tends to be OK in our experience. We have used many of them and have never received spam from any of them.Most reputable companies also publish their privacy policy and give you options to not receive mailing from them if you do not want them.

Customers with a CIXdesktop account from Parkglobe who register a domain name can use our CIX Online domain manager to setup individual email address aliases for use when filling in website forms. As an example you could set up an email address of amazon@<your domain> for use with the Amazon website. This allows you to pinpoint if any individual company or website starts sending you spam and secondly it allows you to discard email to that specific email address without disrupting all of your other contacts. Some other Internet service providers also allow you a similar facility for setting up and managing email aliases.

Finally if you have a CIXdesktop account from Parkglobe you can use our configurable CIX SVF anti-spam and anti-virus facility. Details on how to set this up can be found in How do I setup the CIX Spam and Virus Filter?

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Q) These cix: hot links are quite clever. Can you explain them in more detail?
A)Yes. Firstly, after you click on a hot link you can get back to the message you were originally reading by pressing backspace.

The cix hot links allow you to reference a message in the current topic, a message in another topic in the same conference, or a totally different conference.

a) This is a link to a message in the current topic. When you click on it you are sent to message 1 in this topic.

         cix:1

b) This is a link to a message in another topic of this conference. When you click on it you are sent to message 172 in the queries topic of this conference.

         cix:/announce:1

c) This is a link to a message in a totally different conference. When you click on it you are sent to message 875 in information topic of the cixnews conference.

         cix:cixnews/information:875

If you are not a member of the topic referenced in the hotlink, Ameol2 will ask you if you want to join it. If you are a member of the topic but don't have that message number, Ameol2 will ask you if you want to retrieve that message when you next connect.

There are two quick ways to create a link.

1. When viewing the message to which you want to make a link, use Edit|Copy Link. (If you want to use this command often, consider assigning a shortcut key to it; you can do so from Settings|Customise, Keyboard tab.) This will copy the full hot link to the clipboard. You can then create your message and use Edit|Paste <Ctrl+V> to paste the reference into the message editor.

2. Highlight the message you want to reference in the thread pane of the message window and drag the message to any edit window.

Both of these methods will create full links as shown in (c) above. You must create the short style links manually.

As mentioned you can use <Backspace> key to return to the original message. However you should also note that if you hold down the <Ctrl> key when clicking on the hotlink, Ameol will open a new message window.

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Q) Why does Ameol try to send my report message to a read-only topic?
A) It is important to ensure that you are running the most up to date version of Ameol. This can be downloaded from cix:cix.support/files or http://www.ameol.com. Ameol's reporting facility has logic built into it to allow for the overflow of topics.

As an example the cix:cix.support conference has a 1ameol topic. When that topic fills up, there will also be a 2ameol topic. After this topic is created, the 1ameol topic is made read-only.

When posting a report Ameol looks in your local message base to see what is the latest version of the logical topic. If you do not have the latest version of the topic in your local message base, Ameol will try to post the message to what it thinks is the most recent version.

In order to prevent the Ameol Report facility trying to post to a topic which is read-only, you should always keep the latest version of topics in your local message base. Please do not delete the most current incarnation of any of the cix:cix.support conference topics from your local messagebase. You may resign them in order to keep down your message traffic. If you delete the relevant topic(s) then the report facility will be unable to post to the right place.

If you have deleted the most recent topics or you are unsure if you have the most recent ones, then you can:

1. Use File|Scripts...
2. Select "Consolidate all conferences".
3. Click Add.
4. Click OK.
5. Click Close.

and the next time you blink Ameol will ensure you have the most recent conferences in your local message base.

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Q) Why does the date & time of my on scratchp.nnn files seem to be wrong by one hour?
A) The discrepancy is caused by the conferencing server operating in GMT which adjusts the time stamps for messages posted during BST but does not adjust the time stamp for the scratchpad.

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Q) What is the difference between a "Local Topic" and a "Mailbox"?
A)Although local topics and mailboxes both appear in the messagebase in the same way (as topics off a conference), they serve quite different purposes.

Local topics are intended to be used as repositories of useful information. They can be created in any folder but are usually created as a topic of a conference on CIX or as a topic of a specially created local folder. This latter technique is the recommended one and the name of the folder should contain at least one upper case character in order to distinguish it from actual conferences on CIX. Once created you can copy CIX messages or post notes to them for your private use.

Mailboxes are intended to be used in combination with sorting rules to separate e-mail into manageable categories. These are usually created in the Mail folder.

The most important difference between local topics and mailboxes is that mail and news headers can be suppressed in mailboxes but not in local topics.

So if you are about to use Folder|New Local Topic... or Folder|New Mailbox..., ensure you choose the correct option for the purpose you intend.

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Q) Can I turn an existing topic into a "local" one?
A) Yes. Perform the following actions:

   1. Export the topic. (Use File|Export, select "CIX Scratchpad".)
   2. Edit the exported message file, capitalising the topic name. (N.B., Keep the length of the topic name the same!)
   3. Delete the topic.
   4. Re-import the file (Use File|Import, select "CIX Scratchpad".)

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Q)How do I use regular Expressions?
A) Regular Expressions can be used when composing Ameol rules by using the following parameters.

.  - Any character(except line breaks) Will match c, 3, [SPACE] etc 
\d - Any digit Will match 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9
\D - Any non-digit Will match anything except 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
or 9
^  - Beginning of line
$  - End of line
\t - [TAB] \thello matches "hello" preceded by a tab
\r - Line Break [RETURN]
\s - Whitespace. Matches any whitespace character: [SPACE], [TAB], Line Break, New Line
\S - Non whitespace. Matches any non whitespace character
\w - Word characters. Typically letters, numbers and underscores
\W - Non word characters. Matches any non word character
\character - A character that is normally a special character. Special characters are: . # ^ $ \ ? + * | [ ] ( )
[any series of characters] - Any characters inside the brackets. [abc] matches a, b or c
[any character - another character] - Any characters within the range of characters [a-c] matches a, b or c[^ any series of characters] - Any
character except ones after the ^. [^c3] matches any character except c or 3? - 0 or 1 of the previous character ba?t matches bat or bt, but not boat
* - 0 or more of the previous character ba*t matches bt, bat, baat etc
+ - 1 or more of the previous character  ba+t matches bat, baat etc but not bt
pattern1/pattern2 - Either of the patterns specified ba|t matches ba or t
but not bat (it will match ba and then t for two matches instead of one)(pattern) one of the special characters - Same as above, but treats the characters in the parenthesis as a group (ba)*t match t, bat, babat but not bt

See http://regexpstudio.com/TRegExpr/Help/RegExp_Syntax.html for more
information on these.

In the F3 Search function of Ameol you can use AND, OR and NOT by ticking the "Use Regular Expressions" box.Example: The or End This will look for the words The or End. Example: Alarm and not Zone This will look for Alarm but will not find entries for Zone Alarm.
 
You can also include spaces in the search by enclosing the phrase in quotes.  E.G. "The End" will look for an exact match of The End rather than The or End.

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Q) What is TAPI?
A) TAPI stands for Telephony Applications Programming Interface. It is a part of Windows. Ameol Communications refers to the communications/connection software internal to Ameol.

The idea behind TAPI is that all Windows applications which use telephones (e.g., Ameol2, fax software, Hyperterminal) can use TAPI to do all the dialling, etc., by specifying a few calls to the operating system instead of having to manage that themselves and write their own code (which may be incompatible with other telephony applications) to do it.

In theory, this means that you should not need to shut down applications which use auto answer (like fax) before using another telephony application (like Ameol2). It is intended to be the solution to the old "which application has the phone line?" problem. In practice, some applications (e.g., fax programs) do not quite follow the rules properly yet.

Ameol Communications uses the same built-in Ameol "old style" dial-up communications (which used to be the /only/ option) that Ameol Version One used.

Note that in new Ameol2 installations, TAPI is listed as "Dial Up Conferencing (Win95/NT)" and Ameol Comms is listed as "Dial Up Conferencing (Ameol)".

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