gregoryyoung is rapidly becoming one of our favorite Page Editors. The misfortune of being dislocated from New Orleans has given him time to come up with ideas for all kinds of articles; his latest is below.

This week, I will be doing something a bit different for my article and I would really like to get some feedback from the EE community. On Friday afternoon of last week I was asked to write a little bit of code to log into a remote SMTP server and verify a user's email address. This naturally didn't take very long but it seemed like it should be rather common functionality; in fact I found a few libraries that were a couple hundred dollars each which offered it. I decided to take my code and extend it a little bit to support the answers to some common questions I see on Experts Exchange and open source it with a BSD license.

I have also added some additional functionality to the library if you do not use the CDO mail attachment object to create your email. One thing I have been asked quite a few times in the past has been how to mail an attachment from a stream or other medium without the need to create a temp file. The EmailAttachment object has a static method on it which will handle this for you, .FromSteam() as well as a constructor that takes a byte array.

Since the library speaks directly to SMTP servers, a few other features are possible. The first of these is the ability to attempt to verify an email address with the remote server in order to validate the email during entry. Another feature which is available is the ability to directly send emails (as opposed to relay) as it allows you to get immediate feedback from the remote server as to the deliverability of the message.

Now for the feedback part: Here at EE we have a few thousand .NET developers. I propose that as a group we create a set of utility namespaces (under the BSD or MIT license) as well as FAQs to help out with many of these common questions. Given that this could lower the number of questions in EE, it will also go a long way in providing cohesion between answers and will help move the knowledge into a centralized area. These libraries would also be invaluable to a new developer trying to make their way into .NET as it would help pave their way through many of these more complex areas. I have created the following thread to discuss this further: Q_21604659.html.

Greg Young

MHenry,the Page Editor for the Macromedia topic areas, has never posted in the Philosophy & Religion topic area, but that's never stopped him from having an opinion.

I don't believe in ghosts.

Don't get me wrong; I'm the biggest horror fan in the world. Nothing I like better than a good scary movie on a dark, rainy night. But that doesn't mean I believe they are all real. What I don't understand is how many people claim to believe in God and also believe in ghosts. It's kind of contradictory, don't you think?

Often you will hear people, (so-called experts or psychics) saying ghosts are the victims of violent crimes or that they have unfinished business. Some also claim that ghosts just don't know that they're dead.

Now here's the contradiction for you folks who believe in God: Are you saying that God is kind of arbitrary about when your soul goes to heaven or hell? I guess he just decided that it's ok for the soul to wander the earth as long as it's a victim or doesn't know that it's dead, right? If so, God's a hell of a lot more flexible than anything I read in the Old Testament. Maybe he'd let me hang around and be a ghost if I have unfinished business. I've been meaning to start exercising and get back in shape. Is that unfinished enough or would it have to be more along the lines of unreturned library books?

If ghosts really do exist, I think I would have seen one by now. Think how many billions of people have walked this planet. Don't you think ghosts would be everywhere? I would think it would be damn near impossible to avoid them. And why is it always a place that ghosts haunt? It's always a house or a boat or something. If I was a ghost, I'd be haunting Carmen Electra's dressing room; why bother with creaky old houses.

I was talking with a friend the other day and most of this writing is a direct result of that conversation. I even told him the part about how I had never seen one and thought they would be everywhere if they existed at all.

He didn't miss a beat: "Maybe they don't like you. Maybe ghosts think you're an a****le and they are avoiding you."

Did I mention he is a friend?

And yes, I know there are some fundamentalist groups out there that don't believe in ghosts. You have to give them credit for being consistent anyway. Of course, a lot of them are insane...

Maybe being consistent isn't the most important thing after all.

The Moderators came across this question and thought the discussion was worth reprinting here. Thanks to jube01 and BonRouge for their comments; we've edited out the off-topic parts.

• Asked by Jubei01
  I'm so annoyed with css not being standardized on all browsers!!! Don't get me wrong I like css, I really do, but I find that I spend literally half my development time trying to get the damn thing to work across at least IE, FireFox (Why can't all browsers be like FireFox!?), and Netscape.
  I'm not going to waste a whole day or more hunting down obscure hacks and fixes to make my website compatible on all browsers. Instead I'll let you guys who really know the nuts and bolts of css to do it for me (and do it in about 15 minutes!) if you don't mind. :)
  I've put up the website here http://www.gladstone.qld.gov.au/gragm
  The CSS file is here http://www.gladstone.qld.gov.au/gragm/includes/style.css
  You will notice on the main page in IE some of the boxes under "Now Showing" with images the text disappears. If you don't see it refresh the page until you do. The boxes are in random order.
  In FireFox and Netscape it cuts the last box off at the bottom of the page but you can keep scrolling down.
  Any other problems you can see would be a bonus as well.
• Comment from BonRouge
  I'm afraid I don't have a quick fix for you, but I do have a few comments...
  Firstly, to expect any page to work well cross-browser, you need to set a few rules. How do you do that? You use a valid DTD - kind of like the one you've commented out.
  Secondly, your menu is... well... not so great. Try switching off javascript and see what happens to you menu - gone in a puff of smoke. (Well, actually, there's no smoke - it's just gone).
  Then there's your table. Not a good idea to use tables for layout... Here's a few reasons why : http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/index.html
  After that, there's the invalid code - tons of it. 'border="0"', 'bgcolor="#FFFFFF", 'align="center"' - all invalid (to name but a few)...
  I tried to check your page in the W3C validator, but it didn't know what to do with it:
  http://validator.w3.org/check?amp;verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.gladstone.qld.gov.au/gragm/
  You're using hx tags in a pretty weird way. They're supposed to be for main headings (h1), subheadings (h2), etc, etc, but you've got stuff like this:

  <p><h2>Admission Free</h2></p>
  <p><h1>Opening Times</h1>Monday-Friday: 10am-5pm<br>Saturdays & Public Holidays<br>as
  advertised: 10am-4pm</p>
  <p><h1>Phone</h1>(07) 4976 6766</p>
  <p><h1>Fax</h1>(07) 4972 9097</p>
  
  <p><h1>Email</h1><a href="mailto:gragm@gragm.qld.gov.au">gragm@gragm.qld.gov.au</a></p>
  <p><h1>Street Address</h1>Corner Goondoon and<br> Bramston Street,<br>Gladstone.</p>
  <p><h1>Postal Address</h1>PO BOX 29 DC,<br>Gladstone, 4680.</p>

  Erm... I hope this helps.
• Comment from Jubei01
  Solved my own problem with a few position:relative to fix IE.
• Comment from BonRouge
  Right... don't mention it.
  ...
  What does seem strange is that all my advice (which is actually good advice) seems to have been completely ignored and Jubei01 hasn't even acknowledged it. You know, something like, "thanks for the advice, but I really can't be bothered learning how to write good code - I was just after a quick fix" would have been fine.
• Comment from Jubei01
  I wasn't ignoring your advice. A quick answer was exactly what I was looking for. Your advice was just that, advice which leads only to more questions and more problems. I don't have the points to waste. Answering questions isn't as easy as it sounds. You have to hold the persons hand throughout the entire process. I don't know how many times I've come this close to answering a question only to have it taken away because I've named a variable wrong and that person didn't take the time to figure it out. Even worse I live on the other side of the world and most of the questions are asked when I'm catching up on much needed sleep. Next morning the process has run it course and only now I see that stupid error even though I thought I tested it correctly. Frustrating to say the least!
  Which is exactly why I use EE. It's a great site and I wouldn't have learnt as much as I have without it. Sometimes time is of the essence and getting that quick answer allows me to get on with rest of my day. I have a job that I work a lot of overtime that I generally don't get paid for. I've got to learn asp.net sometime as well. They don't pay me to take time to learn this stuff. I'm just trying to get ahead in my chosen profession any way I can. Sometimes taking a shortcut is unfortunately the best way to do that.
  Please BonRouge don't take what I've said the wrong way. Believe me I do know where you're coming from. I do appreciate your advice and I should have acknowledged you. I guess I wasn't thinking at the time. However I do believe there is some merit to what I've just said.
  Continuing my beef about CSS. I've heard your advice many times before and read it on sites such as A List Apart and CSS Zen Garden etc, etc. It seems to me that the CSS community can be a little elitist (no offence intended!) and have the attitude if your site isn't coded the "CSS way" then its not the right way. Like I said I do "believe" in CSS and I guarantee I will use it the "correctly" the day it works on all browsers exactly the same. If we all coded to conform to these invisible rules then why don't those who make CSS just get rid of everything we shouldn't be using and wrap standardised blocks of code into single tags instead? At least it would have a better chance for working on every browser. Isn't coding, all coding supposed to be flexible? I mean seriously I haven't in my travels read a w3c document that says you absolutely can't have an h3 tag inside a set of p tags (I guessing here. I haven't actually checked!) or had a browser launch a popup windows saying "error, you shouldn't do that!".
  I honestly can't see how anyone including the sites I've mentioned can justify the time required to get CSS to work. It only takes 1 minute to create a HTML table that you know works on everything and an hour or even a whole day for CSS checking consistency, errors, and applying hacks just for similar results. If I can save over half my development time by using a HTML table or 2 and it means I can get my site out into the big wide world sooner and it works for 90-95% of my visitors and I'm happy with that then that should be good enough. Shouldn't it? I'm not trying to set the CSS world on fire I'm just trying to make it work as best I can with the time I have. Maybe later I will go back and take your advice.
  I've found asp, java, C++ and all other languages I've learnt a walk in the park compared to css. Something that should be so simple. I want my time back and I'm very, very annoyed.
  I know that sometimes the tone of an typed message can be taken many different ways. I do worry about this a lot. You just never know with these things. And again please don't take what I've said the wrong way. It is indeed supposed to be constructive and not intended to flame the CSS community or get flamed back either. It's just my point of view and I accept it could very well be wrong. I hope you can understand where I'm coming from regarding both issues.
• Comment from BonRouge
  Interesting post.
  What you say about html tables taking one minute to create is kind of interesting because for me it's the opposite. I'm not trying to claim any superiority here - I'm just saying that when I found CSS I was very happy because tables always frustrated me. I was pretty bad at developing with tables for layout. I wanted to add more text somewhere and it meant that an image which had been aligned with some other text was suddenly further down the page as the td I was typing in stretched the table. I had tons of problems with things like 'colspan' and 'rowspan' and multiple nested tables. When I first found html pages that looked so clean because there was none of that presentational mark-up in it (I'm not saying you need presentational mark-up for tables, I'm just saying this is what I was seeing) and no table, tr and td tags, it just seemed like the whole business of development just got a whole lot easier. The code was easy to read and laid out very simply. I think that's the thing about all these 'invisible rules' that you talk about - if you just mark things up as what they are, everything will probably work a lot more smoothly. I mean, put paragraphs in 'p' tags, main headings in 'h1' tags, tabular data in 'table's, and so on. A lot of this is not about CSS - it's just html and semantics. I think it's fair to say that putting the word 'phone' in h1 tags is just... well, wrong. I mean - it's not the main heading is it?
  As for the worry about points and stuff on this site, well I don't know about that - they've given me unlimited points for some reason (now I'm worried about how this sounds - I don't want to sound like I'm bragging or something)... It's interesting that you say you live on the other side of the world. Where is that exactly? I'm guessing we must live on the same side...
  The point of my last post was not to try to take your points from you or anything like that. I just thought it would have shown a little courtesy to say 'thanks' (as you acknowledged just now). No big deal.
  Cheers for now...

Don't ask me how I found this; I think I clicked a link off the Netscape home page (isn't it curious how my new HP computer came with Windows XP, but IE has Netscape as the home page. There's a column in there somewhere, just trying to get out.)

Anyway, I came across an item about six ways your computer can get you fired. I used to work at a company where a woman was fired because she was sending emails to her boyfriend. That wouldn't have been so bad, except he was leasing them equipment provided by a competitor, and she was sending him leads. Not real smart.

Number Five on the list is one that the editor has touched on a couple of times: blogging about work-related stuff. In this day and age, it's dangerous, because you never know who might be your company's best customer. In India recently, an IBM employee quit his job rather that take down comments he made about one of the company's clients (note: IBM backed him, but he quit anyway). Earlier this year, Google employee Mark Jen was fired after posting his impressions of the company less than a month after he started.

This one missed the deadline for last issue. There's a new worm that exploits a vulnerability in cross-site scripting. Basically, a MySpace member wrote a script that first added any visitor to his friends list, and then added the script to that person's profile, so it would spread. It adds up to what might have been a DDoS on the site. What is truly ironic is that MySpace.com is owned by Intermix.com; if the name seems familiar, see the item above about spyware and adware.

Finally, the good guys finally got one in the Win column a couple of weeks ago, when the FBI raided the home of Alan Ralsky, whose $750,000 house was supposedly built from money made by sending out as many as 100 million emails a day. Ralsky is Number One on Spamhaus.org's All-Time List.