My problem arose when I realized that one, and only one, song from a particular LP was invisible when I looked at the album I had copied over. I was using the phone’s built-in VCast music library and player to get to the album. I decided to access the phone as a USB mass storage device instead, so that I could see if the actual song file had been copied. In fact, it was there, pretty as you please. I tried copying it again anyway, but still had no luck viewing the file from the music library.

Then, on a hunch, I decided to carefully compare the file to other song files from the same album, to see if there was any reason this one wouldn’t show up in the library. It was then that I noticed that one word in the song’s title had an apostrophe. Since I had allowed Spin it Again to assign file names, it had not occurred to me that the software would use the exact title (including the apostrophe) as the name of the file. I changed the name of the file, replacing the apostrophe with an underscore, and voila! VCast could now see the song. When using third party software to rip songs or modify file names in any way, be sure to eliminate any stray apostrophes, commas, etc. or your MP3 player’s music player may not be able to read the file.

An another occasion, two different songs from one album did not show up in the Vcast player. Both copied fine, and there were no special characters, etc. I was stimied, until I realized that the two songs had the longest two titles on the album – one with 52 characters and the other with 45 characters. Since the file name consisted of the song title in each case, I decided to reduce the file names to about 25 each. Once again, both songs magically appeared. Apparently, Verizon’s software can’t read file names over a set length, so be sure to keep all filenames to a reasonable number of characters.

The post Getting Verizon VCast to See All Songs on a LG VX8350 appeared first on Aartek Systems.

I regularly use my laptop at our local library. Actually, I occasionally teach seminars at the local library, and between classes I like to catch up on email correspondence. Receiving email was, as usual, no problem. Sending email, however, was a major pain. In yet another ongoing crusade to control spam, the library’s firewall prevented email of any kind to be sent via port 25.

For a while, I used webmail to send mail, but this was extremely inconvenient since I have, due to the nature of my business, about ten different email accounts that I send/receive email through. Checking each one of them individually through webmail was time consuming and laborious. Furthermore, most days I would open up Outlook Express (my mail client of choice) without thinking and download my mail. To reply, I then had to log into webmail and copy and paste the original message into the reply.

So I tried other options, including creating an SSH tunnel via Putty (I couldn’t get it to work, even with expert advice). Seems my mail server isn’t configured properly to allow this kind of traffic.

Anyway, after months of workarounds and dealing with the nuisance, I suddenly remembered seeing “IMAP” when adding an email account in Outlook Express. Then it dawned on me…I have a Google mail (gmail) account (which can be configured as IMAP), so why can’t I set up my gmail server to send mail and thereby possibly bypass the firewall restrictions?

As it turned out, I could. First, I had to enable IMAP in Gmail. The steps are as follows:

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
4. Select Enable IMAP
5. Click Save Changes

Next, I need to configure Outlook Express. I could have followed Google’s instructions on how to do this; however, I didn’t want to receive mail via IMAP, but just send  it. In order to do this, for each account I needed to send email from, I changed the outgoing server to imap.gmail.com. To do this:

1. Click Tools, Accounts
2. Select the account to change and choose Properties
3. Click the Servers tab.
4. Enter imap.gmail.com for the outgoing mail server.
5. At the bottom, check the box that says “My Server Requires Authentication”.
6. Click the “Settings” button.
7. Choose the “Log On Using” radio button.
8. Enter my gmail account name and password and click OK.
9. Click the Advanced tab.
10. Change the outgoing mail server to 465.
11. Check the “This server requires a secure connection” box.

With that, I was able to send email using Outlook Express, from behind the firewall.

The post Using Outlook/Outlook Express to Send Mail Through a Firewall appeared first on Aartek Systems.