Moss Designs
November 19, 2004 CADzette
CAD News Large and Small
Costworks Eliminated in Revit 7.0
 
The Cost Report function was eliminated in Revit 7.0 because the cost values were too outdated to make the reports of any value.

An alternate for users who want to be able to estimate the costs of their business project, you may want to try Timberline software.

Titleblock Text Problem in Inventor R9
 
If you upgraded from Inventor R9 from Inventor R8 and found the text in your title blocks messed up, you are not alone.

Apparently, Inventor R9 had problems reading some of the fonts used in R8. Download the file systemfont.zip; extract system.ttf and install in your fonts folder.

To install in your Fonts folder, go to Control Panel- >Fonts. Then go toFile->Install New Font. Browse to the folder where you extracted the system.ttf file and select it.

Combatting Spammers
 
From Larry Caldwell (a fellow who does not mince words)-

MailWasher is a turkey; stayed on my machine about ten minutes. SpamInspector is a well thought-out program I was happy with on W2K but can't get it to work right on XP Pro (changes the mail account to 127.0.0.1 and adds a suffix to the account name as in: "account name:pop-server" not good ... constantly have to reset it after a logoff/on). SAPAMfighter is okay but lacking features like power- user configuration, set to very high scrutiny still won't filter everything not in address book, won't mark filtered mail as read, won't filter hotmail, no learning algorithm, to name a few. SpamInspector was the best I'd found, but it's useless on XP Pro FAICT. Have Spamfighter loaded now until I find someth'n better. Find any new/other ones I haven't seen, let me know if you wouldn't mind. BTW ... bouncing emails back just keeps the spam coming; much better to let them go without any feedback at all.

I think we all agree that spam has grown beyond being annoying to making email a nuisance instead of a convenience. Terrible when a wonderful communication tool has been hi-jacked by carpetbaggers.

I have been getting some good feedback and excellent results from a software tool I implemented several weeks ago. It basically uses the Challenge/Response method to eliminate spam.

I was a little concerned about implementing it as i did not want to put any correspondents off, but the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

This is a method that Bill Gates has proposed, but has not gotten wide acceptance. The idea is when someone sends you an email, the software sends them a reply to see if they are a real person and not a spammer. They click a link in the email and their email will then go through.

Senders only get challenged once. If they respond positively, their email address is added into a database and they get the green light from that point on. If there is no response, the email is deleted and you never see it. Since most spammers use fake return addresses and auto-send their spam, they don't reply.

You can try the software for free and if you like it, you can buy it. Unlike other spam filters, it does not try to read the email that's sent, or use complex algorithms, etc. It basically builds and maintains an address book list of good emails and uses that to filter your email. You can add emails to the database manually, if you like.

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