503 Valid RCPT command must precede DATA

Posted on October 7, 2011 by admin

Anyone have a problem in Outlook when trying to send an email that says '503 Valid RCPT command must precede DATA'? It's a total pain.

Other websites said to do things that didn't solve it, including:
1. Clicking receive to receive before sending. Still get 503 RCPT error.
2. Checked 'My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication. Still get 503 RCPT error.
3. I changed Outgoing server (SMTP) from 25 to 26 (if hosted by Linux server), as per instructions in cpanel when configuring mail. Still get 503 RCPT error.

503 Valid RCPT command must precede DATA - what a pain!

Alas! Here's what solved it: changing from "Log on to incoming mail server before sending mail' to 'Use same settings as my incoming mail server'.

503 Valid RCPT command must precede DATA

503 Valid RCPT command must precede DATA email - solution to email error in Outlook

So, the folks giving the advice to log on to incoming mail server before sending mail was wrong- that actually CAUSED the Outlook error!

If you have Outlook 2010, you probably have a nightmare trying to navigate through its menus, which they hid from everyone in that version. Instead of clicking once or twice, visible directly from the drop down menu, you have to click multiple times and its found in an unlikely place.

Here's how to change email settings in Outlook 2010:

1. At top left, click File tab
2. Click Account Settings in the middle of screen, then click it again (stupid navigation)
3. Select your email account from list, then when highlighted, click Change... above
4. At bottom right, click More Settings...
5. Click Outgoing Server tab at top
6. Make sure 'My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication is checked
7. Make sure 'Use same settings as my incoming mail server' is checked
8. That should solve your Outlook '503 Valid RCPT command must precede DATA' error. If not, then I'd ask tech support for your web host provider.

Hope that helps someone and saves hours like it could have for me.

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Google May Favor Subdomains in Search Result Sitelinks

Posted on August 17, 2011 by admin

From a change Google made yesterday (8-16-11), you may now notice when you search Google for either: digg, amazon, apple, ebay, or other prominent websites, that Google will group (cluster) the subdomains together in a 2 column format underneath the primary www domain.

Google previously displayed short sitelinks underneath the primary domain with limited or no descriptions. Now, Google not only shows a greater number of links and description of each, it appears to favor subdomains (example: instead of www.webmastertools.bz, subdomainname.webmastertools.bz) as opposed to subdirectories (example: http://www.webmastertools.bz/how-to-duplicate-columns-in-mysql/). Upon a cursory test of several prominent websites, most displayed its subdomains in the sitelinks- likely a new default setting from the recent change.

So, for SEO, is there now a greater incentive to utilize subdomains instead of merely using subdirectories?

Ebay results in Google

Grouping of Ebay's subdomains in Google

Woot in Google

Grouping of Woot subdomains in Google

Amazon's search results in Google

Amazon's search results in Google

The change seems contrary to past decisions Google made to limit a particular domain's dominance, from abuse that Matt Cutts of Google calls, 'host crowding'.

This is the official Google announcement of the sitelinks change.

Webmasters have some control (limited) in Google's Webmaster Tools.

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How to Display UTF-8 Characters on a Web Page

Posted on August 10, 2011 by admin

In 3 Easy Steps...

You would think displaying UTF-8 characters/fonts on a web page would be simple and that easy instructions would be online, but it isn't, especially if you're retrieving it from MySQL. And I wasn't able to find any site telling how to do it- only a bunch of geeky UTF-8 history and why it's called that- something most people don't care about. But fortunately, this post will tell you exactly how to do it.

Read More about displaying UTF-8 Characters on a Web Page...

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How to Duplicate Columns in MySQL

Posted on August 8, 2011 by admin

Gosh, I sure did things the hard way before, by writing PHP code that looped and to update table 1 with table 2 where id of table 1 = id of table 2.

Hows the REAL way to duplicate columns in MySQL (duplicate a field)

update `tablename` SET `tableyouwanttoupdate` = `tabletoduplicate`;

That's it!

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Beware of Crawlers Stealing Your Bandwidth Like Yahoo (67.195.111.54)

Posted on July 19, 2011 by admin

After recording search activity on my own website's search engine for two weeks, I was shocked by what I saw. From a total of 100,000 searches, about 38% were from only 7 IPs, with the one IP more than all the other 6 combined!

Who was the worst offender stealing bandwidth?

Find out who the bandwidth offenders are...

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Get All Variables in PHP from GET or POST

Posted on July 11, 2011 by admin

Use this PHP code to pull variables that were just posted, such as from an HTML form:

extract($_POST);
extract($_GET);

Read More about PHP GET and POST...

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Add Custom Fonts to Your Website

Posted on July 3, 2011 by admin

Add Custom Fonts to WebsiteI've seen other websites using cool custom fonts (as real, SEO-friendly text) and I scratched my head wondering how can they display anything other than the boring: arial, times, georgia, verdana, etc. See a working example on this post or on Children's Bible website. It shows stylistic fonts, but you still get credit for SEO by having the real text on the page. Fortunately, there's an easy way to do this, and it displays consistently well on major browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Learn how to add custom fonts to your site...

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MySQL: Get Largest Value of Each Category

Posted on June 11, 2011 by admin

Let's say you have books in MySQL, and you wanted to count the maximum number of chapters per book. Perhaps you want to do this to add error text or prevent people from searching beyond the maximum number of the book's chapter. You can do with with MySQL's MAX function- it finds the maximum value of the chapters field, in this case:

Count total chapters in MySQL (Maximum amount of chapters):

SELECT `bookname`, MAX(`chapter`) FROM `table` GROUP BY `bookname` order by `id`;

That's it!

Read More...

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Post WordPress RSS Feeds to Facebook

Posted on March 24, 2011 by admin

There's no standard for importing RSS Feeds into Facebook- to post either to your personal profile or your fan page.

WordPress plugins don't seem to work too well, since they need continual updating. WordBook is currently broken. Another plugin requires several more complex steps to setup and when backed by a for-profit business, they have their own agenda (likely including their own branding in your posts).

So, here are the two best options:

1. Feedburner- choose Publicize > Socialize > Add Twitter Account…
Then from Twitter, you can use the post to Facebook tool.
http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/

2. Use Twitterfeed. It's a free service where they'll post your RSS to both Twitter and Facebook. The downside is they add a little icon that says Twitterfeed and links to their site.
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitterfeed.com%2F&h=f77da

 

Reference:
http://mashable.com/2009/05/25/twitter-to-facebook/

Posted in General Webmaster Tools | 2 Comments

Trim MySQL Data

Posted on January 13, 2011 by admin

If you want to remove (trim) the white space (blanks) before or after MySQL data, you can do that easily by one of this code:

1. Best way:

UPDATE `table` SET `column`=TRIM(both ' ' from `column`)

Real example: UPDATE `prop65` SET `chemical`=TRIM(leading ' ' from `chemical`)

If you want to remove spaces only on the left side (leading), instead of 'both', put in 'leading', and for spaces on the right side (trailing), put in 'trailing' instead of 'both'.

 

2. You could also this:

Select where field like " %" and field like "% ";  

…to identify which have spaces, then delete the spaces manually, but that doesn't work as well.

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