Pierre, one of our PaperCut users from France, has been working with us to track down a few bugs in our page count detection associated with Canon PCL drivers. Unfortunately the Canon IR series printers extend the standard PCL print language and driver output by adding custom binary header and extra data spread throughout the stream. We have worked around this by filtering the binary extensions but changes in recent drivers have caused bugs to surface. This has now been fixed in the latest PCM update. It’s very frustrating when manufactures “extend” published standard with undocumented proprietary extensions!

Pierre also has emailed through an example of a method he uses to control the addition of printers on his network’s computers. I have added Pierre’s example to our knowledge base.

I’ve never heard of Kim Komando, but apparently she’s a radio show host in the US with a huge following. On the weekend she recommended our free tool, emailStripper. emailStripper strips those annoying >>>>> characters from emails that have been forwarded too many times. We wrote emailStripper about 5 years ago and its popularity never ceases to amaze us, getting thousands of downloads each month.

On the day emailStripper was recommended on Kim’s “site of the day”, we received about 13,000 unique visitors and used about 2.3 GB of bandwidth (and the day isn’t over yet). This is about 8-10 times our normal Sunday traffic of 1200 visitors and 250MB of bandwidth.

A side effect of this traffic was that our SpreadFirefox ranking jumped. Last time I checked we were 11th! Obviously many of Kim’s listeners took our recommendation of Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox seriously.