d7xTech Software FAQ

See All FAQs and Terms (Quick Links) for links to all FAQs including purchase terms, free software agreements, and software licensing terms.

A note about Anti-Virus detections

Sometimes our software can be falsely flagged as a ‘threat’ by some Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware, etc. security software vendors.

Read more about Anti-Virus Detections (False Positives) on this page, which includes external links to submit “false positive” detections to most security software vendors.

If you happen to be looking at results from VirusTotal.com, please be aware that several anti-virus scanning engines used will detect a virus in just about any software, VBA32 is particularly known for this, as well as several others.  Therefore, it is very typical for perfectly legitimate/clean files to have one, two, even three or more detections from the nearly 70 scanning engines used in a typical VirusTotal.com scan.

Email  (Troubleshooting Issues)

For CryptoPrevent, please see the CryptoPrevent Email FAQ here.

For d7x, please see the Email Configuration section of the d7x manual here.

All other applications, if you are having issues with GMail try the steps below:

GMail’s SMTP server is “smtp.gmail.com” and it can be accessed on port 465/SSL or port 587/TLS or StartTLS; select “Auto” for authentication if available.

Be certain to include the domain name (e.g. @gmail.com or @yourcustomdomain.com) in the SMTP username field.

For accounts without two factor authentication, enabling the “less secure application” feature may help:  https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps

Two factor authentication can complicate things as well, and when using this you will need an “application specific password” in order to connect properly to the server through this app.  Learn more and obtain application specific passwords here:  https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en and you can manage them at this link:  https://security.google.com/settings/security/apppasswords

Finally, we have also had reports that Gmail will sometimes block what it considers a ‘suspicious login‘ and that it should alert you of this the next time you login to the webmail interface.  You should be notified that you can ‘unlock‘ your account by going to this link:  https://accounts.google.com/DisplayUnlockCaptcha  after which the account should be unlocked and email sending will no longer be blocked.

Digital Signatures and User Account Control

Most if not all of our applications are digitally signed.  Information from the digital signature is displayed in User Account Control pop-ups (requesting admin rights) prior to running the apps.

You can examine any digital certificate by clicking more info on one of these prompts, or by right-clicking on the file from Windows Explorer, selecting “Properties” from the bottom of the drop-down menu, and then selecting the “Digital Signatures” tab.

There are two issues that may occur related to Digital Signatures, both amount to the same symptom:

1. With some of our very old software, on some systems the signature was not correctly recognized as a trusted publisher, invoking the yellow/orange warning “User Account Control” box and displaying “unknown” as the publisher.  This should no longer be an issue; several years ago we moved away from StartSSL for our code signing certificates; most recently we have used SSL.com, which should be supported on all modern platforms “out of the box” and without update.

To resolve the issue, be sure and install the Trusted Root Certificates update from Microsoft/Windows Update.  If this does not appear in the updates list, you may manually download and install the package directly from Microsoft HERE for Windows XP.  Alternately, visit  which will prompt you to download the appropriate cert, open the file and select Install.

2. With some of our aging software (where a new version has not been released in several years) the pre-existing digital certificates that the application is signed with have expired.  An expired certificate will cause Windows to act as if there was no certificate at all, invoking the yellow/orange warning “User Account Control” box and displaying “unknown” as the publisher, rather than d7xTech, Inc.  This is because the certificate is designed to expire after a period of time (we choose the maximum 3-year certificates) and that “we just need to update the digital signature” on that file because it is over 3 years old; but this in no way indicates the software is malicious or infected.  You can still manually examine an expired digital certificate for validity as mentioned above, if you wish to make your own decision based on that.

Current versions of our software are signed with an Extended Validation (EV) certificate, meaning essentially that we (as a company, and myself as the owner) underwent a more stringent identity verification process before the EV certificate was issued; it also means we paid a good bit more for the EV certificate.  We chose to go with an EV certificate because it allows our software to download and slip past any initial Windows Smart Screen warnings/user prompts by establishing a “relationship” with the Smart Screen filter.  When an EV certificate is NOT present, Windows Smart Screen filter normally triggers a warning when software is either known to be malicious (of course) OR if the software not “well-known” according to some unknown Microsoft standard/logic (which ultimately amounts to not having the EV certificate.)

Digital Signatures and White-Label Software

If you are an IT services provider using our related software such as d7x or dSupportSuite, you may expect the ability to fully brand this “White-Label” software with your business logo and details.  Unfortunately, this is only partially true (without a lot of effort on your part) because the User Account Control dialog will always display information to the user from the file’s digital signature, specifically the original name of the software (before any white-label modifications) and of course the trusted publisher which is our company name.

This issue affects not only our software, but all software from anywhere else, because the trusted publisher information appearing on the User Account Control prompt of ANY application cannot be altered, except by “signing” the executable with a new digital signature.  Otherwise, User Account Control would be a pretty pointless feature, as all manner of malware could disguise itself as legitimate applications!

So how can you sign the executable with your own digital signature, specifying your own company name?  The process can be somewhat involved and requires paying for and obtaining an identity verification from a trusted certificate authority, such as SSL.com (now the least expensive company mentioned), Comodo, Verisign, Digicert, or StartSSL.  Granted this information may be a little outdated, the process of obtaining identity verification, a digital code signing certificate, and applying that to the executable is outlined in a now very old blog post called Digital Code Signing – What a Chore! if you are curious and maybe want to do this yourself.