I currently have
Service
Electric cable modem which, for the most part, I am
happy with. I miss my ADSL and would just
love to sign up with
Speakeasy if they only had
decent service in my area. Sure, I'd be paying more for less bandwidth more than
likely when compared to cable modem, but then I'd have an ISP with a clue.
Actually, I'm not picking on Service Electric in any way on this one. The
situation is that Service works with
PenTeleData (PTD) to
provide service and that service, of course, includes E-mail. Prior to
changing to PTD I had Fastnet, which is now USLEC. And they did zero spam
filtering, which is fine by me, as I liked having control of that aspect of my
Internet usage and the ability to see just what is being blocked in the event
of a false positive.
Oh, as an aside, the reason I changed from Fastnet to
Service is because I had to. See, I moved and Fastnet didn't have service at
the new place, actually, no DSL service was available here. Even though I moved
at tops about a 5 minute drive away. Now, supposedly you can get DSL here but
it is slow and expensive.
Anyway, back on topic.
After using PTD for some time I noticed a sever reduction in the amount of spam
spamassassin was catching. I called and confirmed that PTD was doing
filtering which for the most part is cool. However, after roughly two years
I've noticed that I wasn't getting messages that I wanted. For instance, the
latest being confirmation/activation messages from forums that I have
intentionally signed up for. If these messages were tagged as spam in my own
system it would just gotten dumped into the spam directory and I'd still get
it. But PTD seems to think it's better to dump things that they think are spam
into the void. Knowing how easy it is to adjust spam settings I attempted to
find their on line tool to adjust my inbox filter settings only to find none,
which prompted a phone call to them. They claim that they can't change the
filters at all or turn them off as they apply to everyone. Additionally, they
swear up and down they don't dump anything to /dev/null but only tag it as spam
for the user to filter. That last part is very obviously a 100% lie because if it
was true I would have gotten the tagged messages. I've heard other stories
about the same kind of flexibility problems with other ISPs before so I know
I'm not unique.
I mean, what the heck is it with these brain dead ISPs? Why is it acceptable
for me to loose E-mail because they are over aggressive in their filtration?
I'm paying them money to get all of my legitimate E-mail. Depending on the
content of the E-mail it could have negative impact if a message is lost. What
if I'm corresponding with a potential employer and suddenly a message sent
gets dropped? Here I am oblivious to the message and the sender sits around
wondering why stupid Brian isn't replying and, oh well, he mustn't want the job
anyway. How unprofessional of him.
PTD seems to be OK with this, I mean, it's not screwing them so why bother
keeping a customer happy?
A friend of mine,
Ricardo works at a company called
Pobox which provides some darn cool mail services. I
signed up for the
basic service for $20 a year, which is essentially a
forwarding service which points to my current E-mail address. I found a
message sent to my Pobox account and then forwarded to me would get through,
while the same message would get dropped when sent directly to my ptd.net
address. I'm guessing PTD is dropping a broad range of IP addresses and the
forums I've been trying to participate in happen to be caught in the crossfire.
It happens, but I should be able to whilelist things that I want. So far Pobox
has taken care of my problem and the nice thing is if I change ISPs I can just
keep my pobox address and change the forward. No need to inform everyone of
the address change. Once I'm on more financially solid ground I may upgrade
to the
Mailstore service so I can have a separate POP/IMAP/webmail account
from my ISP and bypass all the idiotic ISP stupidity completely.
I just wish ISP's would wake up and become a bit more geek friendly. They can
fool the average user who doesn't know any better with their bullshit but must start
to realize that geeks will call them out on it. And it's not good to piss of
the geeks as they are the ones that usually recommend service providers to
non-geeks.