Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I hate making big changes, but I fear it's time. I need advice and suggestions.

First, my dialtone provider, Talk America, has been overcharging me on taxes and assorted fees, so it's time to punt them. This could wind up being a good change as long as what I'm considering doesn't bite me: while "dry DSL" (that is, DSL without a POTS dialtone) still costs too much, and likewise for cable without already having cable TV, Verizon is offering cheap DSL which costs about as much as 'measured service' (that is, a phone line that doesn't have unlimited free local calling), and the two together come to about the same price as a normal (unlimited local calling) POTS line. So I could save a little and get a faster connection ...

... if DSL is reliable enough (both in the everyday uptime sense and in the "provider ain't gonna pull the rug out from under me in eight months" sense) that I don't have to fall back on using dialup and incurring per-call tolls. (This is mitigated somewhat if I get the type of service that has 30 free calls per month and have a dialup provider where connections can reliably stay up for more than twelve hours at a stretch; otherwise the per-call charges for dialup will add up to eat all of the supposed savings.)

I've asked elsewhere about the reliability of DSL (most of my friends with broadband connections have cable), and the one response I got said that reliability varies from place to place and the best predictor is whether my neighbours are happy with it. But I'm pretty sure none of my neighbours has a broadband Internet connection.

(It's probably worth noting that Bell Atlantic managed to really piss me off several times when I was their customer, and that although post-merger-and-renaming Verizon has been better to deal with, they don't give me warm fuzzies.)

The savings would be even greater if I got rid of my existing ISP, which has some hard-to-find features I count on and which has friendly and mostly-helpful tech support but is not cheap. But with no dialup provider at all, I really would be completely at the mercy of Verizon DSL, which makes me nervous.

And that brings me to my second, and much more stress-inducing issue. My ISP, RadixNet, has become unreliable with regard to delivery of email. First there was the occasionally black-holing of domains from which I get -- and expect -- legitimate email, which has resulted in my failing to receive messages from three different mailing lists at different times. I think other list members and I have finally gotten that behaviour beaten out of them. Then there was their refusal to accept email from my (at the time) employer, a policy that made it a pain for him to contact me with assignments. The policy appears to have silently been rescinded, because he recently emailed me and it got through, and he said that neither his setup nor his ISP's DNS have changed. Through all of this was their routing all of my mail through a spam filter despite the announcement of that filter (and help screens about it since) describing it as "opt-in" and my never having opted in. It turns out they have multiple layers of filtering, some of which they can bypass and some they cannot, and they've finally (within the past month) routed all of my mail around the ones that can be bypassed. (Spam filtering is nice, when I can trust it not to generate false positives and delete mail that should have gotten through; having the filters be under my control increases my trust.) So my mail is no longer going through /etc/procmailrc but is apparently still being managed by Bogofilter. If no legitimate messages were ever deleted, I'd probably have never noticed; as it is, it's a problem. And then there are unannounced changes that keep outgoing mail from my LAN from getting out, which their support staff are helpful about when I ask for advice on updating my configuration (alas, now I need to replace my old Sendmail to get around the latest change, and the version of Linux it's running on is old enough for that to make me nervous), but the lack of advance notice means that the first time I find out about the change is when folks fail to get mail I sent.

Finally, messages that do make it all the way to the host where I read my mail are sometimes not delivered. At least some of these get as far as .forward processing and are copied to the file my Linux machine FTPs every quarter hour and I see them at home but not in my shell account at my ISP -- this is how I'm aware of the problem and how far along the messages have gotten. But when I'm not at home, I don't usually telnet all the way back through my modem (which is only up 95% of the time, not 100%) to my Linux machines to read mail -- I read it at a shell prompt on one of my ISP's machines. If it's not delivered there, I might miss it. Messages from syntonic_comma and anniemal have fallen through the cracks, yesterday an urgent announcement of the rescheduling of a medieval faire got dropped, and recently email from myself to myself on the same machine courtesy of the cron daemon was sent but not delivered. Something is wrong with mail delivery. And I've let it go on longer than I should have, waiting for support to respond to my pleas. It's been weeks since I complained about not getting the Quotation Of The Day Mailing List, and they still haven't tracked down that one repeatable glitch.

My one New Year Resolution this year is to resolve this issue and get reliable email delivery one way or another.

I really hate the idea of giving up an email address I've used for so long, especially since I do have old friends occasionally email me after years of silence, so the old address will sit in folks' addressbooks for longer than transitional forwarding will last, and my current address is on various copies of things I've written as the contact info for asking for permission to copy things elsewhere or to provide feedback.

On top of that, I hate the idea of migrating my web site again, which is bookmarked God-knows how many places, and linked to from all over the web. Of course, if I'm going to move it now, this is probably the time to get a vanity domain so that I'll have shorter URLs and can keep the same address even if I change providers yet again sometime in the future...

So, my questions:

Given that the mail readers I can stand are /bin/mail and (to a lesser extent) Mutt, is it reasonable to expect reliably enough uptime from a DSL connection that I can do without an ISP-provided shell account and just telnet home to check my mail when I'm away?

Is it insane to rely on DSL without a dialup provider as a backup, especially if I decide to count on being able to telnet home to read email from the road?

What dialup providers with Baltimore-area numbers are people happy with, do they provide shell accounts, will the cope with my being connected pretty much full-time, is email delivery reliable, and how are they for web hosting?

Note that I do want a Unix (or Linux, or OS X) shell on whatever machine hosts my web pages, with 'vi', 'sed', 'grep', 'find', 'tar', and various other tools that I consider "basic". SSI and PHP would be nice, but I've lived without them so far. (Note to friends offerring web space on their own servers: my traffic for just the HTML was about 560MB in December, and I don't have the traffic numbers for the images (which are currently on a different server) handy.)

Right now I see three general courses of action: 1) switch telcos but keep normal unlimited service, and find a more reliable dialup ISP that provides shell access and delivers email to the shell account; 2) switch telcos, get measured service, and add DSL, and also get a new ISP with reliable email and shell access; 3) switch telcos, get DSL, and set up my own machines to be where I read my mail no matter where I am. In parallel with those options, there's what to do about my web site when I leave RadixNet: a) make sure my new ISP is a reasonable web host with shell access; b) get a separate web hosting service with shell access; c) accept web space from a friend. Unless I get really ambitious or one of my pages get slashdotted, (c) probably makes the most sense at least for now, right?

I'm moving slowly on this because I dread it so. (%whine%) But it's time to kick myself into action. I've bitched to RadixNet's support staff long enough without getting an actual solution.