Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Okay, I confess, this is not what my brain conjured from the comment that accompanied the link in email, "Glass panties? Who comes up with this stuff?"

I really hate changing my email address. I really, really hope I don't have to. I like to have a certain amount of stability in my net-presence, to be findable by old friends, to have links to me in various places all work. Changing email addresses is downright traumatic for me. I don't want to do it.

But just in case I have to, are there any affordable ISPs with Baltimore dialup numbers that provide reliable email delivery, PPP, and shell accounts? If it actually comes to that, I'd better have some research ready.

In the past year, I've been dropped from (and later reinstated to, after jumping through apropriate hoops and complaining loudly to my ISP's help desk) a handful of mailing lists for having list mail bounce back marked as spam. Mailing lists I intentionally subscribed to, containing actual intelligent content. (Okay, two of them can get a bit flamey, but still...) When my ISP first installed system spam filters, they were opt-in things. Folks collecting their mail using POP/IMAP could check a little box to have their mail filtered, and folks reading their mail in a shell account could get a little snippet of code to add to their .procmailrc files. At some point, without my having heard about it ahead of time, something changed. Now there seems to be some sort of filtering further out on my ISP's network, before mail reaches the host where I read it (admittedly the most reasonable place to detect certain types of spam), and Procmail changed from being a tool users were responsible for choosing or not, to being the mail-delivery-agent for the system, with a gobal /etc/procmailrc file doing a bunch of spam and worm/virus filtering. Hey, that'd be a lot more convenient if, a) I still had a way to opt out and use only my own filters, or b) it never produced a false positive on the spam test.

This morning I got yet another automagic email from Yahoo saying that I'd been unsubscribed from one of my Yahoo Groups (yeah yeah, I know, but it wasn't hosted at Yahoo when I first joined) because mail to me was bouncing. I looked at my bounce report on groups.yahoo.com, and sure enough, the most recent trouble was a bounce message that said:

Remote host said: 550 5.0.0 Rejected for Spam Mar/03

Note that despite the system spam filters, I still get seven or eight spam messages for every legitimate message in my personal mailbox. If you mix mailing lists into the numbers, it's probably more like one spam for each legitimate message, or maybe two spams per. (I'm on two rather high-volume lists.) So I still have to do a lot of the spam filtering myself. The system-wide filters cut down on the amount of spam I see a bit, but they certainly don't fix anything for me.

The thing is, other than this one issue, I really like my ISP. They've cut me shitloads of slack when I've been late paying my bill; their help desk really does respond to email and usually provides clueful, useful answers; they're one of the few places that still provide shell accounts; and ever since they replaced some hardware they couldn't fix, access has been remarkably reliable. So on top of my hating to change my email address (and for that matter, the URLs of all two hundred or so of my web pages, many of which are linked to from other folks' sites), I feel I'd be losing a pretty cool provider if I have to move. If I were inclined to switch providers willy-nilly, I'd have looked for something less expensive two years ago. This place isn't exactly cheap, and I'm exactly impoverished.

But I need my email to be reliable. I need this erroneous spam detection bullshit to stop. And that means that either my ISP needs to change their approach to dealing with incoming mail, or I need to find an ISP that delivers my mail reliably. If this were the first time I'd had this problem, I wouldn't be thinking of switching. But this has been happening on and off since around June. That I know about. And I've explained the nature of the problem to them before.

Obviously, I'm rather upset.

"Whacking video is easier than learning Japanese."
     -- madbodger explaining his decision to build a PAL->NTSC converter.

Just a reminder to any who might have overlooked it, and news for folks who haven't heard of it before: Tomorrow, 3 April, is Cheese Weasel Day. Give somebody some cheese.

The email I sent to a mailing list the first time I heard of Cheese Weasel Day -- uh, 1992, I think; that was two email addresses ago -- is conveniently archived here (and my thanks go to the friends who've mentioned CWD in their journals lately and linked to that page -- I'd forgotten where it was).

It's a little-known holiday honouring the Cheese Weasel, who brings cheese in April to folks who've been good. I didn't want to post this reminder yesterday, lest folks think it was an April Fool's Day joke.

Have fun. Share some cheese. Spread the word. Confuse people, then get them in on it.

Well, after a long "stuff pages into bookmark folders or decide I'm done with them" session last night that got continued this morning, including making two folders just for bookmarks to open again in batches later to finish sorting for real, I've finally whittled the number of open Opera windows on my BoyGeorge (my Win95 machine) down to forty eight. I haven't counted the number of open browser windows on RuPul (my WinNT machine), but it looks like a similar number. Maybe now I'll have enough RAM available to open a couple of spreadsheets on BoyGeorge. (The only other window open on that box is the telnet window in which I'm typing this.)

I need to come up with a way to keep the two bookmarks files synchronized.

I need to dispense with a bunch more of these pages I'm still looking at, 'cause it's coming up on time to reboot Windows yet again.