Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

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.

So I wrote to my ISP's help desk... (some of the ASCII emphasis conventions converted to equivalent HTML here) I've obscured the name of my ISP because even though all my friends know who it is, and anyone else can look it up easily enough, the point is not to smear their name across search engines in this post.

Subject: More spam filter false positives

Folks, I hate spam too, and yeah, my life is easier for not having to wade through quite as much of it, but false positives are a REALLY BAD THING. You may want to switch to a filtering method that minimizes false positives. Yet another Yahoo Group to which I'm intentionally subscribed started bouncing, which I discovered when I got an automatic message asking me to confirm that my address still works. Looking at my "bounce history" at Yahoo, it says that the last bounced message was 3/27, with the message:

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

Please PLEASE PLEASE work to ensure reliable delivery of my email! Back when I had a choice whether my mail was filtered through the systemwide spam filters, I chose not to use the system filters Just In Case your filters produced false positives. I took on the extra effort to do my own filtering because I feared that legitimate messages might be dropped by more general filters.

Nowadays, is there even any way for me to opt out of systemwide filtering? Now that all incoming mail has to pass through /etc/procmailrc before it gets to my own .procmailrc? And with what appears to be some sort of filtering at the edge of the [ISP] network before it even reaches [shell account host]? If I can't choose not to participate, then you must use a filtering method that puts reliable delivery of non-spam messages as its top priority, before even the goal of filtering worms and spammage.

Email is my primary medium for communication, ahead of snailmail and the telephone. I need it to be reliable. Yes, I know that email has inherent glitchitude and once in a while a message falls into a "black hole in the net" (fortunately less often than, say, fifteen years ago when most of us relied on UUCP), but I really don't need even more problems added by poorly tuned filters.

This makes what, the fifth time I've had legitimate messages dropped that I know about? And I only know about them because they were mailing list messages and either a human list maintainer or a robot emailed me a troubleshooting message after seeing the bounces. How many more messages am I missing that I don't know about?

The three things I pay you for are: an email address, a shell to telnet/dial to, and a PPP connection. Right now I only really trust two of those. How do we fix this? How do we make it so that I know my mail will reach me as long as it gets as far as [ISP]

In case I haven't made it clear, this is a Major Issue for this particular customer. Find me a solution. I need my primary means of communication to be something I can trust.

Sincerely,
        -- Glenn

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.