15 Megs of Fame




Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


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Another smart-assed remark from Mike
My kingdom for a competent ISP that doesn't require a credit card
02:45:00 on 1999-11-03

I hate my ISP. They used to be really good. They were cheap. I've been with them since I stopped working for another ISP here in town in early '97. But this is getting bad.

Y'see, I have a lot of email addresses and I actually use most of them. I have three POP3 accounts with my ISP; I have a hotmail account that I registered my domain in; I have my forwarding account for my domain; I have three email forwards from pobox.com; I have a Yahoo! mail account that I use when I'm away from home for a few days and people might want to email me; I have an email account at my former university that nobody's ever seen fit to delete, apparently (which suits me fine; it's the most reliable email I've ever seen) that I can check with the POP3 protocol or telnet in to check. I'm sure I'm missing a couple that are languishing somewhere with thousands of spams in the box or something.

(Oh, yeah, I have one at Xoom, but I have no idea what the address is, nor do I care. I just needed the big storage space for realmedia file streaming.)

Anyway... every few days, when I try to connect to the mail server at my ISP and the client just sits there. Doing nothing.

I ping the mail server, and it comes right back with no problems. It's not dead...

I pull up my telnet app and connect to the mail server at port 110. No response. Not good.

It's always like this. And it's always in the middle of the night when nobody is there for me to telephone them and yell at.

(Not like it does any good - recently, I called them up because I wasn't getting any traffic out. At all. I asked if there were network problems.

"No," the support droid said. "Why do you say that?"

"There's no traffic getting past the router going to the UUNET link."

"Really? Hmmmm." Clicking of keys. "Hey, you're right. Hey, hang on." Hey, you're an idiot, you know it?

Wait a couple minutes.

"Yeah, the systems guys know about it already, they're working on it."

"How long will it be?"

"Oh, within the hour." Everything with these people is within-the-hour.

I'm so glad tech support is well-informed.)

So anyway, I'm getting dropped off some mailing lists, some missing messages in others, and warnings about bounced messages from yet others. This is getting annoying as Hell. I sent a snippy email to them, and while I've gotten some backlogged email since then, I am waiting for lots of annoying little gripes from majordomo, listserv and qmail servers any time now.

Does anybody out there know a good, reliable (I mean 100% uptime) POP3 outsourcing service that will accept attachments up to five megs or so, and has no real mailbox limit (although I download all my mail quite regularly, usually many times a day)? I really only need one POP3 mailbox to forward other accounts into, Pegasus is happy with sorting it out for me, and I can use my available SMTP servers, but some of the prices I've seen for just a mailbox are ridiculous.

I would just go ahead and pay up my webhosting and use that, but the trick is that I've heard some horror stories regarding Dreamhost's mail lately. Then again, I have some questions about the technical knowledge of the people who have been complaining about Dreamhost, so maybe it's the users, not the service, there.

I feel ridiculous, I'm replicating all the services I am paying them for. Email. Web hosting. News service. Why am I even paying them? Connectivity? They can't even keep that up enough anymore. And I got a busy tonight. Grr.

For the time being, though, I have [email protected] forwarded to the university, though. At least I know then I'll get my mail. Y'know?

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



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