View 257 May 5 - 11 2003 (original) (raw)
Wednesday, May 7, 2003
Column is due on the wire tonight and it will get off on time. I won't have all the WinHEC knowledge in it, but it ought to be pretty good.
My email going out gets:
The following recipient(s) could not be reached:
'James Siddall jr' on 5/7/2003 10:45 AM
554 Service unavailable; [68.152.107.90] blocked using relays.osirusoft.com, reason: [1] send-safe, see http://spews.org/ask.cgi?S1062
I don't know what that means, but I had to go to dialup through earthlink to send mail. Others here have no problem sending mail. But mail.jerrypournelle.com gets that treatment. ALL the mail I send gets that whether it is to one or many recipients. If I go to dialup through mail.earthlink.net that doesn't happen.
It's probably my fault, not the people who run jerrypournelle.com for me, but I sure do not know what to do now. Somehow I manage to have mail service that won't work through the Microsoft Press Room ethernet connection using Outlook. Ain't computers wonderful?
I probably need some kind of ISP mail service that just lets me send stuff through press room ethernet connections. Others in the press room are having no problems. FTP I have no problem with. Internet Explorer I am having no problem with. Maybe I need an msn account? I am very confused here. The worst of it is I suspect I once knew all this and lost it, and that's really frightening.
For all those who wrote to me: 68.152.107.90] has nothing whatever to do with me. It's apparently the address Bell South assigned to the Microsoft Press room. Why my "from" is being translated to that before it gets to my ISP -- it is my own ISP that is rejecting my mail -- I do not know. The chap next to me is getting to his mail server without that indignity, and he's using Outlook just as I am. Robert Thompson is sure it's Outlook's fault, and perhaps so, but I don't see how. Meanwhile I can only send mail when I connect to a dialup service. If I send it any other way I am killed by spam protectors, who have not been able to protect me from about 200 advertisements for viagra and enlargement of my anatomy today.
I have solved the problem and filed the column, and I'll have more to say on this another time. It's rather interesting.
I solved the problem by dropping the Ethernet and using the telephone to connect dialup to Earthlink. That worked, but it was a bit slow. I could have used Earthlink web mail to send == that worked fine == but I have never put my address book in that, and some of the places the column has to go have names that are hard for me to remember. I could of course write them down. Or transfer them to that address book, and one day I guess I will do that.
I still wonder why the Microsoft Press Room is considered spam, and about the usefulness of blocking someone from sending single messages. I can understand a spam blocking system that says no you may not send 100 messages, or 1,000, or 10,000; but I think few spammers do their work one message at a time. Perhaps I have missed something.
Anyway it is midnight, I have to get up early to hear Peter Glaskowsky talk about the future of microprocessor chips, and I'm exhausted.
[The problem was solved at my ISP; they were doing filtering in the wrong order, so that it dumped me before I could authenticate. They fixed that at Mazin/Rocket. The generic problem of Spam On Road remains, and I'll have more on that later.]
Blast.