DSL provider recommendation

Wed Jul 23 16:31:56 PDT 2003

>From: "Ron Leedy" <rflii at speakeasy.net>
>To: "'BayLISA'" <baylisa at baylisa.org>
>Subject: RE: DSL provider recommendation
>Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 16:06:06 -0700

>BTW - Speakeasy is a GREAT ISP with setups for the neophite and the guru.
>From nation-wide dialup to DSL to T-1 lines.  They are adding wireless
>access points.  Any subscriber who is willing to be a access point gets
>reduced rates.  That's how innovative they are!!!

Speakeasy may be great in many ways, but -- as a non-Speakeasy customer
-- I recently had an interaction with them that I considered Pretty
Annoying.

I received some spam; the machine that was the SMTP client to my
SMTP server when the spam was vectored had a hostname (that matched
its IP address) in the speakeasy.net domain.

Accordingly, I sent the usual "boilerplate" to speakeasy.net at abuse.net
to let the folks there know that there was likely a problem with some
resources under their purview.

I received an autobot's response, whining that I had tred to send a
message with attachments, or in some non-text format, and that my mesage
was therefore not acceptable.

Now, my usual (and in this case) MUA is /usr/bin/mail on a FreeBSD box.
(For Solaris types, think /bin/mailx.)  It does not prohibit me from
creating any content I wish in the message body... nor does it provide
any facilities for creating MIME of any type.

After the second of these within 36 hours, I sent a note off to
postmaster at speakeasy.net, asking that this misfeature be repaired.
(I didn't get a definitive response; postmaster@ did indicate that
support@ had such a filter, but the type of report in question should
have gone to abuse@ -- but he then indicated that he had recently seen
some evidence that abuse@ also had such a filter in place.)

(Among other things, I pointed out that having such a filter in place,
while the spammers are the ones controlling the content, was likely a
Very Bad Idea, as it would allow certain spammers near immunity from
being reported to abuse at speakeasy.net.  I also noted that I suspected
that the filter triggered a false positive based on seeing a regex that
matched the beginning of an HTML sequence.)

Take the above with a "grain of salt" of appropriate size for your
situation.

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Based on what I have seen to date, the use of Microsoft products is not
consistent with reliability.  I recommend FreeBSD for reliable systems.