> > My job requires me to receive spam and process it for > > security reasons for my customers. > > Good, you'll have your own domains for that. Nope, I have taken an easy option. I don't want to run mail servers, that is what I pay paradise for .... my email address is a paradise address. I have setup my own domain to forward all email to my paradise address and I filter from there. The extra time required for me to configure, run and administer a mail server and the extra firewallng etc required for me to do that is not worth my time. My core business is service, not hosting. I do however what to receive all the email sent to me, unadulterated, unfiltered and via pop mail or whatever. I don't pay paradise to muck around with my email, I pay them for pop, smtp and adsl access. No more, no less. That way I get to use email as I wish too without all the hassles of firewalling, security, hardware up time, backups etc.
That is also the same reason I will never host web servers unless it suddenly becomes very financially viable for me. I don't even host my own sites. I pay others to do that so I can get on and do my core business. > If it's really *that* important for you and your clients, you'd have > your own mail server anyway, where you can tweak things down to the last > nano-bit. Nope ... see above... > Paradise's mail server is still good (e.g. they even give you both > envelope headers, e.g. Registerdirect does not) True > - very helpful, fast response, connection is good, downtime is minimal Not always my experience. i have unexplained down times when I cannot connect, rebooting computers, adsl modem etc doesn't work. Paradises answer is they don't guarentee 100% uptime or connectability at any level. I had a period of two weeks where I couldn't connect without trying 8 or 9 times a day because the ip addresses they gave me on dhcp lease were not connected to the internet and were not routed to enable connectivity. Boy that peeved me off. I was losing 2 hours a day trying to get connected. Their response? see above. > What about the possibility that their spam filter is indeed a good one. No generic spam filter is a good one, especially one that doesn't learn for each and every user. My customers include helath, vitamin and mineral producers so their legitimate mail includes requests for all sorts of things including words guarentteed to be stopped by a spam filter ... e.g they manufacture and process herbs and minerals that are in male potency herbal products, include horny goat weed, are in male erectile and impotency products, used for womans problems etc. They don't produce crap for the spam market but they are a bulk seller of ingredients that may end up in the spammers market place as ingredients in another product. > You want to pressure Paradise about some decent access to the blocked > mails? Count me in. Cool ... that is an excellent idea. it is the web access I cannot abide. Too much work in too slow a medium. > Your suggestion to change from Paradise to Telescum sounds like a > suggestion to change to Redmond (same bed, anyway). Same extortionate > mental attitude too (or is that the same thing?). I dislike Telecom for various reasons. Their monopoly, their prices and their liason with Remond. But, and this is a big but, I still use M$ products and I still use Telecom for many things, as do we all (ie telephone lines, public payphones, white pages, yellow pages etc). This doesn't mean I support their ethic. That I fight in as many was as possible. I do however respect some of their products. As for being in the Rdmond bed ... I guess I must be a bit of a whore, I programme and work in both the Linux, Delphi, IBM, Microsoft and other camps. I use and support all the above products and I sell and support all the above products. I choose the best from each and turf the rest. To choose one side or another is to cut off your nose to spite your face. It is the same as the Mandrake, Redhat, debian, Genttoo factions things. Hey, they are all good products ( even Redhat which as I speak I am using RH 7.3, Debian and Knoppix ) but each has its flaws and each has its strengths. No one is perfect, not even Linus :-) The same monopolistic attitude mentioned above is being shown by paradise. They have effectively said you must do it our way even if it inconveniences you and if it costs you time and money. They have effectively told people like me we can go screw ourselves as they know better. If we let them get away with it this time then what is to stop them doing it again. This is as much about the ethical issues of what they are doing as it is about the sheer inconvenience and possible illegality of what they are doing. I pay for pop mail access. I pay for adsl access. I pay for smtp access. I did not sign up for them to screw around with my mail and I will not pay for them to remove the very service I am paying for, which is the ability for me to download ALL, repeat ALL my mail via a POP connection, not to play with it and side line it in a way I never asked for. Possibly this is a breach of the sale of goods act or fair trading act or something similar. I am not a happy man. I will be persuing this matter with paradise, even to the pointof trying legal avenues if needs be. If they don't come to the party well they have lost a customer. I am not the only one. By their own admission there are lots of corporate and business customers out there who are saying this is not viable for them. Paradise is choosing to ignore them at their own peril and this will cost them custom. Shane -- Shane Hollis Notes Unlimited New Zealand Ph: 021 465 547 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
