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Earthlink and Mindspring Merge
bee writes "Yet another ISP merger-- Earthlink and Mindspring this time. The new company will keep the Earthlink name, and will apparently be the 2nd largest ISP in the country. Yahoo has the story here." Together, they'll have over 3 million members. Not exactly AOL, but enough to have some serious clout in the ISP business.
But it is run by Garry Betty, who managed to run DCA into the ground.
Just wait 'till countries start doing their own IPOs, and it'll be the same country, too.
On alot of the spam attributed to uunet is actually coming through ELN mail servers
I was a PSI interramp customer when Mindspring took over their home accounts. Service was absolutely abysmal and managed to get worse!! The actually shut down my account on a Friday because someone had sent them an (unverified and forged) e-mail requesting they do so. This happened twice!! Their help desk was useless -- I spent many hours on long-distance hold, only to have some clone insist on sending me their install software (as though I didn't already know how to configure ppp & the various applications). So I quit and went to Earthlink, generally pretty good service except very Linux unfriendly ("sorry, we don't support that" is their stock response). I guess I need to look at some other ISP now.
Mindspring has some SERIOUS issues with their mail relay servers and spam...
{smtp2|smtp3|smtp5}.mindspring.com are all listed by ORBS. That means sending mail through them is basically hit or miss since various sites WILL deny delivery based on that listing.
You just have to hope that one of the other relays takes your mail there, or you're screwed. They need a whole bunch of clues.
-EarthLink used to have strong ties to the Scienos. Their founder was a strong Scieno and many of their first employees were Scienos. They actively participated in the alt.religion.scientology crap that went on several years ago.
-The Scieno influence has supposedly faded and Sky, whose previous business experience was running a coffee shop is now just a director and will not be running the new company.
-As a MindSpring employee I have seen all sorts of people in the office goth pagan etc. I have never met a scieno at MindSpring. Most MindSpring people know what scienos are all about and do not like the organization.
-There was a Scieno recruiting office down the road from MindSpring until recently and several MindSpring employees have even picketed it before with the local anti-scieno-cabal.
So if there is any scieno influence at EarthLink now it will be completely gone at the new company once the MindSpring managers take over.
*obiwan*
>The PSI net and the UUNet dialups in many areas >are shared between > >ELN >MSN >Mindspring >WebTV Precisely. These are PSI POPs and UUNet POPs. The author mentioned ELNK users dialing MSPG POPs and getting confused. That's never happened.
It kills me to hear everyone whining about outbound port 25 filtering. Its just like back in the day everyone shut off their open mail relays. There was the crowd of people that got that panties all bunched up over that too. Outbound port 25 filtering needs to happen. Its the nature of the spam beast. I havent gotten spam from an Earthlink mail server in months because they have staff that watchs for spam on their mail-machins. But I have gotten it from direct delivery spam programs ran off dialups. Yeah you cant relay your own mail---- GET OVER IT! --Aaron
What makes you think they showed disregard for their customers? I'd bet both my testicles that they get F-A-R MORE complaints from their customers about spam then about how they cant use their poorly configured MTA. Filtering outbound port 25 is a VERY responsible thing for any ISP to do. It truely shows that they care about other members of the internet. outbound 25 filtering really doesnt help their member base. Just the rest of us. --Aaron
I have accounts in both. Wonder what will happen to them.
Hehehe.
Its still unrestricted. You still have an SMTP server provided to you to relay mail. They are still meeting their end of the agreement. In fact im sure there redundant Enterpise sun box's (or whatever they use) are more then capable of sending your mail. --Aaron
BTW, yes Earthlink does offer Cable and DSL connections, and now that we have merged with Mindsrping we both will offer both service. And yes, (in case you hadn't guessed), I work at earthlink so I don't really appreciate all the bashing going on. If you all want this or that from an ISP then start your own. Quit tying up these servers with whining and complaining. If you don't like something, do something to change it don't just sit there and cry to anyone who will listen, get some balls and do something about it. THat is all!
It would be great if AOL and MindLink with all their combined users were not using IE, it might actually force MS to build a standardized browser.
Does anyone know what Mindspring and Earthlink currently bundle?
Damn, I was about to say that!
People were notified- it was posted to mindspring.announce, it was on their webpage. They're not the only ISP doing this. It might upset you, but it's 'coming soon' to most major ISPs. Robbie
Didn't IBM just sell its network to AT&T?
Netcom was ok... no problems.. Merged with Mindspring.. not too please.. now merged with Earthlink.. the only ISP to skrew me over.. (Salesrep said my wife cancelled my account.. Hello. Not Married.. and still charged my credit card for 2 years..) This truely sucks. DraKKon - forgot password.. :)
Since everyone is content to talk about the negatives, I thought it might be neat to talk about some positives. MindSpring commited themselves to building out their own network so they would not have to rely as heavily on leased pops. It's very hard to get pops in some areas because of telco politics. The MindSpring network is an excellent system and stands as an example of the hard work and skill of the people that build and maintain it. MindSpring has the best news servers there are. Period. MindSpring threw parties with free food and beer in many cities and invited their customers so they could get to know MindSpring and their culture better. MindSpring has repeatedly and dramatically increased the value of their product offerings without increasing the cost. That meant more webspace for dialup and commercial customers, and more new and exciting products. MindSpring has the lowest customer churn in the industry, and the highest customer satisfaction, all while being the first ISP of its size to become ebitda positive and bottom line profitable. This merger can do nothing but good things for everyone. The talent pool at MindSpring is nothing short of phenomenal. There is plenty of love for linux and FreeBSD at MindSpring. There are many MindSpring employees involved in open source projects and user groups. To get a real idea what MindSpring stands for, you have to read the CV&B's and understand that nothing at MindSpring gets done without considering them. The CV&B's are the MindSpring culture and the biggest reason for the incredible success of MindSpring.
http://www.mindspring.net/aboutms/cvb/
I think that's all I have. Most of us that work here truly love our work and our customers. I don't expect that will change.
Well, I have been so disgusted with MindSpring since they took over SpryNet, it can only be an improvement. As a technical support professional, I can honestly say MindSpring has the most laughable "support" I have ever tried to use ... but somehow I can't picture this creating a huge improvement!
I've been a Netcom shell user since 93. They got swallowed up by Mindspring a little while ago, and we had to deal with months of cluelessness. Now there is this merger. I'm worried that Earthlink/Mindspring will be so big that they won't want to deal with maintaining the old netcom shell access anymore.
I've had Mindspring as my ISP for the past year and half, and I have to say they're better than ANY local offering I have in this area (I've tried 5). My average speed on my lowly 33.6 modem is around 3 K/sec, which I would think would be good. I do live about 15 minutes from their tech center for the entire northeast (in Harrisburg PA), but still, I don't see anything wrong with them,.
Now to the story.... Being that I live in San Jose, I have many choices in dialup numbers. Of course, the earthlink help pages only show PSInet, Level 3, and only within the last 6 months, Earthlink numbers. About two years ago, the page was chock full of UUnet numbers. Before my account was removed a month and a half ago, I would always use a UUnet number. Since I log my usage, I would spend more than half of the month on the UUnet number. As a result, I got my account canceled without warning at 11pm one night. That's right. No e-mail, no chance to retrieve my mail on the server, no chance to retrieve my webpage from earthlink servers. I was simply disconnected from my POP, and then not permitted to dial back up. The aparently did it conveniently at the same time that their customer service department closed.
So then I call in the next morning to find out what's going on with my account. When I talk to someone to ask what's going on, they rudely tell me to hold while they transfer me to their 'manager'. Their 'manager' tells me that I am an account abuser since I use phone number that aren't on their webpage. I tell them that I got these phone numbers from their webpages over two years ago. The manager promptly tells me that it is my responsibility to check the pages every so often to see what numbers are removed. In reality, I'm sure that I was removed for using only UUnet numbers. Oh well. What can I say. I pay $20 per month, and I want quality. Of the choiced I have, UUnet is the only one I can consider halfway reliable.
I don't know what you guys think, but I think that this is completely outrageous. I'm sorry, but this from an ISP is completely ridiculous. If any of you have to choose an ISP, Earthlink should NEVER even be an option. They are fascist assholes that are in it for the money, not for the customers.
"While I understand their concerns and applaud their pro-active approach towards spam, I can't condone
the penalization of the masses for the actions of a few. "
I would respectfully submit that those who wish to use smtp services other than the one provided for the account, are a subset of "the few."
I'm in Iowa City and I've never had a problem with their service that lasted more than a day. The one time I did have to call customer service, I was very pleased. Apparantly, the Netcom buyout didn't go very smoothly.
Besides, in an ISP the size of indspring/EarthLink it isn't surprising that there are people who hate it. You can't please everyone.
DUDE! You should submit this story for a Darwin Award.
Awhile back I had to search for an isp to use. To my dismay, there were very very few isps that offered unlimited service for under $20. The only one I found satisfactory was Mindspring. It was then that I found out several of the isps had merged. Mindspring had Netcom and Sprynet. And I think MCI had another smaller one too but the name escapes me. I remember having absolutely no choices. It between mindspring or earthlink. ATT and GTE weren't even offering unlimited anymore. It was pretty depressing. Now there are even less choices! I see a trend where the isps are just merging and merging toward a larger entity and I think this is a bad sign. Those looking into changing ISPs, just do a search for the major isps and you'll probably find that their services aren't as good as before. In the end, it is the consumer that suffers and it's bad because the internet is becoming more and more popular.
I'm a lowly tier one tech at Earthlink. The official policy is that we don't support Linux. But I have personally helped set up more than a few Linux systems. But then again I get everything hooked up. Linux, Win 3.X, 95,98,NT. Mac, Geo, Palm Pilots, Sega Dreamcast... Name it, I do it all... But from what I've seen, I'm an exception not the rule.
Bigger spammer and biggest pain in he ass. I have them right now. That was a _big_ mistake! I don't know knows worse. AOL or earthlink.
yes today sucks ass
How about AOL? ;-)
They always gave me free months to test out new access numbers, and were never down, and the access was darn fast for a 56K connection. But, I went with cable modems for the speed jump, which is awesome. But if Earthlink offered Cable Modems (They will be soon), i'll gladly jump back onboard with them. I don't know why.. Ive used so many ISPs and they were by far the least busy and least saturated one ive used. I got good speed from all over the world, unlike other companies.
I just didn't share Sky's vision for world domination - I could tell, even then, that he was going to tread on whoever he needed in order to be as rich as possible
Wasn't that L. Ron Hubbard's vision too?
www.xenu.net
It seems the competition between the larger, national ISPs is dwindling. Since Mindspring is now Mindspring/Netcom/Earthlink (and probably more), which doesn't leave room for much competition. I believe that local ISPs are better because you'll undoubtedly get more support, without those damn 1-800 #'s (Hold please...). Cable/DSL/High Speed Connections is the new thing, so I'm not too worried.
EarthSpring?
MindLink?
MindEarthSpringLink?
EarthMindSpringLink?
Your guess is as good as mine.
I work for Earthlink, and I can tell you that we have very strict anti-spam policies in place. Any member who spams is disusered immediately and can never get his account reactivated. That port blocking thing mentioned earlier is in effect as well. Why? To block relayers. Duh. Don't like ELN's policies? Start your own ISP. It's easy enough these days.
But I suspect the Mindspring takeover will all but end it, since it would appear that Mindspring management will be calling the shots. (Disclaimer: Yes, I'm a Mindspring employee) Yeah, now that Mindspring is in control, we will introduce our policies of goat sacrifices, skyclad tech supporters, free beer for employees, requiring at least one piercing or tattoo per employee, working by no other light than the dull glow of the monitor, and a goth-to-norm ratio of around 1:5. (You thought it was scary thinking about your data going near a Co$ machine? Try thinking about nekkid, pierced, tattooed, beer drinking, goth tech supporters taking your calls in the dark!)
While it is possible that some of the older dialups (namely PSI) may have been shared between two separate contracts with a third-party vendor, there has NEVER been an Earthlink login on a MindSpring modem, or vice versa. At least, not so long as I can remember. And if it was that far back, we would have been too busy trying to slash each others throats. (Remember the anti-MindSpring Earthlink ads?)
I can't remember the last time I received mail from them and I'm a subscriber!! Earthlink is definitely a very good provider. Connections are fast and the price is right. I just wish my phone lines were better in my area :(
You HAVE TO use a smart mailer option (DS) in sendmail to point to their mail server.
Um... The PSI net and the UUNet dialups in many areas are shared between
ELN
MSN
Mindspring
WebTV
...many others...
I am glad to hear that a representative of this service provider would base himself on what somebody else said.
(DISCLAIMER: The preceding does not neccessarity reflect the views or opinions of Netcom/Mindspring)
Mindless mindspillage from a mindspringer:
You all complain too much.
I work for Netcom/Mindspring. Our service is fine, sure we have our flaws but who doesn't. Computers aren't exactly trustworthy.
I listen to customers everyday that whine about something new and how they can't do it. User flaw apparently does not exist in their minds but they're real good at self-righteous justification. I never get mad, i always happy to help out a person even though they are pissing mad for apparently no reason other than the fact that they cant get what they want immediately. Even though we are literraly always panicing to bloody hell to get things right and quick. They also have this thing where they think that sitting on the phone for 2 hours complaining about how bad the service is, is going to fix any problems. They like to assume that we sit around in lounge chairs and roll around on astroturf in our underwear while taking fone calls drunk off our asses and not caring about anyone just to piss them off.
Everybody has been too dependant on technology and computers and even now, the internet. Which really makes me wonder what would happen if some big natural disaster hit and the whole internet backbone was destroyed, if we would commit suicide and back ourselves up on a tape drive and hope that the next generation of computer turds would have a bigger, better, faster, internet, with no busy signals for unlimited uninterrupted perfect 56k everyday all the time connections and no SPAM with *all* ports available for usage, then find out a way to restore us from backup so we could abuse these services and bring us back to where we are today.
It seems like everybody is afraid of big companies. They do not however realize that big companys are made of massive amounts of people--therefore a large diverse variety of brains combined to form a whole. You cannot say "mindspring sucks cuz they really suck". Its probably the bad service you got from the one person that helped you (which is highly unlikely). Mindspring and other isp's have feelings too. The general rule is that if you hit a person they'll hit you back, unless they're not allowed to in which case they'll just be a very unhappy person. And it's not fun doing things for people when you're unhappy right? Customers are oddly really mean when they need something, but really nice when they get what they want, which really puzzles me because isnt it supposed to be the other way around?
Sure you can go with a local isp and get one of the few techies that know how to use a mac real well. But to tell you the truth, us mindspringers seem to be pretty damn smart for a bunch of "dumbassed big internet company provider type people".. and if for some odd reason we dont know the answer, theres a whole lot of other people we can refer to, to get answers. We frown upon customer disattisfaction--its because we love you.
All I guess I'm saying is that, complaining.. anywhere.. does not get you nowhere. And if we have done you wrong, then do us right and tell us what we did wrong and we'll be happy to do what we can to make you a better person. Computers *DO* make mistakes. And we are here to help you fix it.
Just to clerify, we are _MERGING_ with earthlink, not to be mistaken for taken over, though its still going to be refered to as earthlink oddly enough.
Maybe im just tired and delirious from a long hard day of making people happy and feeling good about themselves.
The cup of water is half full. Be Happy.
I just moved from Mindspring to Earthlink a month ago, cause they had a crappy commection here where I live. Oh poop, they're FOLLOWING ME !!!!
ya I switched because of this also.. assholes changed that policy on my without informing me, so my webserver email stopped working one day. When I finally emailed them about it, and learned that they were blocking it, well, I promptly informed them I was switching and WHY. I use Earthlink now, and I wonder if that policy is going to jump to earthlink, if so... time to move ISP's....
see subject line
2nd largest ISP and 1st largest spammer.
... one of the upper level support techs who knows first-hand what's going on:
They don't cancel the account, generally. They cancel you in the RADIUS server that UUnet checks. In other words, you cannot log in to a UUnet number, but you can log in to PSInet, Earthlink, Level 3 or even Sprint.
Admittedly, with any large company you get mistakes. In theory, no one gets cancelled for UUnet unless they have other local numbers. It is supposed to be a network migration. Sometimes..it doesn't work. And sometimes people get cancelled (all the way) by mistake. But that's a completely unrelated issue to the UUnet stuff.
I just want to set the record straight. Let's hope this Post Anonymously checkbox works.
One of the things that's always impressed me about Mindspring is the quality of their newsfeed, both in terms of propagation (i.e. all the parts of a post tend to get there) and retention (upwards of a week, even in alt.binaries.*). For $20/month, Mindspring beats the pants off of any of the commercial news services. Next to no spam in the text hierarchies, news.admin.net-abuse.email holds up remarkably well even during periods of heavy DipSlime attacks, and virtually no spam, even in the alt.binaries.mp3.* hierarchy. I can quickly scan through the headers, pick the songs I want, and let cron and a little bit of perl take care of the dirty work during off-peak hours.
Any ELN users care to comment on the quality of Earthlink's NNTP feed, both in text and binary hierarchies? How about any Netcom users - have you noticed a change, for better or worse, in news quality since Mindspring bought Netcom?
Or do these merger/takeovers generally affect only the corporate level, but leave the network largely intact? (i.e. Have Netcom customers kept using *.netcom.com servers, and can I expect that Mindspring customers will keep using *.mindspring.com servers, and Earthlink customers will keep using *.earthlink.net servers?)
(If any Mindspring execs are reading this - have someone buy your news admin team a case of beer. They've earned it, and I've referred several customers to Mindspring largely on the quality of its newsfeed. Anyone with sufficient cash can build an ISP to let people surf the web. A quality newsfeed, on the other hand, is something not everyone can offer. It scales nicely - one big disk farm and a few people to run it can serve a lot of customers - and it's a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition.)
Im surprised to read all the bad feelings towards mindspring, I have been using them for 2+ years w/o problem. Occasionally POPs get busy, but it is usually remedied reasonably quickly. The few times I have called them they have been pleasant, but I dont remember the hold times. Im wondering if my experiences have been so different then everyone elses because Im in atlanta (where mindspring is based I believe). disclaimer: I dont work for or represent mindspring.
is an Online Service Provider, not an Internet
Service Provider.
AFAIK, AOL does not provide the user with an IP address when they log in. An ISP provides the
Internet, of which an IP addy is an important part.
Of course, if I'm wrong in this, I'm just a big
windbag:)
I shoulda gone to work for Mindspring when they
tried to recruit me in '95.
--------------------------
Your Favorite OS Sucks.
^D
Just Sky and I, sitting in a dumpy little office on Los Feliz Blvd, with 10 modems on a cheap metal shelf we got from a liquidation sale, and a couple of Sun workstations.
:)
Man, EarthLink has changed a lot since those days. I worked with Sky to get the whole thing started, and in fact it was my casual suggestion that he start an ISP before writing Internet-integration software that got the whole thing going... He'd come to me to develop what he'd called "Internet Navigator", which was basically his concept of having everything (mail, telnet, gopher, ftp clients) all bundled together to work as one package.
The idea being that all of it worked well for the end user - in those days, things were very much piece-meal. Also, this was in the Mosaic v0.9 days - MCOM wasn't even around yet.
One night over dinner I told him that before he got into trying to write a do-it-all Internet package, he ought to work out what was needed on the ISP end of things first.
And so he asked for my help, I quit my job, he secured some funding from some smart VC's, and we opened up shop... I was one of the two original founders, but since I left after 6 months and disassociated myself with ELN, I guess I don't count...
I just didn't share Sky's vision for world domination - I could tell, even then, that he was going to tread on whoever he needed in order to be as rich as possible, and I guess that's what's happened over the years. That's the way money works, I guess.
Still, its interesting to have been part of EarthLinks primordial history, and to have watched it all grow into a mega-corp so fast.
And even more amusing is the fact that they're now merging with Mindspring - in those days, Sky used to quiver with fear over ISP's like that (Primenet was the other major competitor for the SoCal area).
I wish all my old EarthLink friends best of luck with this merger. You guys that have stuck through everything that's gone on over at ELN deserve whatever you get out of this MindSpring deal...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I was using netcom for years w/ my Linux box & ppp with no problems. Now, after switching to mindspring/netcom, I all of a sudden can't send email with xfmail. Getting mail, no problem, sending mail....well all I get is operation not permitted or some such blather. No change on my config..... Maybe it's time to go local.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
I don't know who would be a good choice for a national ISP, but if I wanted an international ISP, I'd go with IBM. (check out www.ibm.net -- they have access numbers everywhere!) I'm sure they fairly well blanket the US as well.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm wondering if the ISP situation will eventually turn into the same type of situation when Bell was mutilated into many small companies after. I KNOW this is not the same situation, due to the fact that you can change ISP's pretty much at will, but with newer technologies coming in, perhaps several may find some better ones that they 'lock in' for themselves, simular to cable modem access..
Ideas? Comments?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
If it's in email or real mail it's an announcement. And only then if it's spelled out clearly and in readable text. Any other kind of announcement is nice, but honestly, what's the last time you checked your ISP's home page?
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
My other utilities send me real mail when they change things. Somehow they can deal with the customer service spikes. Now granted these messages are intentionally small print and cryptic so maybe that's the answer.
In any case, most ISPs already send out software upgrades when available. That certainly causes a customer service spike.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Apparently the "abuse me" option.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Mindspring is a disease for ISPs.
Now, with that off my back, I can add to the cheer that Netcom subscribers feel. I have had an account with them since 1996, and I felt that they had one of the more dependable services around. Granted there are other services which offered more web space or phone numbers, and granted you paid a little more for Netcom, but they maintained their equipment and things just worked. Since the buy-out, this has no longer been the case. Busy signals are more prevalent, the web page (which used to be fairly easy to navigate) has gone under several changes making it more difficult to find the access numbers (and other member services), and the system just feels slower. I never had problems until the merge.
I miss my cable modem; at least when it was on the fritz, it was still sending stuff over at T1 speeds.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
MindSpring offers cable modem service in some cities. They're about to roll out ADSL service in the next few weeks.
I see ISPs as a commodity. In '92-'93 your ISP really mattered. There were lots of ISPs floating around out there. Many were run by clueless people who were out for a fast buck. Their users were plagued with spotty service, lost email, busy signals, etc.
Nowadays it really doesn't matter what ISP you use. As far as I'm concerned, an ISP is something that gives you IP connectivity. It doesn't matter who I get it from. If I get busy signals or poor connections to my ISP, I can go elsewhere. I can get an email alias or a webmail account so my address won't change when I move around.
The only time an ISP really matters is if you need a static IP (which are hard to come by these days) or some other special service that you can easily get from a small local ISP.
Robbie
-- Comtrends!
I understand that you'd like ISPs to send out a postcard or an email to every user whenever they make a change, but that's not practical..
Let's look at what would happen.
1) MindSpring sends out a postcard or an email to every customer reading:
-----------------------------------------------
| Attention Customers: As of the first of next |
| month we will be blocking outgoing TCP |
| connections on port 25. You will need to add |
| mail.mindspring.com as a smarthost in your |
| MTA configuration to continue to send outgoing |
| mail. |
-----------------------------------------------
2) Now, I don't know how many of you have worked at an ISP before, and I don't know how many of you have ever had to deal with your average ISP user, but out of the million-or-so customers MS has, let's estimate that a full 90% of their customers are people without the knowledge to know what port 25 is, what an MTA is, etc. Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of people getting these notices and panicing? Tech support queues would shoot through the roof as support engineers had to explain in great detail to customers that the change doesn't affect them at all.
3) Another large percentage of users would get ticked off that they're getting a steady stream of emails and postcards from MindSpring announcing every change of service.
MindSpring tells users that important announcements will be posted on their web page and in mindspring.announce. If you don't want to read it, than that's your problem, but it's there in the account information you got in the mail when you signed up. If you want to get an email when something changes, then use URL Minder or something to monitor the news webpage and email you when something changes.
Robbie
-- Comtrends!
Holy cow. I had forgotten about the nudie pics.. :-) Robbie (wonder if Greenman reads slashdot? Hi Green!)
-- Comtrends!
Yes, but reasonable admins don't use ORBS anyway. ORBS has a history of unreasonableness and blocking mail servers out of spite (blocking them because the ORBS admins didn't like the person running them, not because they were a relay).
More importantly, the MindSpring dialup IP ranges are listed in the DUL, so many, many mail servers won't accept mail from people on dialup connections anyway (unless you relay through your ISP's mail server).
MindSpring's engineering staff has more clue than
most other ISPs combined..
Robbie
-- Comtrends!
Tom probably can't make exceptions. AFAIK, the port blocking is done on a network wide basis in the core routers.
I have several friends that are relaying mail outside of MindSpring using another server that has it's MTA running on an off port. I imagine you could also use QMTP if you're running Qmail to relay to an external system.
Really, using MindSpring's server as a relay point makes the most sense. If your message can't be delivered on the first try, MindSpring's server can keep trying to deliver it while your home system is disconnected. Besides, many mail systems won't accept mail directly from servers that live on an ISP's dialup network if they're using the DUL.
Many administrators (not all of which are active in the anti-spam community can't find a reason to ever accept mail from a dialup IP address and will drop it. I've seen mail bounces because of that before.
I'd bet that greater than 98% of all mail coming direct from ISP dialup IP ranges is spam. It's the only way spammers can really spam effectively anymore- most ISPs have monitors on their mail servers that alert them if someone is sending more than, say, 1000 messages a minute or something like that. Spam software is now getting around that by sending the mail directly from the dialup system.
Until you've worked at an ISP and had to fight spammers firsthand you'll never really understand this. As annoying as port 25 blocking is, it's the 'wave of the future' for ISPs (some backbone providers even block port 25 from all hosts except their customer's mail servers!)
You may not like it. It might piss you off. But that's the way it is. Welcome to the modern Internet, where spamming a**holes are causing us more and more inconveniences every day.
Robbie
-- Comtrends!
ORBS is a joke. The RBL/MAPS and DUL are the blacklists most people use. If you're trying to send mail to someone who's ISP is using ORBS, they're missing out on LOTS of legitimate email.
For example, smtp2|smtp3|smtp5 aren't open relays.
So why are they listed in ORBS? ORBS is not very well administered and has many legitimate systems listed for no other reason than ORBS doesn't like someone at the site that's being blocked.
It's a very customer oriented policy. They're keeping spammers from abusing the network.
Robbie
-- Comtrends!
They told me that I was cancelled for either multilinking or logging in twice... Cancelled end of July. same scenario...
Luckily for me, that led to a search for a new ISP, and found a local cable co that actually had a deal for 64k cable access for $25.00/month...
The 1000kdown/128kup service was "only" $50.00; which was only $8/month more expensive than ELN+phone line costs for second line...
Moving was not a big problem since all my "public" mail went to my iname.com address, and I kept a web space on a third party server....
Havnt looked back...
--
Time is on my side
Just be sure not to use MLPPP with their services... They will disconnect your account as a "Level A" offence... In the same category as Spam and mailboming...
Their system allows the connection.... (at least on the UUNet pops in some areas), and even though their AUP states one connection PER MACHINE, they still consider it as having multiple users with the same account....
--
Time is on my side
Is Earthlink the ISP that was started by Scientologists, or am I confusing it with another one? Can anyone refresh my failing memory or correct me on this? Any good links?
Is Earthlink still in the hands of the Co$, or have they removed that taint from their hands? I don't want my data going anywhere near a machine that's owned by the RonBots.
Mindspring's DSL rollout *does* include NT compatible software. And yes, they *will* support *nix/*BSD OS's. However, if you're on the latter, you have to get your NIC working first. ;)
@}--`--
The spokeswoman did not immediately know what the total size of the board will be, nor its composition.
Okay, that's 3 things she didn't know, so what exactly DID the spokeswoman know that wasn't offered in the press release? I think they'd hire better PR people. Popping off a merger with no information from the company's Spokesperson doesn't seem very responsible.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Mindspring has a schedule for ADSL rollout in a few cities this fall. (Atlanta, SF, Charlotte, among others, I believe) $50/mo 1.5Mbdown 256Kb up.
I'm in the same boat here.
...replace my monitor unnecessarily.
I dumped Earthstink as well, after only about a month and a half of pure hell. Earthlink has been the Satan of online services. Before that, I thought I knew what bad internet service was like from hopping my way through about a dozen of them, but I'd only experienced poor to mediocre service before Earthlink. Earthlink showed me new depths of frustration, and almost led to me to, um,
Not only would I get busy signals all the time, the only reliable thing about Earthlink was that I could count on the connection to go comatose after somewhere between 5 and 90 minutes into the dialup. Usually much closer to the 5 minute mark.
When I say comatose, I mean dead as a doornail, in all ways, except that connection would still be there. It wouldn't pass any meaningful data (not even a ping), but dammit, once comatose, it wouldn't drop your call, either!
It was always either that, or a random disconnect in the 15-40 minute range. Never both. And their news server sucked, too. This was less a year ago.
Then I switched to Mindspring, with access in all the cities I travel to.
Since then, I have never (not even once) heard a busy signal, and I've not had any connections go comatose on me, either. My connections stay connected. Every time I leave it up overnight when I go to bed, it's there when I get up, happily churning off data in the morning.
Further, the news server has been quite excellent. This is coming from an avid newsgroup user. If it weren't for Usenet, I probably would have went straight back to Compuserve when I first got on the net about 5 years ago.
Now I realize that no service is great on all POPs, but for the "rust belt" area that I travel, it really has been this good. I've never needed tech support other than to ask a pointy question or two of a senior tech (whom I always engage before asking, so as not to confuse the front-line droids), so I don't know about that part.
Now this. The worst internet service I've ever had is merging with the only one that I've ever been satisfied with...
The only bright spot? I'll have cable modem service here in less than 3 months, and could get by with NetZero, or a minimalist account with AOL (eeeww) or something like that for travel.
Here's hoping that Mindspring/Earthlink doesn't suck for all of those out there who don't have many options. But incompetence is almost always like a contagious disease, and I'm pretty sure that Earthlink will have Mindspring totally screwed up within 6 months.
Best regards,
Michael.
Wow, nudie pictures in the offices? Sounds like an interesting workplace.
Scientologists are pretty much jackbooted thugs, but from reading his response to the Scientology crisis on Earthlink, I think he's a decent guy. I thought he expressed the case for his service quite well.
D
----
Wow, nudie pictures in the offices? Sounds like an interesting workplace.
The Church of Scientology organization is more or less a bunch of jackbooted thugs, but many individual Scientologists are fine people. From reading his response to the Scientology crisis on Earthlink, I think he's a decent guy. I thought he expressed the case for his service quite well.
D
PS If there were two copies of this message posted, this is the one that best expresses my opinion.
----
Gosh, I remember my Netcom shell account - I was dhd in 1994 - 1997 or thereabouts. I don't think I even cancelled it - they just stopped billing for it one day and I didn't bother reinstating it.
What I remember the most was everyone's complaints about terrible service. The systems seemed to be holding together through glue and bailing wire. System freezes were common. But there was always the bizarre L.Detweiler (tmp@netcom.com) to make things just bizarre enough to be real - at least until they finally deleted his account.
It reminds me of the curious maxim that communities online are best created by adversity. Facing common problems, having the Netcom administration as a common enemy, it felt almost like home.
Pity nothing like that exists anymore.
D
----
I think if you visit my ancient anti-Scientology pages at http://www.amazing.com/scientology/ , there are a few tidbits on that subject. Sky Dayton went to a Scientology-based public school, and a number of Scientologists apparently infiltrated management. Earthlink was a haven for Scientologist spammers (they tried overwhelming the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup with cheesy pro-CoS material, but I think it did them more harm than good). Eventually, though, they had to kick off the spammers because it was damaging their reputation as a service.
About a year ago, someone I know who worked there said the Scientology connection was still alive and well. However, as I said in another response, I think the Earthlink connection will kill that off. We can only hope.
D
----
someone who worked for Earthlink, I would think this is a good thing, most customers means more and more money. I don't work for Earthlink, I'm one of their customers and I think this is really shitty. This means more people sucking bandwidth on my cable modem and taking up the dialup modems. The only reason I cant see that Mindspring and Earthlink would merge is to stop confusing people when they end up on a Mindspring domain, the two companies have been borrowing each other's dialups for years now. Eh oh well, I'm just complaining.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Hrmm... Regarding the BCC limitation, this is either a mail client problem or some one-time misconfiguration. We (EarthLink) don't limit the BCC (RCPT TO), it would PO too many people (namely me).
faced with s similar dilema when my university shell account expired, i found it impossible to locate a *decent* isp that offered shell access(the only one around here that did only had 33.6 dialups and was $27 a month) the best solution i came up with was to get a dialup account with whoever and then for $4 a month get a shell account at ultrashell.org, or is it .net?
I was a Netcom customer too, and although they weren't super, they had really good deals on webhosting for a company that wasn't running out of someone's garage. When they were bought by Mindspring, they stopped billing me for 4 months and then sent me 4 months of bills at once, at their new higher prices (although they sent me an email saying that as part of the buyout, they promised they would retain my same webhosting rates. Oh yeah, and the two other "pointer" domain names I had got screwed up in the process. Now we're merging with Earthlink? I know there's some adjustments that you have to deal with in mergers, but to have this come right after I dealing with the Netcom/Mindspring thing is like pingpong. Maybe I'll do what my friend did and just get DSL...
Comparing my experiences across several ISPs including small local and big national, I find Earthlink to be pretty good. They actually put a lot of effort into blocking it, catching some customer heat for restricting SMTP servers to trusted IP blocks and having a Usenet back-off trick that makes things go inanely slow if you spam.
... but the way to avoid that isn't quite clear.
Oh, yes, once upon a time they were the worst. Just ask them and they'll tell you. But that isn't the case anymore. They still get the hit-and-run people. Buy account, spam a lot, lose account an hour later after sending a load of messages
DISCLAIMER: I do work there now, in a capacity where I talk to the network operations people a lot, so I have a much clearer but perhaps emotionally bent view of internal spam-fighting than most.
I have yet to see one person give a legitmate explanation of how port 25 blocking prevents them from doing anything other than spamming.
By the nature of SMTP, it makes no difference which server you relay through. It certainly does not prevent you from picking up mail from other accounts (via POP, IMAP, or whatever), and it does not prevent you from setting whatever "From:" address you want.
If you are concerned about security, you shouldn't be using plain SMTP anyway. You should be setting up a VPN or some other encrypted tunnel which certainly wouldn't be on port 25.
There are also times when, to portray a more professional look, you don't WANT mail being routed through your ISP, rather you want mail being routed through your own server.
That doesn't even come close to qualifying as a legitimate reason for not having port 25 blocking because 1) All decent SMTP servers are going to mark your mail with the dialup ip address anyway; and 2) Anyone who looks into mail headers would certainly be knowledgable enough to realize the necessity of having ISPs involved in mail transmission.
Saying that the only people who use mail servers other than their own ISPs are spammers is simply wrong and asking for a "legitimate" reason does not negate the fact that I'm paying for unrestricted access. That is reason enough in my opinion.
I never said that only spammers use other mail servers. I said there is no reason why people other than spammers need to use other mail servers.
If the ISP calls their access unrestriced, then does port 25 blocking without telling anyone, then yes, they have an ethics problem with their advertising. However, I don't see any technical problem with their service.
I just decided to leave Earthlink, here's why:
I just had ADSL installed on Tuesday, Earthlink is my ISP and PacBell takes care of the DSL equipment.
First problem is that Earthlink does not offer static IP's for DSL. They use dynamic addressing and some sort of proprietary software to set up your connection so what it amounts to is basically "dial up" DSL. When you want on you bring up the dialog box and click Connect, when you're done you Disconnect.
Second problem, for me anyway, is that their install software is not available (dons flameproof suit) for NT. Not for 2 to 3 months, so you must be running Win95 or 98 (possibly Mac also but not sure). As for Linux support, don't even think about it.
I'm not sure if the merger with Mindspring will change this policy or not, but for now Earthlink is out.
I left Earthlink a year ago and switched to Mindspring, mainly because I kept getting busy signals 90% of the time. Now it appears I'll have the worst of both worlds. Oh well, I'll be switching to ADSL soon anyway.
Shane H.
Shane
Additionally, the ten bones a month has kept my email address the same for the last few years.
Besides that, I am an Illuminati Online member. How cool is that?
Check em out.
Lotek---
Yea, I'll turn the lights off if you don't.
I'm still a shell user on netcom. When I want that fancy web stuff, I run slirp. If the shell accounts all go away now that Earthlink is here, at least I'll still have shell accounts at home on my Linux boxen any time I want. Maybe, when I need a new provider, I'll even see if DSL is finally available in my neighborhod.
Actually, given Earthlink's origins, wouldn't "MindHead" be a more appropriate name?
For the record, I did contact support via online chat and the tech I spoke with was not very familiar with the policy. When I asked where it had been posted online he had to go ask someone. After a 15 minute wait, he sent me to a URL buried deep in the knowledge base.
How can you hold your customers to an expectation of knowledge that your own employees don't even possess?
Brewer sends out an email to EVERY Mindspring member almost monthly, how hard would it have been to mention it in that? Word it so that the non-techies don't even understand it and don't worry but the people who DO understand it can be informed and make decisions accordingly?
I believe that they have forgotten, or maybe outgrown some of them, but CV&B #5 still holds true: We will preserve and protect our company's resources with at least the same vigilance with which we protect our own personal resources.
Weren't the CV&B's numbered by priority with much of the first four being customer oriented? I guess you're right, it does seem that Mindspring is only looking out for Mindspring at this point.
Yeah, I got the "spam prevention" explanation when I asked about this. While I understand their concerns and applaud their pro-active approach towards spam, I can't condone the penalization of the masses for the actions of a few.
... I'll take the spam.
The fact that no one was notified of this change also makes it stick in my craw.
I'm with you, I'm all for no more spam, but if the cost is my freedom to send email through more than one server
Not only has the service gone to the crapper for the 4 years I've been with Mindspring, their policies suck now too. Like their policy to block ALL port 25 traffic to all servers other than smtp.mindspring.com which means you can't send mail thru ANY server other than Mindspring's.
... Murphy's Law, the bigger they get ... the more they suck.
They still advertise "unrestricted" net access but that's pretty damn restrictive if you ask me.
I guess this is to be exptected tho
.. Unless someone else has any suggestions?
Yah. Get a local ISP. The kind where everyone knows the first name of the guy in charge. The kind of ISP where a call to the service department means you can hear dogs barking in the background and the resident geek's wife watching soap operas in the living room.
And oh yah - usually the service is cheaper and they support Linux. Hell, most locals run ON Linux.
Mine uses FreeBSD, tho. Sue me.
-Lx?
I'll probably get shot for saying this, but when I was doing nation-wide field support for my company, I was using MSN [The only reason I stopped using MSN was because I got DSL]. I never had a problem with their service, and once the account is initially set-up with their software [on Windoze 9x of course] it was no problem setting up a normal PPP connection for them on any computer [tested with MacOS, BeOS, Linux, NT].
Of course, their tech-support was clueless when it came to other OS's, even to the point of not knowing that their supposed to say that MSN won't work with non-Windows OS's, but if you generally know what you're doing,and have access to 1 windoze box for setup and account maintenence [and looking up local #'s when you travel], then MSN is nice [or was for me]. I never had problems with busy signals at home [San Jose] and rarely got busy signals when on the road. The only place I ever had busy-signal problems was in Odessa, Tx [middle of nowhere] which uses the same UUNET dialup for AOL, MSN, and any other ISP's that use UUNET POPs.[I'm assuming Earthlink and Mindspring fall into that category]
Ender
Nothing to see here
Dude, you are in the best possible location in the world when it comes to ISP choices. I can't believe that you put up with an ISP run by the criminal nut-cult known as Scientology.
Off the top of my head, you can go with idiom.com (a small, friendly ISP based in berkeley: I use them myself, and they're great!), Best.net, Sirius.com, scruze.net, and there must be at least a dozen others with local dial-ins you can get to.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Ever since Mindspring gobbled up my ISP, I've had nothing but trouble. Luckily, I have DSL now. I wouldn't recommend that anyone have anything to do with Mindspring. And any Earthlink customers should leave while they still can. Mindspring made me wait on hold for 30 minutes(!!!) to cancel my account. That's the only way they said they allowed cancellations.
Sorry I don't have any alternitive suggestions (other than a local ISP), but I'd strongly recommend NOT having anything to do with Mindspring. They've caused me more trouble than I care to think about.
I can't say anything either way about the Mindspring Engineering people. But the customer service department needs to be hit by a couple times by a clue-by-four. Especially the billing department. I never had any problems with either one relating to the actual service (though I may have had a few less busy signals once Mindspring took over). But man, my experiences with the customer service department has soured the whole thing for me.
Also, a disclamer: Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm sure Mindspring has a wonderful engineering department.
"...We have not taken a position of refusing to make exceptions overall"
Yeah, the way Mindspring rolled out the port-25-blocking was pretty lame, and Tom, by virtue of his position, sounds like he had to choose his words carefully in that post, but it sounds to me like he's willing to listen. Tom's got plenty of clue.
On a technical level - while the following idea won't solve the case where you're relaying through a server for which you have authorization to relay but don't have administrative access... if you do own the server through which you're relaying, I'd imagine you could have it listen for SMTP traffic on a port other than port 25. Your outbound mail goes to your "other relay" via this other port. Or you can just relay outbound mail through smtp.mindspring.com, and fetch your incoming mail via POP. (Disclaimer: I haven't given any of these schemes because I haven't had the need to relay outside of Mindspring's network. Anyone who has put thought into this issue, please post your thoughts and/or solution... sounds like it's in demand!)
I just got a free Earthlink coaster, er I mean CD in the mail this week. I guess they don't cleanse their mail lists against their customer base since I've had an earthlink account for about 2 years. The CD had Netscape 4.04 and IE 5 - but they encourage you to install IE at every opportunity.
BTW - I examine the headers of every SPAM I get - I can only remember seeing one that originated from Earthlink. I sent it to them and they responded that his account had been shut down.
Also, their mail servers automatically ignore all BCC's after the 15th address, which is a pain when I need to blast something out to 30 odd friends, but does make it damn hard to use their servers to relay SPAM.
I was just trying to figure out who to go with as a national ISP, Earthlink or Mindspring. Guess I don't have to worry about that now.
.. Unless someone else has any suggestions?
--
Donald Roeber
Donald Roeber
Generating 2048 Bits of Randomness...
Personally, I prefer the local ISPs to the very large ones. The bigger the company the longer you wait on hold. My local guy is fast, friendly, available, offers Unix shell accounts, and most of all, flexible. Besides that, if I get really pissed off at them for any reason, I can drive down to the office and make a big scene. Now that's service! Aren't the big ISPs going to become less and less relevant as we move to the broadband services? Do either Mindspring or Earthstink offer DSL? I'm pretty sure they wouldn't offer cable modem service. Right?
I wonder how the eng scene is looking right now...
If someone gets caught spamming (mail or news), they can be billed upwards of $200.
A few years ago, EarthLink and a few other ISPs signed on to lease POPs from UUNet. UUNet then created the "dial access" infrastructure.
The way it is currently, EarthLink's POP system is like this: If you live in California, you can dial into EarthLink POPs. Most or all calls are routed from the telcos to ELN'S HQ in Pasadena and answered by hardware there. If the nearest ELN POP is congested, you can also use a UUNet, UUNet-DA (their newer "dial access" POPs), PSINet, Level3 or Sprint POP, depending on what's locally available. If you live outside California, the only difference is that there are no ELN POPs.
So really, there isn't any shame in getting MSN, because what you're really getting is UUNet or UUNet-DA. All you need is a dialup number and DNS and mail settings. It will work just like with any other ISP.
Of course, if you get EarthLink, you get more than just UUNet and UUNet-DA. This is beneficial because even though UUNet POPs are great, there are a few dodgy modems out there that just won't talk to them for anything. A common tech support fix (after settings have been verified and the POP itself tested) is to switch a subscriber to a POP on a different backbone (e.g. they were using UUNet, move them to PSI). This actually works from time to time.
The other big change was that their PPP usernames changed from (for example) 0234DJ@SIA to ELN/0234DJ. That caused some confusion, but all Sprint customers were sent a CD that converted their settings for them. Additionally, the ABC@SIA -> ELN/ABC change didn't take place immediately on all POPs - for many dialup numbers, you could get in either way for a few months.
ELN's policy is that if you dial up twice at the same time, it's the same as having two computers dialing up at the same time. It uses the same amount of resources, e.g. ELN has to pay for two connections. If you're an ISDN customer, it's different; you can go dual-channel if you wish. Of course, you eat up your alotted time twice as fast. (It doesn't always work, though, because the way the technology works right now, you have to hit two ISDN TAs that are in the same chassis to go dual-channel; if you hit TAs in two separate chassis, you won't get it.)
Yeah, that's them. I work for MSPG and got this in an email today: >2. Church of Scientology principles are deeply ingrained in Earthlink's >organization. Sky Dayton is a practicing member of Scientology. However in all the time I've known him it has never come up, or manifested itself in any way. When he started the company, several of the early hires at Earthlink were his friends, some of whom were also Scientologists. Garry Betty is not a Scientologist, and the company in no way espouses any particular belief as a company. You will assuredly find many more Protestants, Catholics, and Jews at EarthLink than Scientologists, and no corporate culture ingrained with anything but healthy diversity. As I recall, in the early days of MindSpring we seemed to have an undue number of Pagans on our early staff (recall Greenman and company). Now we were in no way ingrained as a company with Pagan beliefs (even if naked pictures were being taken in the offices). At MindSpring, we pride ourselves on diversity- it's about time we got a few Scientologists in the mix (and any we already have here out of the closet.) The MindSpring diversity motto is "a cage for every animal in the zoo". Welcome to the new animals.
Remus, I often tell people that, given the choice between something like a cablemodem on my end and
/. readers, I would not worry about the shell accounts going away any time soon. MindSpring is not known for doing things that
a saturated network at the provider's, and a
28.8 dialup to a unix host which is on a fat pipe,
I'll take dialup every time. Because I can move data from the network-at-large to my shell very,
very fast by comparison to any low-cost broadband.
Also, if you would compare the sheer throughput of
say, Zmodem, to say, FTP, you will see that the old tech has some perks.
I should probably mention that I am a former Netcom, MindSpring, and I suppose soon-to-be Earthlink employee. And I've been a Netcom shell account user since 1994.
I mention the value of the shell accounts every chance I get. I cannot speak for the company but just between you and me and the 10E9
other
generate widespread customer dissatisfaction, and
everybody who'd consider such a thing knows what
kind of roasting it would get us.
However, it's not written in stone that it shall be SunOS4 forever.
How do you feel about Digital?
PS: I repeat, I don't speak for MindSpring or EarthLink or anybody else but me.
PPS: I'm just a little worker bee, so don't
send me a bunch of questions! I don't know either.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
i went from having half way descent service as a netcom customer to be a second class citizen of the mindspring empire ... now what?? am i do be a non person as a part of this new juggernaught?? might as well get an aol account. think those aol disks im using to prop up the short leg of the kitchen table are still any good??
use Signature::Witty;
I just felt a need to chuckle, and a good way to do that is to make fun of oneself publically. :)
I've been a Netcom shell user for almost 6 years. I got on the internet well before this multimedia-access 'fad', and just as NCSA was debuting some unlikely scientific tool called Mosaic to browse something that didn't exist yet called the World Wide Web. My shell account has served me through flamewars, mailbombings, death threats, linx searches, gopher queries, and lately convoluted telnet sessions and downloads.
Why the hell am I still here? :)
I moved away from my Netcom POP in 98, turning my major presence on the net into a telnet-only wrestling match for productivity. Mindspring bought us out, making the ever-present worries that shell account were about to become extinct a real danger. Now Earthlink wades in, merging with Mindspring in what -- to a shell user -- might best be described as an end-of-the-world safeword-optional orgy on a bed of leather and stock options. The chance of Earthlink maintaining shell accounts is miniscule. We've gone from being the technocapable rulers of the internet to being an unwanted red-haired step-stepchild who is being sent to an ever-shrinking corner.
Yes, I'm enamored of the pseudonym 'Remus Shepherd', and the simple address remus@netcom.com is a nugget of gold nowadays. But even this nerdish dinosaur can make out the writing on the wall by now. There must be shell accounts out there somewhere, and for my purposes they're still superior to anything that has the potential to display a banner ad. Time to put my data into a carpetbag, and surf into a new home.
Oh I'm staying here, of course. Too stubborn not to. I will deactivate my shell account when Earthlink turns off the telnet access to it...not one second before. I may or may not use the account as much, but I'll be here until the network crashes down around me and every power cord is yanked free. $20 per month is a pittance...we're talking sentimentalism, here. Not to mention the best damn productivity tool on the net, even if 'modern' ISPs decry it as ancient and unweildy. They can't even keep their companies from being bought out in rapid succession -- what do they really know? :)
Just in case I'm not the last one to go -- will someone please remember to turn off the lights? :)
Remus Shepherd (remus@netcom.com)
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
This bizarre thing about EarthLink is that they won one of the first ISP vs. spammer court battles in 1997 against Cyber Promotions. Maybe they got tired of going to court? I don't receive much spam coming from an EL address, but your mileage obviously varies. Most of the spam I get comes from my Web hosting provider's "partners," not any particular set of ISP accounts.
"...the 2nd largest ISP in the country."?
Hmmmm, interesting. I wonder how many
I don't mean to complain - I'm just having a bad day
Party Time: Excellent
"Just be sure not to use MLPPP with their services... They will disconnect your account as a "Level A" offence... In the same category as Spam and mailboming... " This is not true. If you would like more info, contact me. Rob Biggs MindSpring Support Phoenix biggsrob@mindspring.net
(Disclaimer- I no longer work at MindSpring)
It took me a while to figure out what was going on with the merger- I hadn't seen a real merger before. Most other 'mergers' are one company buying out another one. This is the real thing- they're forming a new company and then merging both of the existing ones into it.
From MindSpring's press release, it looks like things go like this: MindSpring changes it's name, gets bigger, and gains an officer.
As one of the first MindSpring employees, it's sad to see the name change. Especially since MindSpring's name stands for quality as one of the best ISPs in the country, and EarthLink's name stands for spam and Scientologists. But the merger is good news all around- the new EarthLink will be big enough to take on almost any challenge that comes along. Users don't have to worry about someone like AT&T or another Big Ugly Company buying them out.
It doesn't look like there will be that many changes apart from the name change- Charles and Mike will be in charge of the new company, one of ELNK's officers will stay on as an officer, and Sky Dayton will step down from management and have a seat on the board. The company's headquarters will be at MindSpring's offices in Atlanta.
As for the comments about MindSpring and how their aquisitions have gone (especially Netcom), Netcom hasn't gone very well, but that's not really MindSpring's fault. Netcom's systems were pretty screwed up, and MindSpring has had their hands full trying to quickly bring Netcom subscribers off of what could be thought of as a sinking ship.
Some things weren't communicated very well, but that was only because of the urgent need to get people off of the equipment at Netcom.
I worked at MindSpring for almost four years, and I can say that I've never worked with a more talented group of people. The people they've got in their Engineering department are amazing. Their upper management (McQuary) is excellent. No matter what mistakes they've made, they're a company that's going places, whether they're called MindSpring or Earthlink.
Robbie
-- Comtrends!
Oh, you can't tell me they passed up the opportunity to rename it Mindlink. Earthspring however, would have made them sound all wet.
Move along nothing to see here, just another Mindlinker.
Rip
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
I've been wondering about bringing this up on Slashdot, but I suppose this is an appropriate time.
First a little background. My significant other is an upper level tech support representative at Earthlink's main site in Pasadena. I apologize for posting anonymously but I want to prevent reprisals. If anyone would like to contact me privately
The way Earthlink's dial-up service works is this. They have their own POPs (Points of Presence) which are relatively inexpensive to run. They also lease POPs from three major providers, UUNet, PSInet, and Level 3. In level of quality and cost it goes roughly like UUNet, PSINet, Earthlink, Level 3. The cost of time on a UUNet POP is quite expensive, to the point that any user that uses UUNet for an average amount of time per month generates expenses in excess of the monthly user subscriber fee.
Earthlink has tried several methods to reduce use of UUNet POPs. Tier 1 tech support agents are told to never give out UUNet numbers. Earthlink employees are not allowed to use UUNet POPs for personal use. However, there are many users for whom UUNet is the only available number, and many more for whom it is the only reliable number.
After some management shakeups in tech support, a "Tier 3" team has been created, with some of the better techs at Earthlink, who were promised higher pay (which they got). What they did not know was that they would be forced to call up customers who use UUNet POPs and lie to them, tell them that they are logged in twice (which violates the usage agreement) and that their account will be cancelled. They cannot tell them the truth, that they are using expensive POPs, in fact users are not supposed to know that Earthlink leases POPs at all. This activity may or may not be illegal, and if investigated probably only middle management or worse, tech support agents, would take the fall. I feel that it is at the very least unethical and should be known.
What protections are available to whistle blowers in cases such as this? Does anyone know if this kind of activity is widespread in ISPs?