[oclug] Rogers or Bell?

[Brian Barber]

I know that this is a "high-speed" discussion, but as a dial-up Sympatico 
subscriber, I'd like to throw my two cents in on a slightly different vein.

I was getting an inordinate amount of spam on my Sympatico mail account, 
sometimes to the tune of 12-15 messages a day.  I forwarded the messages on, 
as well as messages containing my comments, to the abuse address and, like 
Sandy, received no reply.  I then thought that I would try a different 
approach.  I researched exactly what they would have to do to close their 
open relays (I know some folks who helped design the infrastructure there 
and found out what they were running), documented it and sent it along to 
them with my name and phone number.  I got a call from one of the sysadmins 
within a day thanking me profusely for the input.  I noticed that within 
around three weeks the spam stopped coming and I don't get any now.

Like all of us in the IT field, we get complaints all the time (sometimes 
it's all we get) and, in the limited time we have, we can only get to some 
of them.  I'm not taking credit for Sympatico closing their relays as they 
may have been trying to get around to it and were close to doing so when I 
sent in my info.  (I still chalk it up to a coincidence.)  I could tell, 
however, from the sysadmin's voice that he was geniunely appreciative that 
someone was not simply complaining but wanting to contribute to the 
resolution of a very annoying problem.

The problem I have with all this is that I was paying them for the service, 
and I felt that I had to help them to make my experience better.  I suppose 
that if the shoe were on the other foot, I would appreciate the help from 
anyone who offered.

My two cents.  Cheers,
BB


>From: Sandy Harris <wtfm at storm.ca>
>Reply-To: oclug at lists.oclug.on.ca
>To: oclug at lists.oclug.on.ca
>Subject: Re: [oclug] Rogers or Bell?
>Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 12:11:45 -0500
>
>Christian Mautner wrote:
>
> > How about Bell/Sympatico? Any experiences?
>
>Several people I know have used their service and beem quite happy with it,
>but I /certainly/ wasn't.
>
>There were system admin screw-ups. I had some mail bounce because a Texas
>ISP had blacklisted bellglobal.ca and was refusing all mail form that 
>domain.
>Presumably this related to the discussion a few months earlier in the
>news.admin.net-abuse.* newsgroups of mis-configured servers allowing open
>relay, and Bell not responding to complaints.
>
>A couple of bounced messages aren't a disaster, and may not even have been
>their fault. They had fixed the servers by then. However I mailed both
>postmaster at sympatico.ca and postmaster at bellglobal.ca about the problem and
>neither bothered to reply. Three months later, mail to the same person in
>Texas was still bouncing. /That's/ a disaster.
>
>They also screwed up billing spectacularly. If they follow through on 
>threats,
>I'll be in court against them soon on that.
>_______________________________________________
>oclug mailing list
>oclug at lists.oclug.on.ca
>http://www.oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/oclug

_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.