~ PATIENCE

One of the necessary qualities of modern life is the possession of infinite patience. For example... my ISP provider, Hawk Communication, was gobbled up by Earthlink last month. That, in itself, isn't a big problem. But dealing with Earthlink is kind of like dealing with IBM, or dealing with the bumbling military. They have their own way of doing things, even if it's wrong, and can't seem to see any other way of operating.

Earthlink is geared to serve single stream users, and that is OK. But I have a website, and that means that I have an email address that accompanies the website address... has it's own domain.... but the email address that was sent to Earthlink by my old ISP is different from my site address. So here I am with 2 separate addresses. Now, I delt with this problem with the old ISP by doing my own spam blocking and virus blocking (McAfee does pretty good job) and I was able to deal with the torrent of crap that poured daily into my inbox.

But will Email allow multiple domains? Nope. The only thing they can see in their mail handling software is the old ISP address (aaahawk). That means that the mail address that I ordinarily use because of the website (domain raindogsurety) comes in outside of the Earthlink server. The mail handling software picks up the other domain. but it doesn't do any of the spam filtering that I used to get done by my McAfee software. Of course, the Earthlink thing can't have the McAfee software installed if it's going to work for me. Too many IRQ conflicts. And the Earthlink mail software looks pretty good. The only trouble is that it will only work on addresses directly associated with Earthlink That means that my website domain is screwed.. and not protected from evil spamming. It just pours in in all its glory. Up to a thousand a day! So.... I have an inbox with spam protection for the miniscule trickle of stuff that accidentally appears in that domain, and a huge horde of crap put in the inbox by my unfiltered website domain. Still following me?

When I called the support guys at Earthlink a kid who sounded twelve years old told me that there was nothing he could do and suggested that I call my webserver provider because there was nothing Earthlink could do. Sigh.

Now remember, I had all of this foolishness working fine a month ago before Earthlink gobbled up my ISP. Now I don't even have a website working. The webhost guys (NetPivotal... great service by the way) tried to give me a different control panel so that I could forward email differently but it won't install... I don't know why yet but I haven't given up... so I'm just hooked.

It's no mystery to me why NASA engineers are at greater risk for suicide than the general population. Those guys must have the same kind of problems with the simple problems they have, like getting a huge contraption like a Saturn rocket to the moon and back without crashing, as I have dealing with the mutants at Earthlink.

I need better drugs. Don't you miss the 60's too?

Bob