E-Mail Woes

Well, our local mom & pop ISP is at it again. Some time Thursday, my DSL connection started acting up. Part of the time, I had about an 80% chance of not being able to connect to a site at all; part of the time, I could connect, but it was like molasses, taking a minute or more to load the simplest of webpages.

Then Saturday morning I got an e-mail from my ISP, informing me that my anti-spam quarantine account was now activated. Since this was the same anti-spam quarantine account that we'd been using now for a couple of months, I wondered what the deal was. Logged in to their website, and found that my user preferences had been reset. So I set them back the way they were before, including setting one item so that all my e-mail is simply passed right along to me, without quarantining anything.

Quarantining e-mail is a pain, it requires me to go logging in to their damn website to access my e-mail. I mean, if I wanted to do that, I'd just go get a web-based e-mail account, like Yahoo or Hotmail. No, I'd much rather receive all my e-mail on my computer, where I've got Mozilla Thunderbird trained very well to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Okay, so like I say, I went and set my anti-spam quarantine account preferences back to the way they were before. Only to learn, as the day proceeded, that the "pass it all along" option is no longer functional.

Worse yet, since some time Saturday afternoon, my e-mail account has pretty well shut down altogether. Between Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening, I received no e-mail whatsoever, except for three pieces of spam, which of course were "quarantined" on their website. Less than 10% of what I'd ordinarily be receiving— all well and good, so far as it goes, though I am left wondering what else didn't come through to me.

Such as legitimate e-mail.

Believe me, this is the third time this year my ISP has launched a "new" anti-spam solution. I was already thoroughly sick of it the first time around, last winter, when I started receiving e-mails from my brother, to the subject line of which my ISP had added the word "SPAM."

And I'll be damned if I'm going to be logging in to a website all the time to be checking e-mail for my POP mail account. Before I'll do that, I'll go and get another POP mail account somewhere else. Even if I have to pay extra for it out of my own pocket.