Earthlink -- threat or menace?

[kinzel]

Note to earth:

if you originate email to me through earthlink or mindspring and do not pre-enable me I will not answer you. After today, in fact, I will direct all mindspring and earthlink email to the "age-as-spam" folder....

and look, though today's message that started this rant claimed not to be forwarding my mail, it apparently did anyway. What a bogus circus of a system down there in Atlanta! Why do you put up with it?

Comments

[mat-t.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've had earthlink since 1998 and never had any problems with it really.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Ummm...

how would you know?

Seriously, I'm afraid that notes like the ones I mentioned have hurt Meisha Merlin (they were using the same system at one point) -- I suggest that because I'd gotten numerous complaints.notes of horror from our readers that MM mail was bouncing or that MM's mail accounts had something wrong. Simply accepting the situation as "that's just earthlink for you"... doesn't solve the annoyance factor visited upon visitors/customers/correspondents.

In this case, I got a potential special order from someone, and when I replied I got an automated note telling me 1) I needed to go through rigamarole and be approved before they'd deign to let me communicate and 2) another note telling me that the message I was replying to was no longer in force and so my reply had not gone through.... What can I say -- that's bad for business!

[missingvolume.livejournal.com]

I think that is if the earthlink user has their personal spam settings to high. I use earthlink for years and have had no real problems with them. Now mailing people with hotmail accounts want me to just pound my head on the desk.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Also one of my pet peeves. Hate it when someone on earthlink sends me a message and then my reply to their message gets bounced because I need to fill out a form to be approved to send them mail.

Really peeved me when this happened with a SFWA officer who shall not be named....

Even worse...

[jack_calls_dances]

if you're blind, as, last time I checked, they don't provide an audio alternative to the graphic letters that you have to type in!

Jack

[(Anonymous)]

What is this pre-enable of which you speak? I've had a mindspring address since they bought nando.net in 1996 and have never heard of it, or had any problems receiving mail. Sending mail.... My father's church apparently has _all_ mindspring addresses blocked, which makes communicating with his pastor rather difficult.
Mary Anne in Kentucky
mastout@mindspring.com for ten and a half years

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

welll...
I got an email requesting a special product. When I replied, I was sent an email...telling me that in order to send mail to that address I'd have to send a special request -- allowing the recipient to verify me and permit me to send them mail.

Pfui...

[(Anonymous)]

I've heard of such set-ups at the level of individual mail programs, but not in ISPs. But then, I don't pay much attention to my ISP as long as it works. (Baaad memories of AOL in 1994.)
Mary Anne in Kentucky

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

Earthlink has apparently turned evil.

I had to fix earthlink's e-mail settings for one of my clients a few days ago. If users have the earthlink webmail spam filtering set to "high", Earthlink's server responds to all messages whose senders aren't in the user's webmail address book with that obnoxious message telling the sender to jump through hoops, then it puts the message in a "probable spam" folder that has to be accessed through webmail. If the user, like my client, is getting his mail via a pop client and has never looked at the webmail client, much less added addresses to its address book or changed its settings, he will have no idea what Earthlink is doing. Given the fact that my client was getting his mail properly up until a couple weeks ago when the computer developed problems that prevented it from downloading email at all, Earthlink may have changed something about their default settings for this stuff earlier this month.