The Sunday 2005-01-23 at 22:25 -0500, Carl E. Hartung wrote: [Oops, I forgot to send this yesterday] [and today it is the fourth time I have to resend]
Here in the south eastern coast, just 0: neither cold not hot :-p <snip> After frigid spells like this, 32F (0C) almost seems like T-shirt weather!
That's the forecast, we still haven't seen it. Right now, at 22:00 hours we have 7C - at the South east coast of Spain, in the Mediterranean. Freezing is really rare. But -15 in the central plain will also be rare, authorities recommend drivers not to drive this week. Dumb, but unfortunately, true, we are not prepared for that weather. [correction: tonight, wednesday 26, we have 4C, -2C a bit to the interior] Back to topic ;-)
I'll let you get back to troubleshooting now, Carlos. It's a lot of fun to watch from the sidelines...
Good luck!
Well, I'll report. Today [yesterday], it works if I connect from Terra, meaning that Telefonica is not blacklisted today. Tiscali is still blacklisted. Telefonica is really a heavy weight. The problem for me, yesterday [day before yesterday], was that both my connection providers were simultaneously blacklisted, so my usual solution of using the other did not work. Each provider has a relay server; the problem for me is selecting one or the other based, for example, on whose IP I have at the moment. But that is the subject of another thread I initiated. [more or less off topic explanation] Let me explain how these big providers work here, and why they are easy target for spammers. Terra is, more or less, a subsidiary of Telefonica. Till a few years ago, this company had every single phone in the country (and some more in South America nowdays). So, their network is very big (for us). The other point to note is that local phone calls are not free as they are in the US and Canada and I don't know where more. Well, Internet Providers here are also phone companies. They usually provide a "free account", which gets their monies from the phone charges when we connect by dialing up their phone number: ie, we are charged by the minute for those connections. They also provide other types of accounts, with a contractual binding. But the "free account" type are, or were, very easy to setup. You are not requested to really identify your self, give bank data, etc: almost nothing. Therefore, it is terribly easy to get an account. As mine is several years old, I don't know how much this has changed, but surely not much. So, a spammer gets an account. He sends his "load". Lets say that the provider discovers it and banns him, they close the account. So what? The spammer gets a new one in a minute. Back to square one. That said, I receive almost no spam originating here, most are in English (they scan this list; I guess). What can be done? Well, the authorities should really involve themselves. Write laws. Here, the police can track the real origin of a spam: the telephone is logged at the ISP, related to the timestamp and IP. It is just a question of tracking a few and putting in jail some spammers... as soon as word gets around, they will stop. And this should be done internationally: that means the European Union this side of the world. Can the ISP do this on their own? Maybe not, maybe they need to be ordered by the police to do so. I think so. They can only close one account... they can not ban them from creating a new one. And that is what must be done. But blocking IPs ranges because one of them was a spam sending point... it is not fair to the rest of honest people. That behavior in any other activity of life would be illegal... [it seems teleline (terra, alias lycos, aka Telefónica has been blacklisted again a moment ago. It bounced once, lets see if the teleline smtp server is blacklisted as well] [no, imposible, teleline does not accept the from address not to be theirs! ] -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson