OnLine Door County newsletter June, 2004:
 
Spammers:  I get a lot of calls about eMail being returned to folks
who say they never sent an eMail to that person.  There is a logical
reason for this and that is that you didn’t send an eMail to this person.
Spammers are forging return eMail addresses from lists of names they 
acquire from a combination of legitimate and nefarious means.  They 
don’t want all those rejection eMails coming back to them or their ISP 
so they use someone else’s.  In fact, the eMail programs they use can 
put a different return eMail address on every one of the hundreds of 
thousands of eMails they send out.  In some cases you will find the same 
address – yours – in the send to and the return and you know darned well 
you didn’t send yourself any such garbage.  Currently, unless your own 
or our SPAM filters pick them up, there is not much one can do about this 
other than delete them.  Also Spammers will use a KNOWN bad address with 
your return address so it shows up as being from PostMaster which they 
think you are more inclined to open and thus at least get a glimpse of 
whatever they are selling.  If they look phony or suspicious just delete 
them.
 
Phone costs:  It looks like regional Bells will be able to raise prices 
due to what is happening in the courts right now.  Maybe they won’t raise 
their rates to their own subscribers but it looks like they may not have 
to discount their current wholesale customers, which means they can force 
competitors to raise their prices, thereby providing yet another way to 
ease competition.  SBC currently forces competitors who wish to sell DSL 
in their areas to purchase a T1 to their ATM circuits and then they charge 
almost as much per subscriber to the competitor as they charge customers 
on the open market, which makes competition very unattractive.  While I 
understand the need for and the good that comes from big business, I must 
say that in some areas they can be very, very nasty.  I rant here because 
SBC and the like affect OnLine Door County and others in my profession. If 
this were a political newsletter I could go on quite a bit about what is 
or has been happening to small farms, mom ‘n’ pop grocery and meat stores 
et. al. and what I think is about to happen to small local 
pharmacies…but maybe another day.
 
Phone Lines:  We have had several calls this year from folks who have 
separate lines for their computers that suddenly only give busy signals. 
I don’t know what the problem has been but that kind of busy no matter 
what you dial usually means the phone company has cut off that line for 
some reason. If you are getting busy signals all the time simply plug a 
phone into that line and try to call a few local numbers…if they are all 
busy, call your phone company.
 
EMails not going thru:  Here again big biz in action. 
AOL / MSN / HotMail…all part of big – really big – business.  From time 
to time someone on an ISP gets a virus and that machine sends out a lot 
of hacking type queries or emails that are caught by other ISP firewalls.  
When that happens sometimes the big guys will simply cut off an ISP’s 
entire address base from their eMail servers and bounce all eMail back to 
that ISP’s customers. Why?  Ostensibly to protect their customers and 
because they don’t care if they cut off some fly-speck ISP with only 
10,000 users. 
I received a letter from one of them saying that we must take action 
because they had noticed over 300 complaints regarding us over a period 
of time.  Two things make that eMail laudable: Firstly, we get that many 
from each of the big ISP’s daily and of course we can’t cut them off 
because we need to communicate with them…and of course it is common 
courtesy to get to the bottom of the problem rather than punish the ISP.  
Secondly, they give us NO information as to the source or type of problem, 
which is needed to be able to track down the offending computers. I think 
we are FAR more diligent in policing the Internet than they are but as 
the banal adage goes, “ya can’t fight city hall.” We prefer to spend our 
time on positives.
 
Errata:  A shortened joke from the INet: A busload of politicians crashes. 
A farmer happens on the scene and buries them all. The COPS ask the farmer 
if they were all dead and the farmer replies, "Well some said they weren't, 
but you know how politicians lie."