Regular readers of this space may wonder where I've gone.
There's a story there.
It starts Friday evening, when a sudden lightning strike knocked me offline. Turned out that my phone service was knocked out -- not the cable, not the electrical, just the phone.
I called for help from my cell phone, and (fortunately) the phone company was nice enough to make an appointment with a serviceman for this morning, Monday.
So what happened Monday you ask.
The BellSouth serviceman was nic. He quickly investigated where my problem was.
Turned out to be the DSL line. It had been fried by the lightning, and it had taken the rest of my phone service with it.
He fixed it, from the box outside my house, but there remained a problem. Not only had the DSL line been fried, but so had the Netopia box with which I run my service, including the in-home LAN.
Anticipating this I had already gone to Fry's. There I bought a new Netgear box. I plugged it in.
Nothing happened. The Netopia box, you see, was both a modem and a router. Netgear just sells a router. DSL modems must be OEMed, because they must be compatible on both ends of your line, at your home or office, and at the local switch.
An hour on the phone with Earthlink got their promise to send me a new modem, for $100, expedited, overnight.
Hopefully, the phone company guy got things right and the modem will work.
So how are you reading this?
I'm sitting in my local Panera Bread, waiting for the line to shorten so I can buy a sandwich.
But there's still a problem.
It seems that, in order to fight spam, neither of my ISPs -- Westhost nor Earthlink, will let me manipulate my mail when I'm off the network. Mailwasher identifies over 1,600 spams in the two accounts, but can't clear them because...my DSL is down and thus I'm not on my home network.
So it goes in the zeros.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Thuktun on October 24, 2005 07:05 PM writes...
It seems that, in order to fight spam, neither of my ISPs -- Westhost nor Earthlink, will let me manipulate my mail when I'm off the network.
Define "manipulate" - fetching email or sending? Not letting you fetch your mail via POP3 or IMAP makes very little sense, since those are authenticated and can't be used by a spammer unless your account is compromised.
Are they worried that someone will phish your email authentication and use it from outside their network? This seems like a vanishingly small possibility compared to the possibility you'd like to fetch your email remotely.
Permalink to Comment2. Monica Nilsson on October 25, 2005 06:44 AM writes...
Hi Dana, for me this is some kind of luxury story... I live in Sweden and you might think this is a rather technically developed country, having companies like Ericsson, but no it's not. I have a small farm just five kilometres outside a city. Sometimes it's nice to work from home, but for me it's very expensive. You see, I live too far from the city to be able to get broadband installed. Five kilometres make all the difference.
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