. . . muttered the ogre

In the past eight days I’ve received nine spams from CustomOffers, identical in form but varying in content. I have relayed each to its provider Exodus, but got no response (other than from the bot); perhaps everyone there is too busy being acquired by CW. I therefore resolve never to do business with either of them.

It especially honks me off when spammers use bugs, of the form <img height=”1″ width=”1″ src=”http://shameless.parasite.com/whitepixel.gif?email=target.address”>. This shows up as a dot, but its real purpose is to appear in the sender’s web-traffic log as a sign that your address is valid.

Oh well. This came to my JPS address (rather than through Pobox), and I mean to find another dialup provider anyway.

In 1999 Earthlink acquired Mindspring, which had previously acquired Netcom. Netcom’s list-servers were transferred to Earthlink, but a couple of blunders were made, with the result that the next time a message went through the dormant list digital-anarchy@netcom.com all subscribers got a recursive cascade of thousands of bounces — and I could not unsub. (The list owner was a ghost.) After a couple of days of non-response from support@earthlink, I redirected my mail to that address. A few months later I no longer needed a shell account anyway, so I became an ex-customer.

My other (PPP) provider, JPS, was also eventually swallowed by Earthlink, which proceeded to lose my website. Again, no help, so I sought a new and better webhost (serve-you.net), but kept my dialup account for the time being since it was prepaid for several months. Now that has run out, and I notice that Earthlink’s rate ($21.95) is rather high, particularly for a feed that sometimes crashes every few minutes.

If you’re in Alameda County and happy with your dialup provider, please let me know. I don’t need mail or webspace.