response 205 of 260:

Mar 5 00:46 UTC 2006

I'm (repeatedly) experiencing the "participation file truncated to
0 bytes so next time you bbs every item is brandnew" bug again.  It's
become annoying enough that I've thrown some simple shell logic into
profile to automatically back up my participation files and warn me
about empties, so with luck this problem won't prove so annoying to me
personally.

response 207 of 260:

Mar 5 03:30 UTC 2006

I'm having the same problem.

response 209 of 260:

Mar 5 04:43 UTC 2006

Always Picospan, never back or fronttalk.  I haven't noticed any obvious
pattern to when it happens, e.g. breaking the TCP connection without
exiting Picospan, but of course you don't usually notice it until later.

response 211 of 260:

Mar 5 14:19 UTC 2006

I am still experiencing the weirdness in Pistachio (Backtalk) where it
reports a non-zero number of new responses but the "Read New" button
appears dimmed and is non-responsive.  It only works if there are unread
items.

response 215 of 260:

Mar 16 15:12 UTC 2006

Supplemental to resp:agora,4,211 above:

     I am still experiencing the weirdness in Pistachio (Backtalk) where 
     it reports a non-zero number of new responses but the "Read New" 
     button appears dimmed and is non-responsive.  It only works if there 
     are unread items.

This behavior went away when I unchecked the setting "view new items
before items with new responses" in the two conferences in which it was
happening.  So, it appears that the script for that setting is broken.

response 217 of 260:

Mar 16 18:34 UTC 2006

I do not care enough about e-mail on grex to try and contact AOL's 
postmaster. I'm not sure there are many who do.

The only way to get AOL to unblock us is for their own customers to 
throw a fit.

response 219 of 260:

Mar 16 19:06 UTC 2006

I just wrote two of them suggesting that they ask AOL to use some other way
of blocking spam, and that they find a cheaper and better ISP for themselves.

response 221 of 260:

Mar 16 21:12 UTC 2006

Can the members with AOL email write AOL about this?  Can you (from another
account) write to any members with AOL and explain the problem and suggest
they find a better ISP?

response 223 of 260:

Mar 16 21:41 UTC 2006

re #220
 Some non-profit charitable organizations are supporting members of Grex and
 use it for e-mail and web sites.
Those non-profits are ill advised and should switch to something more
professional like http://www.grassroots.org/

response 225 of 260:

Mar 16 23:50 UTC 2006

Sindi, the realities of the situation are that AOL has little cause
to worry about blocking mail from Grex, just as they don't care
about whether they should be accepting mail from the small ISP I
work for, which also gets blocked periodically.  An unpleasant irony
of Grex's situation is that the phishers who started getting us
blacklisted were logging in to Grex from AOL.  But it would be
irresponsible of us to block mail and telnet from all AOL users --
that's a huge portion of the internet and we'd make many people
unhappy.  The asymmetry in size, however, means that AOL doesn't
have to use similar restraint in blocking Grex.  Well over 99% of
AOL customers have never met and will never try to e-mail anyone
from Grex, so why should AOL care about unblocking us?

Unless / until their own customers start complaining about their
approach and threatening to take their business elsewhere AOL isn't
going to care.  Otherwise the incentives are actually all on AOL's
side -- heck, if people get fed up about not being able to send
mail to their customers they figure that at least some percentage
of those people will switch to AOL just to get their mail through,
which hardly gives them a convincing reason to adopt a more reasonable
spam control policy.

It's not that the Grex staff don't care about the situation.  But,
speaking solely for myself here, I've fought this battle before
(over and over, actually) and I'm tired of losing it.  It's a
complicated, multi-sided problem, with technical, political, and
economic facets, each of which have their own sub-issues.

What you see when you're looking at the current situation is
essentially a very small part of the problem -- only the most recent
symptom and its immediate repercussions.  Some of us who have been
dealing with the issue for years see this as just the latest battle
in a losing campaign.

That said, I think there are staff members who are more than willing
to take reasonable steps to, well, if not *solve* the problem, at
least make it a little better.  But frankly most of the suggestions
which have been offered so far for what we should be doing come from
people with limited technical experience and clearly little or no
idea about what's practical to implement.  Nobody on staff has the 
time to write a whole new component of the mail system to solve this
week's problem, especially when history has shown us that next week
the inexhaustible supply of spammers will simply move on to some other
tactic and we'll be right back at square one..

response 227 of 260:

Mar 17 00:07 UTC 2006

*yawn*

response 229 of 260:

Mar 17 01:53 UTC 2006

Maybe I can ask all users of AOL that want to receive mail from me to set up
a grex mail account, where they can at least get incoming mail.