AT&T shutting down listmail

[toothpik]

On January 27 I stopped receiving vim list mail in my ISP's inbox.  (My ISP is AT&T).
After logging in to my account in Firefox I found over 300 vim emails in my Spam folder. 
After moving those to my Inbox, fetchmail was able to retrieve them for me the normal
way, but since then no vim mail whatsoever has gone into my Spam folder or my Inbox.

Calling the company you descend into automated-voice-response hell, and when you
get to a human you're guaranteed they are reading from scripts written for Windows or
Mac only, and you will never connect with anyone who will admit they are performing
spam filtering.

They offer a feature they call SpamGuard, which I have verified and re-verified is turned
off, but I receive no spam in the account at all.  No spam whatsoever (!) with SpamGuard
disabled.  So they are classifying spam for me, and in their infinite wisdom they have
decided the vim mail is spam and I am not to send or receive it.  Yes, I tried to send to
the list an email similar to this and it never got here.

So -- anyone thinking about signing up AT&T as their ISP, specifically with the Uverse
service, consider that they will be chipping away at the services they provide and
deciding for you what you get to see.  When I started with SWBell they hosted my
web page for me.  Then they morphed into AT&T, and I morphed into Uverse, and
suddenly no more web hosting, oh, and they stopped serving usenet -- I have to pay
a third party for that.  Now I can neither send nor receive vim mail.  What's
next?  Peer-to-peer comes to mind...

This is a bad trend -- AT&T is probably the largest service provider in the country,
and arguably the most pig-headed, and they seem to be on a path to reduce services
and remold the internet in their image.

Uverse does provide the best cable available -- my television works during storms,
unlike satelite providers, and while I can't claim there have been no outages, they have
less outages than cable, and are very responsive when you call about one.

Anyone with any ideas how I can get back to sending and receiving from my "real"
ISP please share...

sc

[Tony Mechelynck]

I don't know AT&T but I'll tell you what I do about gmail which is what
I use. With some luck, it might give you inspiration.

Normally I get gmail mail by POP3 which means it arrives in SeaMonkey
Mail (but it could be Thunderbird or Opera or Outlook Express or etc.)
just the same way as mail from my skynet.be account. However, from time
to time I use my browser to log into the gmail webmail page and do the
following:
- in the "Spam" folder, mark false positives (legit mail erroneously
detected as spam) as "not spam", which moves them to the Inbox where the
next poll of my Gmail POP server will find them. It also teaches the
Bayesian filters so that similar mail will henceforward run less chance
of being detected as spam.
- in the "Trash" folder (containing mail I already got by POP), mark
false negatives (i.e. mail which should have been detected as spam but
wasn't) as "spam" in order to teach the Bayesian filters, so that next
time, similar messages will have a higher chance of being detected as
spam. This also moves these messages to the "spam" folder.

After some time, doing this repeatedly teaches the Gmail spam filters
what kind of mail I regard as spam and what kind I regard as nonspam.
The result is pretty good but never perfect.

If there's no way you can get list mail to your AT&T account, I suppose
the workaround is to subscribe to the list via some other account such
as the yahoo account with which you posted the message to which I'm
replying now. You should be able to get Yahoo mail without going through
AT&T. Whether you can _send_ Yahoo mail without going through the AT&T
SMTP servers is a different question: for instance my ISP blocks me from
sending anything on any of the various SMTP ports (with or without
SSL/TLS) to any IP address except its own SMTP servers, so I have to
send my "gmail" outgoing mail through the "relay.skynet.be" SMTP server.
Again, I don't know AT&T, so I don't know how closely it watches your
outgoing connections.


Best regards,
Tony.
--
"What I've done, of course, is total garbage."
-- R. Willard, Pure Math 430a

[toothpik]

Which is how we are having this conversation right now.

> Whether you can
> _send_ Yahoo mail without going through the AT&T SMTP servers is a different
> question: for instance my ISP blocks me from sending anything on any of the
> various SMTP ports (with or without SSL/TLS) to any IP address except its own
> SMTP servers, so I have to send my "gmail" outgoing mail through the
> "relay.skynet.be" SMTP server. Again, I don't know AT&T, so I don't know how
> closely it watches your outgoing connections.

Unfortunately they are letting nothing through with which I might train
their filters -- nothing at all is going into my Spam folder, nothing spam, or
vim related in my Inbox.  It's not a bayesian filter, it's a drunken block.

I might have had a slight window of opportunity when I had the 300 vim
emails in Spam if instead of moving them to Inbox I had attempted to train
their system, but at this point I feel so helpless I just want a real ISP.

sc

[stosss]

> I might have had a slight window of opportunity when I had the 300 vim
> emails in Spam if instead of moving them to Inbox I had attempted to train
> their system, but at this point I feel so helpless I just want a real ISP.
>
> sc

Things are going to get a lot worse in the USA real soon and all of us
might find we can't send or receive any email of any kind by any means
before the year ends.

It is time to leave here while we still can.

[Bram Moolenaar]

Why would one use the mail service provided by your ISP? They can never
give you the service like Gmail or Yahoo mail does. And you don't need
to tell all your contacts about your new email address when you switch
ISP.

I used to rely on my own mail service, but filtering out spam became
more and more work. Now I route everything to Gmail, and fetch it with
POP from there. Works very well. Currently there are 10'895 messages
in the spam folder (that's 30 days worth). A little spam gets through,
it's hard to say how many false positives there are (I'm not looking for
the needle in the haystack).

Another advantage is that, although my inbox in Gmail is always empty,
the messages are still archived, which makes search easy.

--
TALL KNIGHT: When you have found the shrubbery, then you must cut down the
mightiest tree in the forest ... with a herring.
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" PYTHON (MONTY) PICTURES LTD

/// Bram Moolenaar -- Br...@Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\
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