An effing mess

[rconner]

Ish. Just spent a couple of hours of quality time completely untangling my whole e-mail setup.

It all started when I decided to change my SpamCop account name because it was attracting quite a bit of direct spam. Not a big problem (I report 'em all anyway), but I just wanted to keep these out of the statistics.

So, I made the changeover with Jeff's help. In trying to test one of my own e-mail addresses, however, I found that it wouldn't work. After some discussion with the ISP involved, I found out that all my messages were going into some account I never heard of and had never checked. I checked it and found a bunch of legit correspondence I missed (sigh).

The ISP says I also had (and was paying for) another e-mail account that I never used, and I go to check it and find that it has about 600 spams going back a couple of years (nothing else, fortunately).

The situation with this provider (whom I used as a hosting service for my website) seems to have spun out beyond my ability to comprehend. Seems I was paying for a lot of extra stuff I didn't need nor was using.

Meanwhile, with my SpamCop account back online, I go to report a bunch of spams and find that they all appear to come from my home ISP's domain. Hmm...remarkable coincidence, thinks I. Until I realize with horror that all of my mailhost config data was lost. So, I had to spend a half-hour or so setting all that back up again, and then sending off retractions of three reports I made (sigh).

There is good news: I already seem to see a big drop in the spam that hits the SC filter (because the stuff sent to my old spamcop.net address now gets bounced back). Also, it appears that when the smoke clears, my monthly hosting bill should go down quite a bit.

-- rick