Stupidity Exposed!

Einstein was right – stupidity IS infinite!

Archive for category Internet Service Provders

Beware of Bell Domains!

Mar 8

Posted by admin in Internet Service Provders, Spams and Scams | Comments off

I just received a (spam) email from info@automaticdomains.com telling me that they were offering a variation to a domain name for sale and that “it would make an excellent addition to your existing” [collection of domains].  When I tried to reply to the email, I received the following response:

This email address is not monitored. Please contact us at info@belldomains.com.

(I hope someone is scraping these email addresses?!?   :o)

First of all, they don’t even own the domain name they were trying to sell me (no one does!):

D:\>whois RECYCLETOTHERESCUE.COM
[whois.internic.net]

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

No match for "RECYCLETOTHERESCUE.COM".
>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:11:52 UTC <<<

Anyway, if I click on the link in the email, I’m taken to the belldomains.com web site.  When I went to their main page, it asks “Did you receive an email from us? Enter the domain below to see if the domain name is still available.” and prompts me for a domain name.  I entered a domain that I knew didn’t exist (like “belldomainssucksbigtime.com”) and I got this interesting response

I get a kick out of how it says “It is listed as a premium domain name and is expected to sell quickly.“!!   :o)

It probably doesn’t reflect too well on the “Domain Name Owners Association (DNOA)” that Bell Domains claims to be a certified seller either.

 

Yahoo! Refuses Customer Support

Mar 3

Posted by admin in Internet Service Provders | Comments off

Yahoo! is no longer offering it’s users any form of support.  In an attempt to send an email to a Yahoo! customer, I received a message stating that my email was blocked for policy reasons.  When I forwarded that email to Customer Support, indicating that they were erroneously blocking my email, and I got this response:

Notice that it concludes with “Thank you for reaching out to us.  We look forward to helping you!”.  Yeah, right!   I went to the Yahoo! hompage, looked for the HELP link at the bottom of the page, searched for appropriate “support topic”, and when I couldn’t find it, I clicked on the “Still Need Help?  Contact Customer Care” button, and THIS is what I get:

“ATTENTION: Yahoo! no longer provides technical assistance for this issue.”  REALLY?!?!  You should have stopped at “Yahoo! no longer provides technical assistance”!!  Who do they think they are – Google?!?  :o)

Domain Registry Of America stikes again (and PROVES their stupidity!)

Jan 24

Posted by admin in Internet Service Provders, Pet Peeves | Comments off

Domain Registry Of America is back, this time to TO PROVE how stupid they are!  After my previous post about DROA, I changed the mailing address for all my domains’ WHOIS records to include a line reading “DOMAIN REGISTRY OF AMERICA SUCKS!!”.  Look what I got in the mail today:

Simple proof that they are using WHOIS records for their own marketing purposes, a use that is (supposed to be) forbidden by their accreditation agreement(s) with ICANN.

Here’s a close up of the address label:

:o)

Verizon Adds $2 Charge For Paying Your Bill Online

Dec 30

Posted by admin in 800-Pound Gorillas, Bank of America, Internet Service Provders | Comments off

OK, I stole the title from Slashdot, but the story bears repeating.  You can see the rest of their story here.Verizon Adds $2 Charge For Paying Your Bill Online

Really, is there NOTHING Verizon won’t do to try to steal more money from their customers?!?  They’re as bad as Bank of America who, last month, CHARGED ME to make a cash deposit!!

Spamcop allows BestBuy to spam!

Dec 20

Posted by admin in 800-Pound Gorillas, Best Buy, Internet Service Provders | Comments off

I am SO tired of Spamcop giving preferential treatment to some spammers, giving them a complete pass on spam complaints!  Here is a excerpt of the processing of an email I cannot get BestBuy to stop sending:

Not only does Spamcop refuse to send spam complaints to “abuse@exacttarget.com” (an email marketing company that BestBuy uses to manage their mailing) with no explanation whatsoever, but Spamcop refuses to report spam complaints for any sites that are hosted by Akamai.  They have this bogus message “Cannot resolve http://www.<something>.com/”, when clearly they can or they wouldn’t know that the site was hosted by Akamai in the first place!?!?!

Considering that Spamcop is owned by Cisco, I think the quality coming out of Spamcop certainly reflects on the priorities that Cisco puts on network abuses like spam?

 

Why does AT&T have to lie to their customers?

Nov 9

Posted by admin in Internet Service Provders | Comments off

I don’t understand why AT&T feels the need to lie to their customers about the most basic of things?!?  Sure, we’re waiting for your web page to load, but don’t lie to us about the reason it takes 10-15 seconds to load!

For 95% of their customers, the time it takes for the web site to load HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CONNECTION SPEED!

RedCondor ISP not smart enough to accept outside help?!?

Nov 5

Posted by admin in Internet Service Provders | Comments off

A friend of mine is trying to email someone whose email account is hosted by ‘omniglobal.net’.  The mail servers for this domain are apparently run by a company called RedCondor.  One of the mail servers lives on IP address 208.80.204.253 and does not appear to respond to the rest of the world.  Any attempt to connect to port 25 (the standard mail port) simply times out, while all the other mail servers listed for that domain accept connections with no problem.  I first called RedCondor almost 24 hours ago, alerting their technical staff that one of their mail servers was unresponsive.  The support person confirmed my claim and said he’d immediately reboot the server.

Several hours later, I checked, and the mail server was still unresponsive.  Several more hours later, with the server still being unresponsive, I contacted RedCondor again.  This second person seemed to not quite understand the issue, but said he’d look into it.

This morning, I checked the server again (from at least 3 different places on the Internet), and it was STILL unresponsive.  I called RedCondor one more time and let their “tech support” staff know that their mail server was dead.  Instead of recognizing that they had a dead server that their customers rely upon to get their mail, this support person insisted on knowing who I was and who the customer was who was having problems.  I told him the customer was an ‘omniglobal.net’ user who’s email was not getting delivered because the mail server was down.  He told me I needed to get that customer to call in with the complaint.  I told him that WHO the customer is was not relevant since anyone trying to email an ‘omniglobal.net’ user could have the same problem.  Plus, it turns out that the ‘redcondor.com’ domain used the same set of mail servers, so anyone trying to email ‘noc@redcondor.com’ might also run into the same problem!!  He didn’t seem to get the connection.  He said he would take my name and number and have someone else call me back so I could insult them.  I gave him my name and number – let’s see if I ever get a call back or if they ever fix their mail server?!?

The sad thing is that RedCondor is obviously part of a company called EdgeWave, who seem to specialize in email delivery systems.  Their own Support pages tout their “team of highly skilled and responsive in-house technical support representatives, who understand the importance of your support issues and your time, stands behind our products.”  In this case, not so much!!

People like these make me wonder why do I even try sometimes?

Earthlink ignores its own emails

Oct 17

Posted by admin in 800-Pound Gorillas, Internet Service Provders | Comments off

Earthlink has apparently given up on reading their own emails to ‘hostmaster@earthlink.net’:

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<hostmaster@earthlink.net>
    (reason: 550 hostmaster@earthlink.net...Due to extended inactivity new mail is not currently being accepted for this mailbox.)

“Due to extended inactivity”?!?  How long is “extended”???

It’s so sad that so many companies want only to take their customers’ money but have little to no other interaction with the customer!!

Yahoo! is such a hypocrite!

Sep 22

Posted by admin in 800-Pound Gorillas, Internet Service Provders | Comments off

Yahoo! claims to value their customers, stating “We respect our customers above all else”.  They also claim to value Community and state they are committed to serving both the Internet community and their own communities.  They also claim that they don’t value bureaucracy, arrogance, sloth and many other concepts that make for bad business, yet I can’t say that I’m convinced.

I’ve been dealing with Yahoo! FOR YEARS (since 2005) in my alter-ego attempts to shut down phishing sites and contact owners of compromised web servers.

During the first year or so, they had COMPLETE IDIOTS working in the department that handled abuse complaints.  I would send them an email detailing an email address that was being used by a phishing site to collect the victims’ data, or telling them of a domain they recently registered that was being used as a phishing site.  They would constantly send me back responses asking for the headers and body of the email I received.  I would constantly send them back a reply indicating that I wasn’t complaining about an email I received – I was complaining about a domain or email address being used for illegal purposes.  They would again send me back another response asking for the headers and body of the email I received.  I would again send them back an email indicating that I wasn’t complaining about an email I received – I was complaining about a domain or email address being used for illegal purposes.  This would go back and forth for 4 or 5 iterations before they’d actually do something about the issue in the original email.

It took some complaints and rants on a few public forums before someone from Yahoo! contacted me directly and told me to try an alternate email address to send my complaints to.  Phew!  After over a year of dealing with idiots on their front line, I was able to get to the second stage of support directly. Woo hoo!!  Of course, I shouldn’t have to know someone on the inside to get the alternate abuse email address, but I finally did.  Maybe life didn’t have to be so frustrating after all?!?

It turns out, there’s a separate special email address for dealing with domain names that have been hosted thru Yahoo! as well.  It got to the point that I would report a domain name that was recently registered and used to host a phishing site, and the site would literally be offline within 30 minutes! (I think the record was 5 minutes – great job Yahoo!)  In recent years, the process worked like a well-oiled machine.

Every now and then, I’d run across a domain whose registration was legitimate, but the admin and/or technical contact used a Yahoo! email address.  I these cases, I would send an email to the given email addresses letting the owner of the domain know their server had been hijacked and was being used to host one or more phishing sites.  The best way to tell someone where the phishing content on their compromised server is was to send them the complete URL of the phishing site.

I don’t know when, but some time ago (more than 2 years?), Yahoo! starting blocking emails to their users that contained apparent phishing URLs (as determined by some anti-phishing groups).  When I tried to contact the owner of a compromised web site using a Yahoo! email address, the email would bounce with the following message:

<DOMAIN-OWNER@yahoo.com>
    (reason: 554 Message not allowed - [PH01] Email not accepted for policy
    reasons.  Please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/postmaster-27.html
    [120])

OK, makes sense.  They are trying to protect their users from phishing sites.  Good on ya!

Here comes the problem: Yahoo! has received emails from me for years.  They know that I’m on the up-and-up, and yet when I send them one of these bounce messages and ask them to forward the original email to their user (so that the user can be made aware that their server has been hacked), they refuse!  Of course, they start off by completely misinterpreting the reason for my emails.  After attempting to reeducate them, they seemed to realize the intention behind these emails, but THEY STILL REFUSE TO HELP ME HELP THEIR USER!

I have asked MANY MANY TIMES how do I get my email address and server WHITELISTED so I can continue to help their users without being blocked like this?  They’ve known me long enough to know that I’m not going to scam or spam their users!  It has gotten to the point that they seem to be completely ignoring my emails asking them to forward something to one of their users!

This is what gets me…  Yahoo! claims to have values.

Excellence?  Innovation?  Customer Fixation?  TEAMWORK??  Community?!?  Words are cheap, Yahoo!…  On one hand, you claim to have an “infectious sense of mission to make an impact on society”, yet when an outsider such as myself asks for a simple request IN AN EFFORT TO HELP YOUR USERS, you all but ignore me!?!

I’m sure one of the largest ISPs in the world knows how to do whitelisting?!?

And then there is their “What we don’t value…” list:

Really??  Bureaucracy, arrogance, formality, sloth, head in the sand, one size fits all, too big for your britches, closed doors, passing the buck!  You claim there are all things YOU DON’T VALUE, but I’m not seeing it.  You make it IMPOSSIBLE to speak with someone there who can actually help out with an issue.  You think the only way people should have to contact you is via email or (worse yet) web forms!  Your “one size fits all” mentality prevents you from even considering that someone from the outside may have something beneficial to offer your users (unless you can make money on it)!

FairPoint needs to charge reasonable prices

Jul 27

Posted by admin in Internet Service Provders | 1 Comment

I just got a postcard in the mail from FairPoint Communications, Inc. trying to sway me off my cable modem and onto one of their FAST Dedicated Connection plans.  Their basic price is $49.99 for 15Mbps download/2Mbps upload service (of course, with no guarantee on speed or service availability).  OK, not terrible, but I want a static IP address.  My cable provider already gives me a pseudo-static IP address since my address only changes if I change my equipment.  So I call FairPoint and ask how much extra is it for a static IP address?  The gentleman on the phone asks what speed I wanted?  I questioned why would that matter – an IP address has nothing to do with the speed of data running over that address.  Anyway, for the basic service, a static IP address costs an additional $30 per month! Really???  That’s 60% of the cost of the basic service itself!?!  I have been contacting FairPoint several times over the years to see if they might offer something reasonable, but so far, they haven’t done anything to make me want to become a customer!