Monday, August 22, 2005

a brief note-- verizon e-mail, etc.

hello out there--

regarding this HZ blog, and my Verizon e-mail:

1st, They're Afraid of the French: a couple of my European correspondents have told me they've been having difficulties emailing me, and C____ in France even told me that her last verizon mailing to me got bounced back with the message that she was "not authorized to send a message to this user," which doesn't sound particularly friendly. That message might suggest to somebody that I was deliberately blocking them, so it's especially exasperating to hear that verizon is doing things this way. (And no, I'm not blocking anyone in particular at this point, FYI.)

My old dial-up ISP* was slow naturally, but gave me the option of collecting suspected spam in a web-mail only spam folder which I could check when I wanted, keeping the questionable missives for 7 or 14 days. (I forget which.) It'd be nice if verizon did that too.

2nd: regarding Blogger comments-- I will probably remove blogger-based comments from HZ and switch to Haloscan on 9.1.2005, so unfortunately all previous comments will disappear, even archived stuff, because that seems to be the only way Haloscan interfaces with blogger. If you want to save comments you've left, you have roughly 10 days to do so, although I may repost some of them.

Anyway, if you've been trying to reach me and been having trouble with verizon-mail, I'm sorry about that.

* "copper.net", which is 9.95/mo for 200/hrs a month max. I never had a bad experience with them in 2 1/2 years, although your mileage may vary, etc. If you want a plain-jane econo-dial-up ISP I'd definitely recommend them, even though I think it's a little too late for me to benefit from their "recommend 3 and get one month free" promo, if they're even still doing that. But dial-up's dial-up, and I felt I needed DSL.

[Verizon may have corrected the problem since then. I will admit I haven't inquired as of this date-Nov 2005. JV]