Month: February 2006

AOL Postmaster

I recently spoke directly to an employee of America Online whose job it is to manage the ability of outsiders to send AOL users email … The employee said that they are the “red headed stepchildren” of AOL … They are for the simple reason that stopping the ability for a legitimate host to send AOL users email seriously screws up that person’s business …

I blame drunk people … and the reason I blame drunk people is due to the fact that all of my problems dealing with the inability to send AOL email stems from people that signed up on a band or bars email list and then report those messages when they come in to their inbox as a Terms of Service (TOS) violation to AOL … They say that the emails they’re getting are unsolicited email … The fact is, these people requested that they receive those emails … Rather than click on the unsubscribe link (which I never do myself), they shove the email over to the TOS …

The reason I myself never click on an unsubscribe link is because in most UCE, that link is simply a ruse to verify your email address and will do nothing but generate more SPAM … But in the case of the band or bar, I think those users should realize, hey, I was at that bar, or I saw that band, and it’s quite possible that I signed up for an elist that I really don’t want … In this case, having the familiararity of that band or bar ought to be enough to verify that the unsubscribe link isn’t in fact a ruse, but a legitimate way to stop the flow of email to that person … But we are talking about AOL users here, and drunk ones at that …

So, taking this many steps further, those drunk AOL users that willy nilly report these emails as SPAM and get my mail server denied access to AOL’s mail servers completely screw up the ability of a person I host who has nothing to do with bands or bars and don’t even drink that regularly at all … Maybe a cocktail at a holiday party to get warm and fuzzy for a little while … So Susie who hosts a simple site to display the photos of her new children can’t email Mom and Dad (who access AOL across the country) to tell them that there’s Day 5 pictures posted … Why?

Because AOL empowers their users to shut off my mail server even if it’s because AOL users are stupid idiots … What did the AOL employee have to say about that? That AOL receives fees from their customers and will do whatever their customers tell them to do because they’re paying them to do it … Oh! Well, guess we should bake them a cake? … But what about Susie’s parents? They never asked that their daughter’s email be shut off to them … Oh well … The AOL employee agrees that there are certain users that probably shouldn’t be allowed access to a computer …

Here’s another way I get screwed … An AOL user wants their own domain … They now have web space and a mail server … Instead of taking the time to learn that new mail server and all of the wonderful features that it provides, they simply set up one email address and forward all of that email to their AOL email account … Then, when SPAM comes through their domain and forwarded to their AOL account, they TOS that SPAM … Well, where did that SPAM come from? Their domain hosted on my servers, so basically *I* am getting blamed for that SPAM, and again, I am being shut down by AOL due to a stupid AOL user … bah!

With coding comes satisfaction

I’ve been coding an update to a web application I developed in mid 2001. I originally wrote it in ASP and since I’ve scrapped that proprietary language for the more versatile PHP, this is the direction I’ve taken … Along the way, cleaning up the code is happening as well as adding more features to the application … I’ve already implemented a completely new user authentication system … While working on this code as a whole, other things have come up that required me to implement them into other projects, so I go off on tangents a bit … The overhead flourescent got turned off and I’m back in reflected off the ceiling incandescent bliss … My kids and wife came to the dungeon and asked why I had shut the light out … Each one of them individually … I told them that I didn’t shut the lights out, just switched which lights were on …

Anyway, I have already begun using the application although not finished … Handling receiving of payments has been completely rewritten so it is much easier on me … This is normally what held up the completion of each month’s cycle in the past … Due to this update, that should not ever be an issue again … I also merged the application … Whereas I used to log into a system separately and let the registered users into their own version of the code, I am merging the purposes of the files to serve those privileged and those that are not … I am also asking for input from the wife as I hope she can start to get into doing things on the computer rather than the occasional lookup on the web for driving directions or something … Would like to get her into full fledged email and computer understanding …

Finally what will happen is that I will write system level scripts to be run automatically by the computers … This way things that need to be run at a certain time or date will happen … I will also add the running of these scripts to run more often and I will start bugging people more often than I have in the past … This should help me in many ways … Along with those scripts revolving around this application to be run on a scheduled basis, I will also have the scripts within the application leave breadcrumbs around for other scripts that will be run on a schedule act according to those breadcrumbs … This should take a bunch of administration out of my hands and automate it for me … I should have done this a long time ago … How crazy I get with it has yet to be determined … I don’t know what snags lay before me …

D.I.Y.

So our home phone no longer had a dialtone … We called for service and they came out … I was asleep at the time … Wish I wasn’t cause the guy royally screwed it up … He told my wife that things were screwed up outside … That he hooked it up properly and didn’t know why it wasn’t working … He traced some of my internal lines and couldn’t get to where some of them went and marked where the line came in and was working … That I would have to take it from there … What this guy did was rewire it at the pole so it came in on my defunct DSL connection … WRONG! … Being that that’s where it was, I figured out how to mount those wire in the demarc and get the line working internal to the house … I’m not happy about the connection now coming in that way as it’s now accessible on the back of my house whereas the other 7 or 8 lines come in on this big black cable … I’m not using all those lines anymore, they were for the now defunct BBS I had running when I moved in … The Internet took care of that …

This past Wednesday, February 1st 2006 Octane opened up at the TLA for Pray for the Soul of Betty which is Constantine from American Idol‘s band … Considering all of the concern prior to the show, it went fine for me … I made Octane sound good and everybody was happy … I didn’t meet the guy, but I was in his presence and that was interesting enough for me … I didn’t attempt to meet him either as I wouldn’t have had anything to say to him except that I saw him on TV … Still the highlight of my Octane career has been meeting Gene Simmons whereas I did have a conversation at length with him and he signed a copy of his book for me …

ICUHost.Net Billing went out and I also sent out a newsletter … After reading the letter and rereading it, I emailed it out and I missed a blatant misspelling … Damn! … I have started developing a replacement billing application that will replace the ASP one I wrote years ago … I am writing the new one in PHP … I am also using a different authorization system than I normally use for other sites I’ve secured up … This one does hash checking as well as email address verification through links and stuff … Pretty cool … Needed something like this for keeping tabs on customers and verifying new ones … I can’t tell you how many people I just didn’t set up because they were from out of state … Even though they signed up and everything, when I didn’t get back to them, they didn’t get back to me, so I guess I was pretty good in sniffing out the fakers … So hard to trust anyone on the Internet these days … Anyway, along with the new authorization methods, the new billing application will be able to verify domains via different databases and I’ll have a way better handle on billing and domain management … There have been domains that I’ve set up but never assigned to a user and they got a free site for months … When I started verifying DNS against accounts, this won’t happen … I’ll be able to check balances and anything past due I can update the DNS records and inactivate the site … Writing it in PHP allows me to utilize the command line and schedule the billing to run as I see fit … I think I will end up running something weekly if not daily … It will check many things for me that I have not been able to check on a regular basis … Right now, I have someone who moved their site, name servers and everything, but I see that they’re using my mail server and other stuff that I haven’t inactivated … I don’t think that’s right, and with automation, these things won’t happen …

Anyway … no time … need more time … We didn’t win PowerBall … We will this Saturday though …