On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 02:47:37PM +0000, Tim Green wrote:

http://www.eclipse.net.uk/ Eclipse are alright, though human support is a bit patchy after 8pm. Similar price to your current deal.

Eclipse are a bit patchy on cancelling services and getting things done when they say they will or sticking to contracts that they have entered into, they have now cost me over £60 quid because of their mistakes in the past, I don't think I will be using them again. Like Brett said, Blackcatnetworks is also my recommendation.

Adam

The message 20050215181311.GA25608@pitr from Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk contains these words:

and BT OpenWound is about as reliable as, well, think of something particularly unreliable and put it in here).

As an unreliable thing?

The message XFMail.050216100839.Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk from (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk contains these words:

...

Zetnet's the oldest independent ISP in Britain, established in Lerwick ten years ago. Closed (to non-Zetnuts) newsgroups, child-friendly policy, Littlehat Proxy server and under-18 newsgroup list for anklebiters, supports Win, Linux, Risc OS, and ISTR BBC and others have been/are being used.

[NB this is not about broadband but about "which ISP for dialup"]

I've been aware of Zetnet for years (since a friend in Caithness has been on it) -- and, by the way, in those days at least some of Zetnet's hardware was in Manchester (where I was at the time). They certainly have seemed to offer a quality service.

Your response above prompted me to look at them again, since I'm currently p***ed off with BTopenworld (yet again).

Really? I can't for the life of me think why...

BTOW's service is OK most of the time (with occasional DNS problems and other things that shouldn't happen in a properly maintained system), but the thing about them that really comes home to roost is that their SMTP service seems to be completely open relay.

Once dialled in to their ISP service, it's no problem to send anyone a message from (say) "Zaphod.Beeblebrox@cosmos.god.org" (not making this up -- I've done it as a test) by doing an SMTP dialogue with their SMTP server, with "helo" from some nonsense address. The only thing that would stop this getting through would be a block at the receiving end.

I'm re-p***ed off because I've just had a message to Salford University bounced because the BT dial-up IP address used at the time was blacklisted ("550-Your email has been blocked, because it was delivered to us from an address that may be a source of spam email" -- and no wonder!)

Yes - you'd think BT would know better - but having joined with Yahoo, which has always been spam-friendly, this is no source of surprise.

I worked round this by logging in to my still existing Manchester University account and sending from there while on line, but this is not how I like to work, especially when this involves exchanges of messages. Normally, my MUA does the SMTP sending of messages which I've quietly composed off-line and at leisure. The MU option is most smoothly worked by creating a local text file of the message to be sent and pasting this into the xterm which is logged in to MU. This is also unduly complicated, though (and it's a bugger for attachments)!

But it's almost like the 'Good Old Days!'

My problem with changing ISP, though, is that at present my BTOW account, for a fairly modest monthly fee (£16/month), gives me free dialling from my BT line, and as much as I ever want to use of cost-free on-line time. So I'd want the same from a new ISP.

Yes. I can understand that. Zetnet doesn't do that, exactly, but for (IIRC) £10/month (£100 p.a.) + VAT you get - again, IIRC - 10 hours a month uncharged online time, and charged at 1p/min after that time has been used, which *MUST* be cheaper.

I went to the Zetnet website http://www.zetnet.com, and looked around for the sort of thing described above. Most of what they offer seems to be "0845 connecivity" which, with the way I use the Net, would run up big call charges.

However, it is possible to track down "0800 free call" connections, on the web page

http://www.zetnet.com/internetservices/connections/flatrate/0800.htm

However, when I read this, it's not as cheap as you might expect. Quotation:

The 0800 service enables customers to connect from any phone line in the UK free of charge for a flat monthly rate. Ideal for any business users who are traveling with mobile PC's and those making regular hotel visits. The service allows full, high quality access to the Internet through Zetnet's network.

You have a choice of free numbers: 0800, which works from any line, or 08089, which only works from BT lines. The 08089 number has one rate (1 unit per minute) that applies at any time. The 0800 number is charged at different rates depending on time of day. Peak rate is from 8am to 6pm on weekdays.

The 0800/08089 service is available as an upgrade to any of our packages (one account per package only).

Package Requirement Inclusive Time Monthly Charge (inc VAT) Basic or Above 600 units Peak 0800 - 48 seconds = 2 units £5.00 Off Peak 0800 - 48 seconds = 1 unit (£5.88) Anytime 08089 - 60 seconds = 1 unit

So for £6/month it seems I can get 600 minutes = 10 hours using 08089 with my BT line. My monthly on-line time for January was 90 hours, which at the above rate would have cost me £45 as opposed to the £16 flat rate per month I pay to BT (and I could have used it for longer). (Part of the reason for these long times is of course the fact that I can't get any broadband so am stuck with about 3K bytes/sec which is dire for the large downloads I need quite often: 3K/sec => 350sec/MB ~= 6min/MB).

In other words, the Zetnet service is basically a flat rate for very modest use (up to 600 min/month = 20min/day), but for the sort of usage I have (about 3hr/day) is pretty much a pro-rata charge of 1p/minute. On that basis, 10MB PDF or .tgz files would on average cost me 60p each.

Ah. One good thing about Zetnet is that if you sign up for a service, and later, they chop it or change it, they don't pull the rug out from under your feet.

While they have not done a no-subscription, Pay As You Go 0845 Business Hours Only account, anyone who had one several years ago was allowed to keep it.

Likewise, it seems, my account is out of date, but still working under the new rules. However, we might have missed something...

Also, I can't find out whether, once you go over the 600min limit, you can extend this Zetnet service as much as you like for the same price (or less) per 600min.

Don't know, is the short answer. I seldom go much over the 10 hours. Only one month recently did I notch up a significant over-use, and that was because of downloading Firefox, several anti-malware programs and some other stuff.

I'd be grateful for any informed comment on the above reflections.

Of course, one option to work round the mail-block problem would be to keep the BTOW account for time-consuming net browsing, downloads, etc., and just use the Zetnet account (for an extra £6/month) to send mail using my MUA's SMTP mechanism. Even this, though, could puch up against the basic 600min/month = 20min;/day Zetnet limit, especially when I have to send attachments.

Yes, I did think of suggesting that, but would the difference in cost be positive or negative? You can get an awful lot of online time for 10 hrs 'free' and the rest at 1p/minute, before you hit £16...

You did imply that your online time tended to be 'modest'.

And it would turn out to be equally useless if Zetnet's numbers were ever blacklisted! So: are they?

Not that I know of. Zetnet is a *VERY* straight ISP. No open relays. Someone who joined Zetnet and used it for a spam run was charged for clogging up the system, but we never heard whether they were asked to leave, or warned about their behaviour.

There are no open relays, and they run a very tight ship protocol-wise.

With thanks, and best wishes to all,

You're very welcome.

You could e-mail Paul Martin (internet director) - pm snailything zetnet full-stop net - if you want any clarification, technical details, or answers to questions which are not obvious from the website. (I munged the e-address because the list is searchable from outside, so I presume, trawlable by spambots.)

BTW, most of Zetnet's equipment is in Manchester, and a lot, if not all of that is in Manchester University. That's Paul's lair too.

Support is in Mancy, but I don't know where.

Ted Harding writes:

Once dialled in to their ISP service, it's no problem to send anyone a message from (say) "Zaphod.Beeblebrox@cosmos.god.org" (not making this up -- I've done it as a test) by doing an SMTP dialogue with their SMTP server, with "helo" from some nonsense address. The only thing that would stop this getting through would be a block at the receiving end.

This is the way most ISP's SMTP servers work; they'll accept pretty much anything that comes from one of their subscribers. They can, of-course, use their AUP to ban you if you do this and someone complains.

Open-relaying would be if they accepted such email from someone NOT directly connected to them (ie by dial-up or ADSL).

This is usually a good thing, as it allows me to send mail "from" more-solutions.co.uk addresses through whatever ISP I happen to have connected to.

I'm re-p***ed off because I've just had a message to Salford University bounced because the BT dial-up IP address used at the time was blacklisted ("550-Your email has been blocked, because it was delivered to us from an address that may be a source of spam email" -- and no wonder!)

This is probably a different issue altogether; I suspect that you are not using the BT relay but sending direct?

Traditionally, SMTP servers would accept email from anywhere, for anywhere, relaying as appropriate. This is open-relaying and has been massively abused.

Most SMTP servers now only accept email from their subscribers (destinations anywhere), or for them (coming from anywhere). (For recipient purposes, "subscribers" means addressed to a recipient it can deliver without relaying.)

This, too, gets abused; you can bypass a lot of spam checks by looking up the MX record for a domain and sending email to it directly, not going through any proxys or relays to get there. Done from a freebie dial-up account it is very hard to trace.

Increasingly, therefore, SMTP servers will not accept email for their own recipients which has come directly from an IP assigned to a dial-up or similar account (regardless of any history of spamming from it). They'll only accept email relayed through your ISP's SMTP server, on the basis that your ISP has some control over you, and in the event of abuse either the ISP will block you (cancel your account) or your ISP will be added to the list of iresponsible ISPs from which email is blocked en-masse.

At this point in time, most SMTP servers (in my experience) fit into the middle category - ie they won't open-relay but they will accept email from anywhere if it is destined to one of its recipients. Some large ISPs (I think AOL is one of them) blocks email direct from dial-up accounts, although this seems to be a large scale experiment where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; maybe they're feeling the water.

The full text of the 550 bounce would probably make the situation clear.

FWIW: The best solution is to get an authenticated SMTP account somewhere, ideally one you have control over (eg I use my hosting server and have complete control over who can use it) and always send through it. That way the same setup will work whether you're dialled up to an ISP or directly connected through a LAN (otherwise you're forever changing SMTP server settings). Because you have complete control it should never be used for spam so should never get blocked by anyone.

As an aside, with BT Openworld ADSL they do actually limit the domains you can send through their SMTP servers as a customer, which without jumping through hoops means you can't send email from you@example.com unless example.com was registered through them; only your @btinternet.com address will work. This is major cause of grief, and to my knowledge only BT do this.

Brett Parker writes:

Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:

<snippage class="much" />

Yeah, I did go into rather more depth than I realised until I received my copy back.

I trust nobody here is on 9600 dial-ups?

...

[Stuff about auth SMTP]

*mutter* this is only any good if that server is also running a non-port 25 SMTP server... Wanadoo, I know from bitter experience, use a transparent poxy SMTP server, so they try to catch all your outgoing e-mail.

I believe that port 587 is a more-or-less standard alternative that should work for Auth SMTP.

Again, this is why having a server under your own control is a good thing :-)

I'm sure I had this working on a Freeserve connection, can't recall trying it since Freeserve became Wanadoo but I doubt that much changed.

Forced SMTP proxies are a big pain, though, particularly when (as happened occassionally) the Freeserve one gets blocked because someone sends a load of spam through it. I'm pretty sure they no longer do this, instead they block attempts to reach any SMTP server apart from theirs (ie you get bounce messages when you [try to] send via a different SMTP server because their server still intercepts the connection but no longer forwards it through their server).

Aside: I think a lot of the policy changes are forced because of the email-borne viruses (attacking an operating system that needs no introduction) using a variety of messages to send itself from compromised machines. In the past, an ISP would see this behaviour as spamming and drop the customer's account for abuse of the AUP. These days, I guess that's not considered fair because the "sender" (ie ISP customer) did not knowingly send the emails. Coupled with the speed they spread (making cancelling accounts a slow way to stop the spread) I can see some logic to the Wanadoo line.