They are so large that they have become very hard to work with, or more specifically, get help from, especially if you are not one of their customers. They blacklist IP addresses, which they are now doing to ours, and there's no recourse for us to unlist ourselves. They offer no contact method other than email, and if email is blocked, tough luck...

To read about this, visit this blog (see the Update at the bottom about his solution, which isn't available to me) 1and1-Refuses-email

Like PSMTP.com, they have earned my disdain. For example, today (7.14.09), they have caused a backlog of over 150 emails waiting for delivery. AND, the saga continues. They continually have failed deliveries and it seems it will never stop. Maybe it's just us. If you own a small domain, and your email isn't coming through, find out if your email is handled by 1and1.com. You can do this by visiting http://networksolutions.com/whois/ (more information) or http://www.internic.net/whois.html (simpler, but less information). Enter your domain name in the box provided. If the NS or MX pointers show 1and1.com or schlund.nnn, you're going to have problems.

As in other cases like this, I strongly recommend you get a personal/private email address that doesn't use 1and1.com (or PSMTP.com). Some of those services include gmail.com, netscape.net, aol.com (same as aim.com), hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc... OR, and this would be better for everyone going forward, If You Are A 1and1 customer, Please contact 1and1 and have them remove ourldsfamily.com from their blacklists.

So, a word to the wise who aren't already using them, if you see this logo, RUN!

Update: All domains that use this have been unsubscribed from our email server and when new domain clients subscribe, they are notified of this page, and then unsubscribed after a few days if they don't respond. Problem solved? No, just deferred...

Here's the error returning to us from their server:

... while talking to mail.astecrew.com.:
>>> MAIL From: SIZE=1324
<<< 550 This is a submission only port. You must authenticate before sending mail
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable

A submission only port? What do you think our email server is doing, fetching your email? Of course it's trying to 'submit' email to one of your users, that's what MTAs do... Okay, is my sarcasm really necessary?

Update: New Error! Yes! More interesting stuff that shows they may not know what they are doing. Here it is:

Deferred: 451 Error while writing spool file

So this means, either they don't have enough disk space, enough processor power, or enough swap space. Something smells fishy here, don't y'all think?

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<[redacted]@bigfoot.com>
    (reason: 554 litemail54.bigfoot.com System load too high, try again later)

Are you kidding me? We have over 6400 subscribers and have never seen that message and we run our system on a tiny box compared to a company such as Bigfoot.com.

I just connected to them via manual ESMTP and got this back (words in this color are the ones I typed):

klp@lehi:~$ telnet bigfoot.com 25
Trying 69.175.14.75...
Connected to bigfoot.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 corp2.bigfoot.com ESMTP
ehlo ourldsfamily.com
250-corp2.bigfoot.com
250-AUTH=LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-STARTTLS
250-PIPELINING
250 8BITMIME
help
214 qmail home page: http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html
quit
221 corp2.bigfoot.com
Connection closed by foreign host.

POBOX.com does their email? No, the vendor of their MTA (mail transport agent), qmail, is a personal webpage... How cool is that? On that page it shows how to move from sendmail to qmail. Why would anyone do that? Sendmail is about as solid as a rock. You just about have to have a degree to use it, but if you know it, you will never move off it. I should know, that's what I use on this server.

Error 501:

What am I talking about? Just today (see Last Updated on...) I have started seeing email bounce with the following information:

Error Code:
IPBL100 - Refer to Error Codes section at http://postmaster.cox.net for more information.

AND, there is a form to fill in to check, so I put ourldsfamily.com in the form, clicked on SUBMIT and lo and behold, we are not listed, so why is the email bouncing? No idea. Apparently COX doesn't have a very good handle on their systems...

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipients has been delayed.

              <[redacted]@digis.net>

The reason for the problem:
4.1.0 - Unknown address error 450-'Recipient Rejected: Too many unknown
recipients, please clean up your list'

I'm hoping someone at Digis might fix this. We don't do any type of list that an email server would recognize. Our emails go out as standard, simple emails to individuals, not lists, whatever they mean by that...

Update:
This ISP does something that's so irritating that it's amusing. But, for the users on their network, it will eventually lead to them being unsubscribed from email groups such as ours. Therefore, Earthlink doesn't think enough of their customers to fix this, or do they? If they fix it, I'll remove them from this list, probably.

Here it is:

550 <redacted>@earthlink.net...User account is overquota
550 5.1.1 <redacted>@earthlink.net... User unknown

Just often enough to annoy an administrator like me, but not enough for the users to seem to notice. I guess if you don't get email, you don't notice it's not there, huh?

Knowing what I know, and watching my mail queue, I wouldn't use this ISP. Maybe that's just me, however.

Go figure.

Okay, in all seriousness, the problem is they have registered a new firewall (the Barracuda mess) and didn't bother to update the DNS setup that would allow this sub-domain to exist on the internet, so when they chose it as an MX server (mail exchange), they forgot to complete the domain by adding barracuda.gtelco.net. It's a simple fix (that will take up to 72 hours after they make the fix, to be replicated throughout the internet), and when it's resolved, I will be able to take this entry out of the list you are reading, probably...

I just checked and the host does appear to resolve, so soon it should start working and bounces will cease.

Update: Currently, Gunnison Telco is now blocking emails from OurLDSFamily.com (us), so all users who subscribe to our groups are not receiving email. Here's the error message:

The original message was received at Sat, 19 Jun 2010 19:16:47 -0600
from localhost [127.0.0.1]

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<[redacted]@gtelco.net>
    (reason: 554 Service unavailable; Client host [ourldsfamily.com]
blocked by redir.rhs.mailpolice.com; 198.60.114.90)

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to barracuda.gtelco.net.:
>>> DATA
<<< 554 Service unavailable; Client host [ourldsfamily.com] blocked by
redir.rhs.mailpolice.com; 198.60.114.90
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable
451 4.4.1 reply: read error from barracuda.gtelco.net.

The problem is, there is no such domain as redir.rhs.mailpolice.com, or even mailpolice.com. I even checked www.mailpolice.com. These are made-up domains. I'm not even sure what to make of this, but in any case, I wouldn't recommend this ISP/ESP to anyone. Of course, being that Gunnison and the surround area is a small community, albeit a cool part of the state of Utah, GTelco is probably the only game in town, well other than using the satellite service offered by Hughes.net.

They are listed here because they are offenders where Email Backscatter is concerned. If you are unfamiliar with what this is, read the entry for IntermountainHealthCare.org where there's a link to the Wikipedia article on Backscatter.

The specific response in their Backscatter emails looks like this:

 ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<[redacted]@htc.net>
    (reason: 554 Failure Message looks like spam, sorry not wanted here q=428071026)

Isn't that cute? It would be better understood if they used punctuation. It should read:

(reason: 554 Failure. Message looks like spam. Sorry, not wanted here.)

And the q# certainly isn't needed because it's a transient number that changes with every email.

So, since I've had them as a client and know some internal stuff first-hand, decided to include them anyway. They seem to be married to Microsoft, thus their mail servers are pretty flaky. Okay, I'm not bashing Microsoft, per se, but... oh wait, I am bashing Microsoft. They just don't do it right. . . and Ikon is their little boy who wants to be just like Daddy when he grows up. Oh, and for the rest of you, this is one primary reason one of our policies recommends against using your work email for services such as ours (see Our Policy Page and read #24)

Now I won't go into how annoying their practices are, because of Policy #24 we have against subscribers using their work email addresses. But, I guess I've hinted at how I feel, haven't I? ;-)

If you use this E/ISP, consider not doing so, unless you have an in with them and can get them to properly configure their mail server to not reject connections willy-nilly because some administrator doesn't know how to increase the number of concurrent connections from their own gateway (lame).

There once was a helicopter pilot taking businessmen to look at properties in Washington state. A dense cloud cover enveloped them during the flight, and they couldn't determine where they were. The experienced pilot descended until he could see buildings, and flying near one with people behind a large window, wrote on a clipboard in large letters, "Where Are We". A person behind the glass pulled a whiteboard up and wrote, "In A Helicopter". The pilot said, "Oh good. Now I know where we are". His amazed passengers asked, "How on earth?" and he replied, "We are above the Microsoft Campus of buildings. I know that because the response was factually correct, but of no real value."

Some administrators seem to think that email should be controlled, and with the advent of MIME/HTML email, maybe it should, however to do that, they use a governor or some tool that throttles the amount of email that can come in. This can be accomplished with QoS (Quality of Service) technology, but it's easily misapplied by both the vendor and the administrator. When that limit is reached, no new connections can be made. Some servers tell the sending server, "Connection Deferred" and some just drop the connection, which results in Connection Refused. That's a naughty thing to do, and not very nice either. That's the story with MyFamily.com...

If you are a Netzero user, please figure out how to tell them that, okay?

One reason: To warn the unsuspecting public about crooked business practices.

How do I know? I've had 2 children work for them and both were stellar performers, but both came away with horror stories of how they treat their customers. One incident: They took a laptop in for repair which had a month left on its warranty. They put it on the shelf until the warranty ran out, then charged the unsuspecting and trusting female customer premium prices for repairs.

Another thing to note: They bash the big box stores for selling computers with inferior parts and such. PCLaptops purchases their parts from the same manufacterers, and in some cases, inferior manufacterers, then lie to the customer about the quality.

One of their managers walked into the store he managed one day and said, "I'm going to fire someone this week. Who will it be?" which is patently abusive, illegal and unethical.

Want more? Too bad. That should be enough. But there is more similar things, and that's why I stay away now though I used to be a customer.

Remember, in business, there are 3 major parts necessary to be successful:

1. Low Price
2. High Quality
3. Excellent Support/Service

I see a bunch from them, and as of today (8/17/2010) there is only one subscriber in our groups that uses them. That subscriber is in 3 groups, so on a regular basis, I get bounces from one, two or all 3 of those groups.

Because they are bounced back, I suspect PLMW.com doesn't even know they are tagging good email incorrectly, so blissfully think their rules are working okay.

If you are an RMCI user, and can add your email group 'from' address to the challenge database at RMCI.net so every email doesn't bounce back, please subscribe, otherwise, don't use an RMCI.net email address for group subscriptions because you'll never get email and won't know why.

fatal errors ----  (reason: 554 sorry, Spam detected by SpamAssassin)

We use SpamAssassin on our site, and we don't re-spam spammers.

Oh, and a couple funny notes: The first is the first paragraph on the home page. It's laden with the inconsistency of use of the 's' at word's end. Can you trust a service about education that makes simple errors such as this?

The second is a typo on their site, it says What can WALSDFE do for you? and should be WALDSFE I first noticed that on 6.23.2009, but it's still wrong as of this writing. Contrary to popular opinion, I never used LSD, but have noticed, and probably made, that typo all my life, having grown up in the '60s.

Update: as of today, there are over 28000 emails in the outbound queue on our server. However, I did some research and found this page:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html and I've filled everything in and hopefully they will respond. I did the same thing for AOL years ago (they put the URL similar to the one above in the bounced email. Nice job AOL; Please Yahoo?).

After the queue filled up to over 38,000 outbound emails to Yahoo, I deleted every one of them (sorry Yahoo users), BUT Yahoo finally got my message to the right support folks, and they asked a couple key questions, like how many soft bounces before a group member is unsubscribed (3 day's worth), and how many hard bounces before a group member is unsubscribed (1). Now we have been added to their whitelist, and NO MORE DELAYS!!!

It's Fixed!! What's the difference between a 'soft bounce' and a 'hard bounce' you ask? Over Quota is a soft bounce, and 'user unknown' is a hard bounce. At least that's my definition...

NOTE: Do Not Take Calls From The "Domain Support Group"!!! To read more, visit Paul Graham's Page specifically about this Scam-based organization.