I finally managed to get back in!

[AnotherFairportfan]

I am, in fact, the one, true, original Fairportfan.

Weirdness Has Happened.

More to follow after i eat a late lunch/early dinner...

[AnotherFairportfan]

Actually, i fibbed.

Having determined that the tablet is fully recharged after i ran it flat out this morning, i am typing this in between spoonfuls of my SR71 style spicy rice.

Anyway.

A week or so, i attempted to log in, and couldn't - the Opera password manager (i assumed) had apparently glitches my password.

So i attempted a manual login, and that didn't work, either.

So, assuming that i had forgotten my password, i activated the "Forgot Password" routine.

And it said "I have sent a temporary password to your registered e-mail."

So, all cheerful, guileless and trusting, i hied me off to GMail, where i found...

Nothing.

So i asked for a re-send.

NOTHING.

So I attempted to re-register, using another GMail account of mine.

And the forum said "Ha-ha! I have now sent your confirmation e-mail to that account!"

A bit more cynically, i proceeded to GMail, where I discovered ... nothing.

So i tried again - twice - using one Outlook address and one Hot mail address.

More and more Nothingness.

I contacted The Old Wolf, over on another board we share. He said he was looking into it, but apparently he's gotten no results so far.

I emailed (well, tried to e-mail) Pablo, but apparently something went wrong there because it seems to have wound up back in my own inbox...

So, finally, today, using yet a third provider (mail.com), i tried again ... and, low and be held ... it worked.

So here i am.

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If possible, I'd appreciate if the mods could move everything from "Fairportfan" to "AnotherFairportfan".

But, if not, I can live with the situation as it is.

===========

I'm just glad to be back.

[Jabberwonky]

Glad you're back, let's hope that isn't catching...

[Atomic]

Had something similar happen when I rebuilt my hard drive -- botched the login, and the Lost Password thing didn't work.

Welcome back!

[Bookworm]

I found out that several mail providers were throwing hissy fits with the reply-to address that the board used. That is - Paul's email address.

Right now, there's a throwaway unusable email address attached to it, but that'll be replaced with a 'real' email address soon.

Apologies for how long it took. I haven't even had a working chair in my workroom for six+ months (the casters all degraded, and I had to take the chairs elsewhere to get the old ones knocked off so I could put on new ones)

[AnotherFairportfan]

* le sigh *

"To err is human. To really screw up requires a computer."

[TazManiac]

Look, all we are really interested in is when your Avatar will lift the hem just a little bit more...

[AnotherFairportfan]

Um, never?

[Dave]

I found out that several mail providers were throwing hissy fits with the reply-to address that the board used. That is - Paul's email address.

Right now, there's a throwaway unusable email address attached to it, but that'll be replaced with a 'real' email address soon.

Apologies for how long it took. I haven't even had a working chair in my workroom for six+ months (the casters all degraded, and I had to take the chairs elsewhere to get the old ones knocked off so I could put on new ones)

Thanks for the fix, Bookworm!

If it's the problem I think it is (trying to use an e.g. Yahoo.com sender address, on mail not being sent through Yahoo's mail servers), the same thing has "bitten" a lot of people and sites over the past few months. Yahoo, AOL, Google, etc. are now "publishing" much stricter policies about whether mail sent using their domain names should be considered "legitimate" if it comes from any network source other than their own central servers.

Almost every site which runs an email reflector has had to take this change into account, and change their reflector/remailer policies, or risk having most re-mailed messages "bounce". I had to rejigger the remailer configuration (and update to a more recent version of the remailer software package) for a small hobby/fan mailing list I run, a few weeks back. Lots and lots of others have had to make similar changes.

It's a hassle, but it seems to be a necessary one. Stricter enforcement of "email origin" policies seems to be one of the more useful tools in stopping broad forgery of email addresses, and thus helping cut down on the constant tsunami of spam, scam, and malware.

[Bookworm]

Frankly, it's horse pucky.

Yahoo is one of the biggest providers of spam out there, so their blocking _incoming_ emails to try to fight spam is a lot like Afghanistan searching people leaving for guns, to try to fight the insurgents. I constantly get complaints from people sending to my servers "Hey, your server blocked my email!" . My response? "Yeah. Yahoo gets servers blocked for spam all day long. I can't even whitelist them, as they don't provide an IP list. Get a real provider for your _business_ account."

It's not like they even sent out a warning to people - I haven't received anything on my two yahoo hosted emails, I doubt Pablo received one, and I certainly hadn't seen any sort of posted warning that they were going to do it.

As for SPF records, etc? Forget it. They're ignored by most servers, a pain in the ass to set up, and even if you think you get them set up correctly, the sites behind it removed their tools for helping you check/maintain records years ago - and never replaced them with anything working.

Want to know the easiest way to block a lot of spam? Block Brazil, Ecuador, and the rest of South America, block China, and block Russia. Bingo - 80% of the spam I've seen that's not from compromised cable modem customers (Hey! Comcast and Roadrunner! Block port 25 on those routers by default! If people want it, they'll enable it.) is from those parts of the world. It'd also block about 90% of the hack attempts.

It used to be that France and Germany were the biggest hack culprits, but that's not the case anymore. (Wanadoo in France, and I forgot the provider in Germany)

(edit. I remembered. It was T-Dialin. The best block for spam that I've found is a simple one. Reverse DNS checks, and forward DNS checks. "Hi! I'm jingo.arsepucker.net, and I want to send you email". "Check. No such host. Sorry, we won't take your mail, you don't exist." If it passes that, then it's "Okay, here's your IP address. Does it actually resolve to anything. Nope? Sorry, we don't take email. " That flushes all those cable modems, because their reverse addresses don't resolve to anything at all. They're just there for the company to know where your modem is. )