[Tig] earthlink blocking independent ISPs

[Rob Lingelbach]

Earthlink has a blacklist policy that unfortunately is
interfering with the delivery of TIG postings to addresses
within earthlink.  The only way I'm able to halfway assure 
that this posting is delivered to the 26 earthlink addresses
that are subscribed to the TIG is to create a second mailing
list and send the message via a large commercial ISP rather
than the independent ISP on which the TIG host is based.  
Blacklisting is a policy that can quickly become quite 
controversial (there is a form of it in use at the entry point
to the TIG host, but it's at a completely different level than
that of earthlink's, which seems to be severe).  I encourage 
anyone who wishes to try to resolve this to contact earthlink 
and let them know there is no reason to block IP addresses 
in a wholesale manner that originate from within speakeasy.net 
or dslextreme.  Earthlink support is now outsourced to India and
it is quite difficult (as with most very large ISPs) to find 
someone who can help.  I can't fix the problem at our end, it has 
to be earthlink who (apparently in a quite selective manner) 
UNblocks the IP addresses that it blocks by default.  The policy
is similar to that of "opting out" rather than "opting in", 
depending on your point of view.  

Please refer to 
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/01/06/earthlinkcbl-update/
for a poignant story of what another independent ISP does about
this.

In the meantime, one suggestion is that you could use an alternate
email address for your TIG subscription, and enable forwarding from 
that address to your earthlink address if desired.  One free email
provider that is able to do this is gmail.  A few earthlink-based TIG
subscribers have done this and it works well for them.


regards
Rob

-- 
Rob Lingelbach TIG admin http://www.colorist.org