On Thursday 19 December 2002 04:23 pm, Andrei Raevsky wrote: > Dear friends, > > I have recently had the worst of times with my ISP who also is my main > internet address provider (I use Hotmail, alas, only for my public messages > since it is saturated with spam anyway). Ideally, I would look for a > company in the USA, with either state-wide local numbers, or an 800 number > to call, which would care about its customers and who at least have some > knowledge about Linux (the big ones all want us to run Win32 software on > our machines). > > Other considerations are, of course, ease of connection, downtime, etc. > > Is anybody on this list actually happy with his ISP and mail server > provider? If yes, please help me out with this! > > Also, I prefer not to go with a company which provides email as a > "sideorder" for long-distance or local telephone service. > > While I cannot afford to pay much, I use dial-up anyway, I certainly would > be willing to pay for good quality. > > I was told that Earthlink is ok. Does anybody know? > > Finally, it would be ideal to find a company which is strongly pro-Linux or > somehow linked with the linux community. > > Am I dreaming, > > Cheers, > > Andrei
Andrei: I've been using Earthlink POTS service for almost six years. Over that time there have been very few service outages, and those were remedied on a timely basis. A couple of key features: 1. EL provides local access points all across the country, including many smaller cities and towns. In bigger cities, there are usually several numbers. FWIW, I haven't had a no-connect or busy signal in the last two or three years. I do get a slow connection once in a while which is usually remedied by hanging up and trying again. EL also has an 800 number available (this may or may not be an extra cost option -- I'm not sure.) 2. Unless you opt-out, all of your incoming e-mails will be filtered for spam through Spaminator (actually BrightMail). While some spam does make it through, the great majority of it gets caught. There have been only two instances when a legitimate e-mail was trapped. 3. I can't really comment on the OS question -- it has never been an issue. Their site is heavily slanted towards Windows (with some Mac references), but everything I've accessed works OK. But then, I really don't do much there. 4. I'm planning on upgrading to cable soon, using Earthlink as my ISP over Time Warner/Cablevision lines. (Less expensive, and more favorable TOS on what I can do at my end.) My second choice: Earthlink over BellSouth ADSL (Not sure about the 40 year old lines in my neighborhood.) HTH, -- cmg
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