Google Incompetence--Blogspot Blacklisted

Web host HMS outraces Google incompetency to win stupidity crown.

My recently-hired web host for my Direct Democracy League site, and for the ddleague email address that I've had for nearly eight years, is stuck in stupid money-grubbing.

They installed a new "spam firewall" for outgoing email that deems any Blogspot address as spam and bounces it. Non-spam blogs on Blogspot are now painted with the same evil as are the spam blogs -- known as 'splogs' since about 2005. As near as I can determine, 2005 is when Google started playing footsie with the spammer hardware, software, and sub-humans that should be hunted down and killed -- figuratively speaking, of course.

It's an annoying, money-grubbing trend in computerdom. Until we pay extra for additional hardware or software, Microsoft is on the virus hacker's side, Symantec is on the root-kit hacker's side, and Google is on the spammer's side.

My web host gets it. All I have to do, the support tech said, is upgrade to a dedicated server, and all this blacklisted Blogspot problem goes away. It's pure extortion.

My signature block on the ddleague email account includes 'DD Revival' -- that is, this blog -- and its Blogspot URL. I refuse to delete 'Blogspot' from my signature block to accomodate the web host's inflexible stupidity and money-grubbing. I want my email readers to have hot-links to both my DDL site and to my blog site.

The web host, Delaware-based "Host-My-Site" (HMS), is now blanket-rejecting all of my outgoing email. It makes no difference that one glance at the suspect email shows that it is a world away from spam, that it is simply routine email. It makes no difference that every "firewall" has a rules structure that allows for setting exceptions.

From one of my web host's support techs (via email) -- "...there's nothing that I can do to help, since the domain [Blogspot] is listed in ORDBS, etc, and if we allow them [Blogspot] to pass through our system, our mail servers may be blocked resulting in hundreds of thousands of email customers being blocked."

Another pack of corporate nazis. THERE VILL BE NO EXCEPTIONS, UND YOU VILL ENJOY IT. UPGRADE TODAY.

Google's not fixing their spam blogs problem has now made their problem mine. I hate when that happens, especially when it smacks of extortion. But Google's incompetence doesn't excuse the inflexible stupidity and money-grubbing of HMS.

In a more perfect world, one in which this country functioned under its Constitution and Rule Of Law, we would unlimber the Ricco Act and clip each racketeering computer corporation by a few hundred million dollars for every count of societal extortion. But in this superrich-defined world of money-power first and ordinary people last, the Rule Of Law is long-dead and buried. Corporations, in this world of zero accountability for the money-grubbing, can be brazen criminals.

My relentless abuse of HMS' dogmatic stupidity -- and my threat to become their worst PR nightmare -- may result in their terminating my DDL account before I can find a new web host. Expect trouble with the DDL site. And please use my new gmail addy for the time being (sneitzke the-at-sign gmail-dot-com).

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Modified Fri 02 Nov 2007, at 6:25am CDT

© 2007 by Stephen Neitzke