Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction
The shortlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction has been announced. They are:
Your broadband will be reconnected within 15 working days.
and
You'll get an email address that you can access from anywhere online.
My money is on the first one: the second one is technically true, except that an increasing number of email addresses bounce off it, notably gmail addresses, but also including on occasion .ac.uk and ntlhome addresses. I have had two explanations for this. The first one was:
known server issues at this moment in time with regards to sending emails from or to yahoo,hotmail and gmail addresses.
The second one is more disturbing:
The most likely cause of the problem you are experiencing is most likely caused by the mail filter which appears to be recognising the email messages as spam. This is especially prevalent in issues of this kind when the same message is sent to a number of recipients simultaneously, and also when any of a number of phrases are used in the subject line of a message, or if a non-trusted file format is used for an attachment.
Unfortunately there is very little we can do to prevent messages being blocked by the spam filters in future as they are trained over time and use by the messages that pass through them, and to retrain the filter to accept message types that were previously blocked would, in effect, be to nullify the positive spam-blocking effects of that filter.
What I understand from the second paragraph is that I'll just have to live with a non-functional email address which will always bounce emails from several friends, relatives, and other people who might be contacting me so that I don't get spam. Maybe if I didn't use email, I wouldn't get any spam. This is made worse by the fact that the Orange filters are not that reliable in my experience, mistaking routine commercial mailshots for genuine spam and missing a great deal of genuine spam. The Gmail spam filter, on the other hand, I have found to be excellent.
This a shame as we have been with freeserve/wanadoo/orange since we got the internet years ago and, despite their bad press, I have never had a word to say against them. True, they took one non-working day longer than promised to re-install broadband when we moved house and were confused about when exactly we should notify them of our moving, but we have very rarely had a connection problem or anything like that. If, however, we are paying for an email address we can't use, our loyalty may begin to wane.
A.D. X KAL. IUN. MMVII
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Tom