[extropy-chat] Earthlink ?

[Dan Clemmensen]

natashavita at earthlink.net wrote:

>Am I the only fool still using earthlink?
>
>  
>
Hi, Natasha

Sorry for the late response.

There is a vey important distinction between internet access and 
internet presence.

Unfortunately, most people have a profound confusion between the two.

Are you using dial-up? if so, earthlink may (or may not) be a good way 
to accesss
the internet for you. The metric for access is how often your get 
connected when you
dial in, and how often you get disconnected.

After you successfully acess the internet, you can worry about your 
internet presence.
This is independent of your access. Currently, many of us have a 
"presence" that is associated
with our access provider, but there is no necessay correlation. Your 
"presence" includes your
web site and your e-mail address.

Clearly, in your case earthlink is not a good place for your presence, 
since your e-mail is not
working properly,

Where possible, you should establish a presence that is separate from 
your access.
Many people use hotmail instead of the e-mail account provided by their ISP.

In your case, you might consider establishing an e-mail account on the 
server that
hosts the extropy site. I assume that you are in communication with the 
administrator of
the site, and I assume (from the existence of the mailing list) that the 
site admin has control of
an instance of sendmail.

If you do this, you can be
    natasha at extropy.org
which decouples your presence from earthlink completely.

Depending on the conditions of the web site that hosts extropy.org,  
Extropy could offer
presence (i.e webhosting and e-mail) to other extropians.

In general de-coupling of access and presence fosters competition. If 
you know that your
e-mail address will not be affected, if is much easier to cancel your 
access account and move to
a  different provider.

I did not figure this out soon enough, so when I moved ISPs, I stupidly 
moved to a new e-mail address
with my new provider. My next move will move my presence to a domain 
that I control, regardless of my
access.