Why High-Integrity Email and Internet Service Providers Matter
By the Solari Team
For many years, the Solari Report has alerted our subscribers to the desirability of avoiding AT&T as an email and Internet service provider (ISP). In 2018–2019, AT&T blocked subscribers with AT&T email addresses (att.net as well as other domains acquired by AT&T) from receiving our emails for a full 15 months, without recourse or explanation, before removing the block. AT&T is notorious among the email postmaster community for its unresponsiveness in these situations, and to this day, it continues to periodically block our emails for short periods of time. Any business that censors its customers—often without disclosing that it is doing so—clearly lacks integrity.
Although AT&T is the most long-standing culprit blocking communications from Solari, it is not the only one—and email blocking is not the only tool in these companies’ bag of communication sabotage tricks. Comcast, for example, routinely delays delivery of our weekly newsletter (most recently delaying almost 1,200 messages), and Microsoft has done so as well.
Comcast—and local carriers that use Comcast infrastructure—have also created routing delays by running users through a “rat maze” of devices to throttle their Internet speed when connecting to Solari. Instead of using the industry-standard Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol, it might take 26 rather than 8 “hops” to get to Solari, slowing down the speed with which users can connect to our site. A member of the Solari team routinely runs into this problem when trying to watch Money & Markets on Thursday evenings. As a writer at UC Berkeley once put it, delaying access to certain sites can give “the misleading impression that [the] sites are slow or unreliable.”
At one time or another, Solari has experienced email blocking from the following:
Apple
AT&T (including att.net as well as ameritech.net, bellsouth.net, currently.com, flash.net, nvbell.net, pacbell.net, prodigy.net, sbcglobal.net, snet.net, swbell.net, wans.net, and worldnet.att.net)
Barracuda
Cloudmark
Deutsche Telekom AG
Domeneshop
GoDaddy
Google
Hornet Security
Hushmail
KPN
Microsoft
NetZero
Rackspace (including emailsrvr.com and REAGAN.com)
Spamhaus
Yahoo
As we continue to emphasize, it is worth your time and effort to find and do business with email and Internet service providers who you can trust not to engage in these types of shenanigans.
Links
Internet Service Provider (ISP): What They Do and Examples (Investopedia)
Open Shortest Path First (Wikipedia)
Internet Censorship (Part 2): The Technology of Information Control
I have been very pleased with my Proton subscription.
Subscribers should be able to avoid the "rat maze" treatment by using a VPN. When a request is sent via VPN, the Internet Service Provider has no way of knowing the destination IP address, thus it could not be subjected to the "rat maze" treatment. The only thing the ISP knows is the IP address of the VPN.
For those who do not know, any IP address you request is encrypted and sent to the VPN server, which unencrypts it, then sends it along to the destination. The data comes back through the VPN server, which encrypts it before sending it back to you.