On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 02:02:33 GMT, "Matt O'Toole" <[email hidden]>
may have said:Werehatrack said:Huh? Configure your newsreader to login with an ID and
password regardless of where you're connected, and it
should not care about that. Some hotel broadband nets
block port 25 to keep spammers from using them as access
points, but I haven't run into one yet that keeps me from
using my usual nntp host...and your existing Earthlink
account should give you access to news.earthlink.net from
*anywhere*. (But their retention stinks.)I don't know about Earthlink, but most ISPs won't let you
connect to their NNTP or SMTP servers from outside their
own network.
I've been able to access both Earthlink's server and the one
I had with my prior ISP from network connections at various
locations, the difference being that with the old ISP, a
login was required only if accessing from outside the
network. Now *both* require a login, which is a development
that should be more common than it is. If no login is
required for in-network connections, a news server can be
flooded or spammed via any open proxy on a customer's
system, and the average broadband network has hundreds or
thousands of customers running such proxies.
Of course, ISP news servers generally have shallow spools
and spotty group coverage, so a third-party service is
still a better idea if the budget can support it. (As
should be obvious, that's what *I* do.) It also has another
advantage in that it requires slightly less address munging
in order to protect against harvesting. If you're posting
from a news server within the same domain as your email
address, spammer harvesting bots will routinely attempt to
demunge your addy by taking the username out of the "From:"
field of the headers of your posts, and the domain name
from the message-ID, and combining them. If you munge only
the domain in your address, you'll still get harvested in
that situation. If you munge both halves, you won't. If you
post from a different domain than you use for email, the
matchup won't score a hit on *your* address even if you
munge only the domain.
--
My email address is antispammed; pull WEEDS if replying via e-mail.
Typoes are not a bug, they're a feature.
Words processed in a facility that contains nuts.