[buug] Re: IMP, horde & ISP [Was: Re: IMP [Was: DHCP: override ...

[Michael Paoli]

Quoting Ian Zimmerman:

> Interesting, I see that you use the IMP thing from horde.  When I saw
> other people using it to post to lists, they always seemed to break
> threads (IIRC they had no References or In-Reply-To at all).  It was
> such a pain that I have actually unsubscribed from some lists because of
> that.  Yet I see yours works correctly.  Care to share the secret so I
> can pass it on?

It's provided by my ISP.  I've got an ISP:
http://www.rawbandwidth.com/
that's substantially more competent and clueful (and also UNIX/LINUX/BSD/...
friendly) than most.  Costs a bit more, ... but also has *very* reasonable
terms of service (a terse and perhaps slightly oversimplified version
would probably be: "don't do illegal stuff, don't spam.  For residential
plans, no selling, giving away, or sharing of use of service outside of
one's dwelling unit (that last restriction is lifted on the commercial
plans)" ... that's about it.  They also have a nice mix of offerings,
including the set I want and have (rather than many of the 'large' consumer
oriented ISPs, that mostly want to sell limited service to 'joe consumer'
in a one-size-fits-all package (or a few such packages) which generally
don't fit many of us.  Oh, not that I am or would be pushing them for
that, but they do also have a referral bonus (I've not gotten one of
those yet, ... but one person did reap the benefits of one of those
from my having signed up with Raw Bandwidth).

They're not *perfect* ... but pretty darn close.  As I mentioned, cost
a bit more (but I think darn well worth it, and probably competitive
for the service offerings, and level and quality of service), and it's not
like there have been zero hiccups (but it's been so low, it's hardly
worthy of mention - e.g. over about almost 4 years of service with them,
I think they once had an outage of about 2 hours or so, ... and I only
happened to know about it because they reported it to their customers
(e-mailed us and explained what had happened, and duration and such)
and reminded us about the dial-up that's available as a fallback at
no charge whenever they have any DSL failure (their standard DSL
packages also include a moderate number of hours (10?) of dial-up
per month at no additional charge - and that can be upped to unlimited
for a few $$ more per month ... and there's no counting of that
time allocation when there's a DSL problem).  I haven't checked, but last
I recall hearing (and that might be out-of-date now) they're not offering
and had no plans to offer support of IPv6 (I don't care about that *yet*,
but probably will some day).  And the only bug/problem I've found in
the years with them so far, is I once found a very minor bug in their
horde ... I e-mailed them about it, and they had it fixed in quite
short order (I found it quite surprisingly fast of a correction at least
compared to what I'd expect of most ISPs, ... I think they'd fixed it
and e-mailed me back that it was fixed within a few hours or less, and
perhaps it was even less or substantially less than an hour).

Horde probably isn't my idea of ideal e-mail client, ... but with my ISP
providing and maintaining it, and its mostly quite sufficient functionality
it is quite convenient, and makes for one less thing for me to have to
do much or anything about in terms of maintaining or configuring it.
With the http/https access, it's also quite conveniently available from
most any semi-sane or better browser that can generally talk to
the Internet, even via proxies, where other protocols can't get through
(e.g. blocked by firewalls/filters).  So I tend to use it for "managing"/
handling my current and semi-current e-mail, ... and then I eventually
suck down all the older stuff I want to keep (which is most of the stuff
that isn't spam and isn't already archived elsewhere (such as many e-mail
lists)) via fetchmail for my "archival" storage.