This last week I was in San Diego for an ESRI conference. I have to say it was really cool. The people were very nice and I got a lot of good ideas on how to design the outage map for work. I was excited because my hotel was right next door and also a bit disappointed because I was going to miss the San Diego Comic Con by a couple of days. I kept hoping that I would see some of the artists and celebrities there early, but it wasn’t meant to be. Oh well.
So, I changed my hosting provider from GoDaddy to 1&1. 1&1 is about 40¢ more per month than GoDaddy, but I get quite a few more features, a control panel that is much easier to navigate, and domain registration/renewal for free. I’m sure that if I had actually wanted to talk to all the GoDaddy representatives that called to try and sell me more options on my plans I would’ve gotten a good deal but, damn the GoDaddy control panel is horrible to get to. It’s not too bad once you finally get there, but if you need to change hosting plans or make any other account-level changes, it’s just a big pain in the ass.
I’m just going to bring back my last post about the 1d10t IT guy and maybe some others that i thought were funny. I still don’t think I’ll use this thing much. Maybe I’ll use it as a place to improve my writing skills?
I really dislike it when an IT type, who isn’t very good at their job and doesn’t know as much as they think (or pretend) that they do tries to tell me that I’m an idiot. The following is an email we received (with any identifying information removed) from a company about one of their employees (whom we contracted to work with us) not being able to send us an email because it kept getting rejected as spam.
Please keep in mind that this is an issue caused by a change in [my company]‘s email security settings. They probably implemented this without fully vetting the consequences of the action. This happens a lot with some clients. When explaining to [my company] why you have to send email through a second party until this is cleared up on their end, it affords an opportunity for us to “teach” them nicely some of the things to avoid doing. If this comes up as an issue with them please ask our network administrator to call the appropriate person at [my company] and have a friendly discussion. It is extremely important to client maintenance that we take a very proactive approach with these types of issues rather than point fingers or always assuming that the problem(s) have been caused on our end. Thanks.
There are a few things I’d like to share with you about this email:
- He automatically assumes that it was OUR email security settings that caused the issue while simultaneously pointing out that they should be proactive and not point fingers or cast blame, without having talked to anyone at my company. All the information he had about the rejected email and the cause for it was from the email itself.
- He very condescendingly tells the email address owner (who works for the same company) that they can use these opportunities to “teach” us about things that we should/shouldn’t do.
- He assumes (incorrectly) that because we are a smaller company in a mostly rural area that we couldn’t possibly know anything about IT
I’d like to point out that the guy who forwarded me this email is a funny guy and knows that we’re not the redneck hicks that the above jackass assumes we are. I’d also like to point out that we have an email appliance that scans our emails for spam content & viruses. The email appliance downloads IP Address blacklists from its parent company (as it should) in order to help block spammy and/or malicious emails. The IP Address that the contractor was trying to send the email from had somehow been put on the blacklist (which is absolutely no fault of me or my company). Of course, this was fixed by adding the email address of the contractor to our whitelist. I had the issue fixed within minutes of him forwarding me this email.
A few days later, a follow-up email was forwarded to me by the nice-guy contractor. it was from his IT department detailing how they had been hit by an infection:
All,
The [regional office] was just caught with a mass-spamming piece of malware that was masquerading as a legit email. The subsequent activity on the infected computer effectively caused the rest of the INTERNET to block our email server.
…
Again as a reminder, we have just sent out the “Network Do’s & Don’ts” so keep them posted nearby your computer for official reference. IT will be keeping a CLOSE eye on our network to try and mitigate any other suspicious activity.
Please, be careful out there.
ah… sweet justice.