Some thoughts -
Why does an ISP which is also a telephone company need my mother's maiden name, my SS#, verification of my address, firstborn child, etc, can't they look at the number I'm calling from? I mean, it's not like they are competent enough to actually ping my IP, and they've also "lost" my trouble ticket, can't write down an IP address correctly, etc... so I'm not feeling particularly confident that they will keep my identity secure.
While all this other stuff was going on, I was also tracking a series of issues with one of my clients who have DSL, and use Cavtel as their domain host. Their emails go out to other people without too much trouble, but sometimes the replies get lost, no bounce messages or anything, so they just find out later that something was not received.
Investigating this, I discovered that Cavtel has started doing some sort of mail spooling, in which an email sent WITHIN their network, ie... from one cavtel.net addy to another, is being bounced back and forth between mail servers. This might not be such a BadThing™ in and of itself, although one might ask - why? - but somewhere along the line, they are picking up Return-path: headers at each server. IOW, the headers are being edited EACH time the message passes through one of their servers. Ok, so they aren't differentiating between mail coming in from outside, or inside their own network? Or reading the existing headers? Um.
Since my net access at home wasn't working, I headed out to said client's business office, and amused myself by sending email back and forth between the email address I use within their domain, and various other internal addresses in the building. Amazing delays, one of them was over 14 hours, and I did manage to accumulate 4 Return-path: lines in one email message.
oh hang on, here's an example -
Received: from cavtel.net (unverified [64.83.1.224])
by cavtel.net (Cavalier email server mail05) with ESMTP id 80453213
for ; Mon, 25 Jul 2005 13:56:24 -0400
Return-Path:
Received: from cavtel.net (unverified [64.83.1.221])
by cavtel.net (Cavalier email server mail04) with ESMTP id 15528096
for ; Mon, 25 Jul 2005 13:56:23 -0400
Return-Path:
Received: from [192.168.0.9] (unverified [64.83.18.90])
by cavtel.net (Cavalier email server mail01) with ESMTP id 3627661
for ; Mon, 25 Jul 2005 13:56:22 -0400
Return-Path:
Note that their servers are also unverified to eachother.
oy.
Well, that does explain the email that I received from one of Cavtel's other customers on July 13th - 64 times. That would be a whole different rant though...