Website Designers and Webmasters

If you haven’t read my first rant about Century Tel, Click Here to Read it.

Disconnection from Century Tel!

Yes! It’s March 20th! It’s been exactly 1 year since we first signed up for Century Tel. I signed up for one year of service, and it couldn’t have been over quick enough. But now it is. Unfortunately, my account won’t just automatically cancel. I have to call them again….. Here is the blow by blow of what happened:

I have two numbers in my phone, and I didn’t know which one to call. I called the first one, which happened to be the wrong number. So after three minutes of pressing buttons, the tech support couldn’t transfer me. But he did confirm that the other number I had in my cell was the correct one.

Try #2: I call the second number. After another three minutes of hitting buttons, I get to another tech support guy who can’t help me…. But this one can transfer me. So I get transfered and wait a bit. I get a lady who asks for all of my information again. I tell her I’m canceling my account, and she has me wait I’ve been on hold for 10 minutes. Finally she gets me disconnected.

And it looks like… I could have canceled my account a couple months ago… But that’s the special thing about Century Tel, everyone you talk to has a different idea of how it works.

Now I just cross my fingers and hope that I don’t have to ever talk to them again…
-Ashton Sanders

BlackList: If your website (or IP) address is on an email provider’s (like AOL) blacklist, that provider will automatically block any email coming from your IP Address.

WhiteList: You guessed it… the exact opposite of being blacklisted. That provider has recognized you as a legitimate company, and allows your mail to go through to their email clients.

Feedback Loop: When you get feedback from an email provider when your email has been marked as spam by that provider’s customers.

Problem: Email newsletters are not getting opened or, seen.
I had to get a clients IP address whitelisted on the major email providers. Unfortunately, when I got to AOL, too many subscribers had recently marked his newsletters as spam, so my request had been denied. What I did manage to do is get a “Feedback Loop” initiated.

AOL Feedback Loop
A Feedback Loop is very simple: Whenever an AOL member marks your newsletter as spam, scomp@aol.net sends you an email with a copy of the email that was marked as spam. This will allow you to remove the complainers from your subscriber base.

Note: The email you receive has the headers removed, so you will have to customize your email newsletters so that you can tell who you sent the newsletter to from the body of the newsletter. This is simply done by propagating information to the bottom of every email newsletter before you send it out.

Here is an Example of a footer:

This email was sent to:
*****@****.com at 1:32:56AM.

Then when you receive the complaint, you will be able to see that when you send emails to *****@****.com, they will get marked as spam. And now you can remove them.

Why don’t people use the unsubscribe link?

I can tell you why I don’t use the unsubscribe link on what I think is spam: Some email spammers would prefer to send out spam to random email addresses to see if they will respond. And that unsubscribe link could just send a “I use the email address, spam me!” to the email spammers, and then it’s all over.

How to Get an AOL Feedback Loop Started:

Go to http://www.postmaster.aol.com/fbl/fblinfo.html and read up on how the Feedback loop works. Then fill out and submit the Feedback Loop Request Form.

That should get you started on the road to being whitelisted at AOL!

-Good Luck
-Ashton Sanders

Internet Service in Montana

Welcome to the first post of the website design in a flash blog.

I’ve had CenturyTel DSL Internet Service for a while, and I liked them. I got Digital Phone and 1.5 MB DSL connection (nice and slow….) for about $100/month… But at least I got free long distance, and a pretty good phone number. I stayed with them for about 10 months. I left town for 5 weeks to visit family of the Christmas Break, so since I wasn’t going to be using my DSL or phone, I decided to turn it off.

Unfortunately, I ran into a small problem: I signed up for a year-long contract, so I couldn’t turn it all the way off. I thought that was reasonable enough; I had said I would stick with them for a year, so I would. I turned the Internet down to the lowest possible setting: Dial-up with 300 minutes of Internet time: $9.95/month. This brought my bill to about $30 for the month that I was gone. Great. That’s not that bad.

This is where everything started going down hill: my cellphone died. So I called back, and the girl I talked to said that my account hadn’t been updated, so we would have to do the whole process again. And this time, she said the cheapest Internet I could reduce down to was $19.95/month…. Weird. I just got off the phone with you guys and you said you could do it for $9.95/month. What happened in the last 5 minutes?

Anyway, I ended up with a promise of a bill that would be about $40 for the month, and they would help me forward my home phone to my cell phone. (Which to make a long story short, never worked. Until I called the 5th time and had them manually do it.)

My vacation time comes to a close, and I go home. I get the CenturyTel bill: $110.00…..

WHAT? Are you serious?

After an hour on the phone with these guys, I finally get my bill back to $40.00. So I decide to get cable Internet and just leave the dial up with 300 minutes in place for the next couple months until my plan runs out.

I get Digital Cable Internet, and I still have never used the dial up that I pay for $9.95/month for. I get the bill this month…. $110.00…. WHAT IS YOUR OBSESSION WITH THIS NUMBER?!?!?

Apparently, I used the dial up internet for over 1000 minutes last month…. Oh, wait… I haven’t installed the dial-up software! I have been using another company’s Cable for two months now…

Ending Thought: Don’t use CenturyTel.

-Ashton Sanders