Vacation mail faster with dialup than cable?

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Vacation mail

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© April 2003 Tony Lawrence

Sun Apr 27 19:47:20 GMT 2003 Vacation mail

We started summer weekends away this week, and I immediately noticed something odd once I had my Mac hooked up for dial-up access ( I have cable at the office): although browsing and ftp downloads are as painful as I remember, mail actually came in faster.

That didn't make sense.

Back in the office, each piece of mail takes about 30 seconds. Out in the boonies, with 56K, it's 3 or 4 seconds unless there is some very large attachment. I had always attributed that 30 second time to Spamassassin; I just figured it took a long time to apply all its tests.

Obviously not. I suspect now that there must be some routing stupidity with my cable access that slows down Spamassassin's black list lookups. Another possibility might be that because the IP address I currently use was once used by a spammer, and maybe the black list lookups are being slowed or even denied because of that.

I'll look into it when I'm back.

I never did figure that one out. I don't have any modems today and no dialup accounts anywhere. Possibly it had to do with the ISP I was popping mail from - maybe they slowed down non-modem access by doing more spam checking? I do not know..

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