Review by tdclauss 
Posted: 5.6 years ago
member for 5.9 years, 45 visits, last login: 21 days ago
 Saint Louis,Saint Louis,MO
 $54 per month (12 month contract)
 about 10 days
 Southwestern Bell
CLEC party: Southwestern Bell
 "Cheap, connection was reliable"
 "They host spammers, which results in your mail being lost"
 "Fine for home accounts, but any serious business should steer clear."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
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Ahh, Valuenet. You always remember your first. Back in the fall of 2000, we were 16,500ft from the CO, so SBC wouldn't give us DSL. But Joe from Valuenet had no problem making a buck and pushing through the service. And so we ran Valuenet at relatively low speeds for over 3 years. Even though we were lucky to get 300K downloads, the connection was rock solid. The few times there was an interruption, a reboot of the DSL modem had us reconnected.
Good thing too, because the one time I thought Joe had a problem on his end, he was very curt with me on the phone. I've never spoken with another person at the organization, so it is very possible it's just the one guy surrounded by servers and wires. I don't know.
Well, we got older, as we all do, and we grew a little. Soon, we'd registered our own domain name. We set up with one of the free DNS providers who also offered a free mail forwarding service. So mails sent to my name at my domain went to this service and then were forwarded to the account I specified, like hotmail, the valunet pop account, etc.
That worked OK for a while, then one day, something strange started happening. Mails sent to our account through the forwarder started taking a full 24 hours to arrive in our mailbox. I did research and was sending myself a mail message when it happened. I received a SPEWS warning message. SPEWS stands for Spam Prevention Early Warning System. Basically, it's a block list that tracks down the ISP's that host spammers and begins blocking mail from their domain IP addresses.
SPEWS is very controversial as it is a very aggressive list. If an ISP doesn't shut down the spammer, they begin expanding the blocks of IP addresses wider and wider. The Free DNS provider had added a filter to their system that checked to see if the mail address domain was listed on the SPEWS list. Since it was, mail began being lost and slowed.
The first time I found out about it, I sympathized with Joe, and after talking to him, I thought it was a mistake, or at least a hatchet job. He assigned me a new "clean" IP address so we wouldn't get caught. Well, 6 months later, that new IP address started getting blocked mail too. Joe then offered to take over the DNS hosting and mail forwarding duties. That was after he hung up on me the first time I asked about SPEWS. Again, that worked for a while.
The problem resurfaced in the Fall of 2003. My wife does freelance work from home for a Fortune 500 company. With the ever expanding problem of spam continually on the minds of network administrators, they finally got around to installing spam filtering software on their mail servers. Guess what? Mail messages stopped getting through. Both to and from the client. Thing is, most spam filters will send a bounce message back saying that the mail has been rejected. These never, ever arrived in our mailbox. What was happening? What had gone wrong?
So it was on to »www.spews.org/html/S2764.html to see what was going on. This led me to NANAE (»groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&l···se.email) which is where network admins go to talk about SPAM abusive ISP's. For the most part, ISP's that end up on SPAM block lists do a fairly dilligent job about trying to get off of them. NANAE is not a particularly nice place, you need a flame retardant suit on when you go in there. But, honestly, the argument is not my fight. I just want my freakin' e-mail to go through.
That's when I came across this: »groups.google.com/groups?selm=me···news.com
Not only had Joe Yu from Valuenet been unresponsive and abrasive to the anti-SPAM community, he also had actually tried to be vindictive. One of the members of NANAE that had complained to Valuenet through the standard channels was mass subscribed to a bunch of e-mail lists, BY SOMEONE AT VALUENET! For me, that was it. It was clear that the abrasive personality exhibited by Valuenet over the phone had now extended into the wider world. The results were not good. Domains residing at Valuenet, or people sending mail using the Valuenet e-mail servers are identified as SPAM and will continue to be for the forseeable future, because the owner/operator of Valuenet is petulant.
I understand the lure of the easy money of hosting spammers at your ISP. They use bandwidth and pay for it accordingly. The world's network administrators fight back. Unfortunately, if you are a valuenet customer, chances are high that your mail will be caught in the crossfire, not once, but on a regular basis.
It's a damn shame too, because the service was solid at a decent price. But we could not afford for e-mail to continue to be the iffy proposition that it had become.
Unfortunately, getting away from Valuenet was another saga. Because Valuenet is not a true SBC partner, you have to first cancel the service and wait the 7 to 10 days before it is off your line before a new service can be installed. We ended up having to reconnect our second phone line and installing the new ISP on that one so we didn't suffer through a two week outage.
Nice thing is, SBC recently opened a new CO that's less than 10k feet from us, so we're getting 4 times the download speed of the old service, just because of the shorter distance. When I called up Valuenet to ask how to cancel the service, Joe answered, but he never asked why I was leaving. I was probably one of his oldest customers...
In the end, it was a pretty good ride while it lasted, but I cannot recommend anyone who demands complete reliablity of their e-mail use Valuenet's service. It does not matter if you run your own e-mail server or DNS server, if Valuenet supplies you with an IP address you are on multiple block lists.
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