Bad day today, for past one week mails from our office mail servers are getting bounced back by VSNL mail server, the reason was, our IP got listed in Spam because of 2 virus infected machines…

I cleaned the machines, got our IP removed from SpamHaus (VSNL uses IP list from SpamHaus) but still VSNL is considering our mails as spam and bouncing the mails…every time it provides the same reason in the bounced email…”< -- 530 5.7.1 http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"

I called their customer support phone number and asked them to remove it, they asked me that it wont be possible to remove it from here, please mail us at customerservice@vsnl.co.in, so I mailed them, no response for a 3-4 days, so I called them up again....they asked me to send mail to abuse@vsnl.com, since the email is vsnl.com so mail got bounced back stating same spam reason...
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We are using Hathway one of the machine in our office, recently they introduced some new internet plans, so we decided to switch to 256 kbps connection from 128.

I called them up on their helpline, tried couple of times..no one picked up…3rd time some person picked up the phone…gave my account details and asked him to change my plan. As usual he asked me to mail to their email address, since we had followed the same procedure for other account and no one cared to reply for 3-4 days so I told him that no one replies there so please open the ticket on phone only…..

He opened it and told me their person will get back to me, gave me complaint number…

No one contacted me for approx 5-6 days, so I decided to call them up and find out what’s happening, as expected he again asked me to open the ticket…I told him that I already have ticket opened, please search for my name in your ticket database and find it….
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So my guess was right :D, I knew it for long basically…

So now when you go for MessageCast, it redirects you to msn alerts page and shows following message

We have an important announcement: The MessageCast LiveMessage service has been acquired by Microsoft Corporation.

Welcome to MSN Alerts

MSN Alerts enables customers to instantly connect to the information that they care most about via MSN Messenger, Mobile, and Hotmail. Click here to learn more about this free service.

More info on their official press release

Oh someone acquired them also? who can it be?

My guess is Microsoft

This is what i got in an email from them…

Dear Deep Ganatra,

We have an important announcement: MessageCast has been acquired.

As part of the transition, we need to have you review new licensing terms. Our service will be temporarily disabled in preparation for this.

A follow-up email will be sent shortly which will allow you to re-enable alerts.

Thank you for your continued support!

The LiveMessage Team

and this is what their site says

We have an important announcement:

MessageCast, Inc. has been acquired.

More details within the next 24 hours.

The LiveMessage Team

Now this one is for the one who have no idea about what I am talking…

Message Cast is a company which provides live feeds on msn alerts..you have to subscribe there and you can show your latest blog posts, site news etc…on MSN Messenger as alert….

Blog version is free but for commercial use it is paid…

Lets see who comes up saying..I bought MessageCast…

Deep

Google recently launched their new software called Web Accelerator

What it does?

In simple words, your page request is sent to their (proxy) server, which checks for the page in server’s cache…if page is found then it shows that page otherwise requests new page from the website….this process should make the browsing faster but there is always disadvantage in it….

Google can always track the activities you do, i.e what sites you surf, what browser, OS you use…
It can also get your yahoo, hotmail or other passwords (unless it is behind SSL [HTTPS])

Google has mentioned it in their privacy policy also….

When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers receive and log your page requests. Page requests and data sent in encrypted form using an HTTPS connection will not go through Google. It is possible that some personally identifiable information could be sent to Google, if the information is sent without using an encrypted (HTTPS) connection.

This makes me think twice before using it…but I think we can have that much trust in google..hehe

You can get more info about the software on their official page