Did I say dry? , spammer!

It seems the moment we dry out we get dumped on with more water.  Last night a little mini-hurricane blew through our area that dumped a ton of rain, I can’t tell how much because my weather center is on the fritz again.  It had to be close to two inches of rain.  All of the familiar ponds around the property have once again formed.

One of the things we did outside on Saturday was to put down a bunch of newspaper in the garden in prep for dumping dirt on top.  We held the paper in place by throwing various objects on top of it like scraps of wood, fence posts and pvc pipe.  Well the storm destroyed our work blowing much of the paper up against the side of the fence and inundating the rest under water.  That will be a pleasant mess to clean up.

Over the past few days I had been trying to send out an email to the roughly 1300 participants in last years half marathon to remind them of this years event.  I was very conscious of not getting flagged as a spammer so I broke the email addresses into groups of 200 and sent each one with a several hour gap in between.  Well evidently I still crossed the line and my account got flagged as a spammer.  All of a sudden my Exchange server was unable to send out email. 

So I get on the phone with Comcast and explain to them what I was trying to do.  They tell me that if you send to more than 99 email addresses at once or send more than 1000 emails a day or send out more than 250 meg of email traffic you get flagged as a spammer.  They turned off outgoing port 25 on my cable modem which is what blocked all of my email.  I promised to be a good boy and they turned it back on.  They also told me that Comcast email customers now are supposed to connect to their mail server via port 587 instead of 25 due to spamming.  As in many times before, Homey helped me out in both diagnosing the problem and offering a solution.  I’m now dumping my SMTP mail to his servers instead of through Comcast.

I have a new ache to report, my left hip.  I have no idea what I did to aggravate it but it is rather annoying.  Any sort of leg bending movement sends a shot of pain through it.  It almost feels like a tendon or something is pinched or caught in an odd spot.  It also would make running quite uncomfortable I’m sure.  I’m hoping it clears up on it’s own.  With me being at the new branch office quite a few days recently it means I have been missing my normal gym routine which adds to the mystery of how I hurt it and at the same time frustrates me.