If you are trying to use one of our on-line forms that require your e-mail address, but you did not receive the e-mail with the URL to proceed with the sign-up procedure, or you did not get led to the next page as you should, there are four possible errors you need to be sure that you cover:

1. You entered an invalid or wrong e-mail address - we assume you checked that...

2. Your browser or our web host triggered an error, in which case you will instantly see an error message (the e-mail is sent directly from the web page, so if your browser does NOT show an error when you click to execute the page, then that e-mail was sent to you! Since it came to you as a surprise that you did not receive the mail from us, we assume that this was not the case either...)

3. Your ISP does not forward the mail to you, taking it for spam; some servers simply delete it. This is most likely happening because someone accused our host Bizland (or a Bizland client) for spam (see below for more explanation), and your ISP now refuses to accept mail from Bizland, in general. If you try to use an AOL address, you can be 100% sure that this will hit you, sooner or later, as AOL is notoric for doing this on a regular basis....

4. You kill it yourself in your own spam filters....

The only situation where we possibly can do anything to help you is in the case of B - where you got an instant error message in your browser. If you did not, then the problem is exclusively on your end of the communication, and we can do nothing about it, other than explaining how things work.

However, for a short-term solution, you can get the subscription to "The Peeing Post" by going here.

If you are not trying to subscribe to our newsletter but simply attempting to get an on-line form to work, then you can skip the explanations and go directly to what you can do about it.

Other subscription problems...

Now, if you got the confirmation letter OK and you already did submit your information through the form on one of those, and you now do not get the welcome letter right away, then there is another problem, but it is of similar nature. The only difference is that, this time, the mail is sent from an autoresponder at referralware.net - a different server than our web host. But the problems and the possible reasons are exactly the same...

We have never (since October 2000) had a situation where the welcome letter did not get sent, except when the subscriber's mail service provider refuses to accept mail from referralware.net. The autoresponder will check this before it accepts to include your e-mail address in our database. If your server refuses to communicate with the server, your e-mail address is not included in our database, and no welcome letter will ever be sent. In this case, it helps nothing if we try to add you manually - because your e-mail address will be instantly deleted in the database in the moment your server rejects mail that is sent to it.

Another scenario is that your mail server accepted receiving the mail - but deleted it instead of passing it on to you. A study done in May 2005 showed that this happens to about 16-22% of all legitimate e-mail online...

So much for "spam control"...

How your ISP censors your mail...

The way things work is this: You ISP subscribes to several "blacklist services" that accept complaints about spamming from anybody. When they receive a complaint (verified or justified don't matter...), they simply add the domain of the server to their list. They sell subscriptions to this list to ISPs. The ISP will then take referralware.net as a spammer because it is added to this list - and your ISP will then delete all mail to and from that server!!!!! They won't even notify you...

Now, when Referralware (our host) gets wind of this, they will immediately provide proof that they are not spamming - and, I know, if any of their other clients do, those clients lose their entire business instantly, so Referralware customers cannot do it for long - and they have no good reason to do it. But, with things working this way, the black lister penalizes ALL clients of Referralware when just ONE client is accused of spam.... In our eyes, it should be illegal to hold innocent people hostage like this, but, online, it isn't. It's anarchy.

Nevertheless, when the proof is provided, the "black lister" will most likely remove referralware.net from the list. But that does not mean that your ISP does it too.... In fact, it could be days or weeks before they decide to do so! In the meantime, all mail intended for you from referralware.net still gets deleted when it arrives at the server - before you ever get to know about it.

It is plain and pure censorship - a violation of your privacy.

And there is nothing we can do about it....

It is actually stupid - because professional spammers are not that idiotic that they use the same server more than ONCE - they constantly rotate the identity of their server, so they don't get caught in this. The only people that get hurt are you and us, because we are not willing to pay the $2,000 per month it costs to use a rotating spam server for our newsletters, so we could be sure our e-mail would always reach you!

Your possible solutions

You have three options if you want to receive communications from us in lieu of this challenge:

1. Get your ISP to put your account outside their spam filters so they quit deleting or delaying mail that is intended for you. (We have many clients who did this, and it did not increase their spam at all - it made no difference, except that they now could receive all their mail...)

2. Get your ISP to exempt referralware.net and bizland.com from their spam filter. That might be more acceptable to them. The specific mailing addresses for the newsletter is - you might need that.... If your issue is about mail from another follow-up list, you can get the address for it from the page with the sign-up from - or by contacting us.

3. Get yourself an e-mail account where you control what spam filters are applied, if any at all. If you are OK with the advertising, you can use Yahoo. If not, you can get a private account at http://k9joy.com/webservices that easily can work together with your current account with your Internet service provider, but without using their mailing system at all.

Finally, a lot of people get caught in their own personal spam filters... If you fail to set up the sending e-mail address as one you want to accept mail from, then your own spam filter might just delete the mail.... you may or may not get a warning.

Another possibility is that your "spam cop" sends an e-mail back to the responder asking it to verify that it is a live person - which, of course, is impossible, because it isn't. We get those e-mail forwarded to our private e-mail addresses, and there is nothing we can do about that, because we cannot reply from the address the original mail was sent from...

You can prevent this from happening by adding the sender address of the appropriate newsletter to your own address book, and you have to do this prior to subscribing. s already mentioned, this address is for "The Peeing Post". For other mailing lists, it is different. Please contact us about it.

Sorry about this trouble - but we hope some of this will help you.

Sincerely,

K9joy Customer Service

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P.S. If your concern is about getting too much information from us, please check our privacy policy here.