About
Captain Ed is a father and grandfather living in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, a native Californian who moved to the North Star State because of the weather. He lives with his wife Marcia, also known as the First Mate, their two dogs, and frequently watch their granddaughter Kayla, whom Captain Ed calls The Little Admiral.
Read More
The Crows Nest
Would Early Primaries Allow More Donations?
Jim Geraghty at The Campaign Spot believes that candidates will benefit if primaries and caucuses get pushed into 2007. A loophole in campaign finance regulation appears to allow an extra $2,300 per donor for candidates if those elections are held this year. Be sure to check out Jim's analysis, and the surprising candidate that may benefit the most.
When Tom Met Jeralyn
One of the interesting aspects of politics is finding out that opponents are people, too. Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft met Rep. Tom Tancredo backstage at NBC's studios, and found him more likable than she had anticipated. Perhaps it was their mutual interest in Dog, The Bounty Hunter ...
Joe Lieberman A Right-Wing Nut?
That's what CAIR says, according to Joe Kaufman. He has a link to a CAIR official's blog post that calls Lieberman, along with John Bolton, former CIA director James Woolsey, and the Heritage Foundation's Peter Brookes as "extremists". Affad Shaikh also calls Dick Cheney a "fat bastard of a liar," apparently not meant as a pop-culture reference to the Austin Powers movies. (via Let Freedom Ring)
Broadband Homelessness
The Japanese have made homelessness more efficient, and more Net-friendly, too. Their Internet cafés have become homeless shelters for the struggling manual-labor sector. The problem has grown into such a problem that government intervention will shortly become a political priority.
Found My Law Firm
Power Line links twice to this story regarding an attorney at Faegre & Benson who refused to become a victim and helped capture a very dangerous man. Keith Radtke is a partner in the firm as is Power Line's John Hinderaker. Radtke is listed in satisfactory condition after getting shot in the back, but that didn't keep him from locking up his attacker in a wrestling grip until police could arrive. I don't know about you, but that's the kind of man I'd want as my counsel ....
Don't Click That YouTube E-mail
The latest in spam seems to be redirections from YouTube links in e-mail to IP addresses without domain names. They attempt to entice people by making it seem that they have been inadvertently YouTubed. I'm sure most people can see through this scam, but just in case, you've been warned ....
Rick Moran Escapes The Floods
Rick Moran has kept us up to date on his travails along the Algonquin River. Yesterday, the police showed up to get him evacuated before the river flooded his home -- but today, Rick finds that a minor miracle has taken place, and that his house survives ... at least for now. Keep Rick in your prayers, and keep checking in at Right Wing Nut House for updates.
Rule 1: Drag The Corpse On Over First
If I've learned anything in four years of blogging, don't try to be out in front of the death rumors, especially with the villains of the world. Saddam died a hundred deaths before we caught him alive in his spider hole, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi almost as many before his demise last year. Osama may or may not be alive, but everyone's avoided speculating on his fate for a while now. Maybe Val at Babalu Blog will get luckier with his "Castro Is Dead" story. We all hope so. I'll wait for the announcement ....
Hobbs Choice
Volunteer Voters is holding its annual "Best of Nashville" on-line polls, and one of the categories is for the best political writer. Our friend Bill Hobbs, now posting at Newsbusters, and he'd like his on-line fans to cast their votes. Drop by and put one in for Bill if you get a chance!
Murtha Getting Backlogged On Apologies
Gary Gross of Let Freedom Ring sees another case collapsing on the Haditha charges. He's called for Murtha to apologize earlier, and adds another reason to the tally.
No Such Thing As 'Moderate' Islam?
Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan told a television interviewer that he finds the label "moderate Islam" offensive. Shrink Wrapped has a lot more on this, but at least in the same interview Erdogan acknowledged that "radical Islam" exists, and that it's been a catastrophe. Be sure to read the whole post.
MS-NBC Gets Punk'd
Power Line has a great post on a lack of journalistic effort on the part of MS-NBC. In covering the Michael Vick story, they reported on what they thought was Al Sharpton's website proclaiming Vick's innocence. I guess Alex Johnson and two other MS-NBC reporters couldn't bother to read the title bar of the site, which proudly proclaims it as a "parody site".
New Instapundit Podcast On Pharmaceuticals
I just caught this e-mail from Glenn Reynolds about his new podcast with Richard Epstein, the author of Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation. Haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but the topic is important enough to make sure I carve out time for it tomorrow. Get their first and tell me what I'm missing ....
Fed Trying A 'Stealth Easing'?
The Federal Reserve seems to have conducted a quiet campaign to steady markets that started spinning out of control, according to King Banaian at SCSU Scholars. He thinks that the Fed has conducted a "stealth easing". Be sure to read his explanation and follow his lnks.
A Shameless Bit Of Sel-Promotion
Gateway Pundit and Val at Babalu Blog note a crass PR move by Hugo Chavez. Venezuela has responded to Peru's eathquake disaster with food shipments -- and with Hugo's smiling picture on the cans. He also uses the tuna-can label to undermine President Garcia of Peru, who narrowly defeated Chavez' pal Ollanto Humalla, whom the labels extol for his "solidarity" with Chavez.
Tacky beyond belief.
Comments (19)
Posted by John Cunningham | August 6, 2007 8:39 AM
Mon Capitaine,
I am one of your most faithful readers, I think, your common sense stands out. I send out lots of email messages for a local Mensa group, a hiking group, and a kayak group, to a fair number of AOL addresses. I haven't seen any bouncebacks from AOL, so I would guess it is a prob with your ISP or maybe your email configs??
Posted by Micah | August 6, 2007 8:46 AM
Hey all,
Yes, Ed, we are having problems, too.
My wife sent out a bunch of stuff Sat. night, and the only two to come back were with AOL addresses. We're in Ohio, but I doubt that has a thing to do with this.
AOL has never been quality.... They are probably still using 286 servers running Prodigy (c) hosting programs!
Posted by Pete Fanning | August 6, 2007 8:51 AM
According to an NSLOOKUP, four hosts respond to the mailin-01 host name, and that IP in your example could have been down at that moment or could have been busy...but as you stated this has been an ongoing problem...one other thing to check is your reverse DNS setting, whoever is providing your DNS service.....AOL rejects inbound mail connections from domains that do NOT have reverse DNS (PTR) records configured.....
Posted by Deskmerc | August 6, 2007 8:54 AM
What Pete said. its possible AOL's dns reverse lookups are failing, but double check and make sure that your mail server has a PTR record of some sort, somewhere. If there are multiple mail servers, they all need to have PTR records for the sending IP.
Posted by David Wollstadt | August 6, 2007 8:55 AM
I have sent out a few messages to AOL addresses in the last couple days and have not received the error messages you describe.
Posted by Thanos | August 6, 2007 8:57 AM
There's been a steep upramp of the storm-worm spreading via email the past week, AOL probably has their shields on high to deflect some of the mail storm. If you are sending to a long list you are much more likely to get deflected.
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3206
Posted by Ray | August 6, 2007 9:00 AM
You should check with your own ISP to make sure the IP address of the mail server that is talking to AOL's MX server is able to be correctly resolved. If it is, then the problem is on AOL's end. If not, then your ISP likely needs to correct the issue with its own DNS setup.
Hopefully the problem will just go away on its own -- DNS problems often are delayed 24-72 hours due to the caching nature of the system.
Posted by Linh_My | August 6, 2007 9:12 AM
AOL, Earthlink and others block a large number of IP address ranges. If address falls with in one of those ranges, than you can not send eMail to AOL etc. customers. This is in response to "spam."
Someone inside of your range of IP addresses may have sent a few too many "spam" eMails.
Posted by The Florida Masochist | August 6, 2007 9:42 AM
Ed,
I tried contacting you recently about a mistake in one of your blog posts. No return email was ever received by me from you, but then the post is still incorrect as of today.
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/010590.php
There you wrote about Indonesia being a singular example of Muslim democracy in South Asia. This than 10 years after Suharto left office, but more notably you forgot Bangladesh and Malaysia both with Democratically elected governments and Muslim majorities.
I try pointing these things out in private email so fixes can be made. You've gotten 1 or 2 of those before from me. Here it is now for your information.
Bill
Posted by avonelle Lovhaug | August 6, 2007 9:45 AM
Be thankful that you get bounceback messages. My emails to AOL accounts simply disappear into an abyss, with no warning to either me or the recipient. They simply do not arrive at the destination. I haven't seen this was other accounts that may think my email is "SPAM". AOL is the only one where I don't see any bounceback messages.
I automatically send emails to AOL accounts using my Yahoo account, which is pretty funny if you think about it. I get TONS of spam from Yahoo accounts.
Posted by Bill | August 6, 2007 9:47 AM
Could be related to an intermittent problem with comcast: newer (3 years?) mail security guidelines call for the receiving MTA to do a reverse DNS check of the SENDING MTA. This is often a problem where the sending site uses auxilliary sending servers (usually for load balancing issues).
Comcast sends instructions in the bounce message; perhaps AOL is finally doing the right thing but not notifying? Usually shows as a permanent failure.
Comcast and AOL, BTW, are among the top spam distributors due to the large number of customers.
If it is this behavior, obnoxious as the lack of notice might be, the web will be better off with broader enforcement. In effect, this addresses the "open SMTP server" problem where you can forge email from any domain.
I'd suggest contacting either your ISP's tech support and AOL's if you have a target that fails that'll call them.
Posted by Rick Moran | August 6, 2007 9:48 AM
Ed:
In case your email is funky, I accept the invite and will be on at 2:00 PM central.
Posted by Orlin | August 6, 2007 9:54 AM
Yep -- that has been happening more frequently when I send messages to people with AOL addresses. It has been happening for quite some time!
Posted by kimsch | August 6, 2007 10:47 AM
My old @netscape.net address was changed to @aim.com for aol instant messenger. Might they be doing this elsewhere? AOL, Netscape and CS (compuserve)?
Posted by Judith L | August 6, 2007 10:51 AM
It's been months since I have been able to send to aol without a bounceback.
Posted by Cindy | August 6, 2007 11:22 AM
Ed,
I have had intermittant problems from my home account with AOL users. However, I suspect that your problem is indeed a reverse DNS look-up problem. A customer of mine had the same issue with their carrier (not Comcast BTW) a couple of weeks back and as soon as the Reverse DNS was listed the problems went away.
Cindy
Posted by John Steele | August 6, 2007 12:49 PM
This has been happening to me for the past two weeks with my friends who use AOL.
Posted by Helo Pilot | August 6, 2007 1:23 PM
The problem was spelled out for you in the BOUNCE message - if you would have just pasted the URL from the bounce message into your browser, you would have realized the problem...
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421dnsnr.html
Reverse DNS - specifically that your mail server lacked a PTR entry in public DNS, was the problem - and no 'DNS Refresh' at your ISP could fix it - that is just the Simpleton explanation...
Posted by Pete Fanning | August 6, 2007 1:45 PM
Well then, I was right the first time :)