Had a few problems over the last few days. As you may know by this post, I had the problems with ADSL. At the end of it, methinks, it was almost certainly Alice’s fault (Alice being the brand name for Telecom Italia’s ADSL service and not some random girl; it’s actually pronounced aleechay and not aliss).

Then, 2 days ago, I found I couldn’t send email through Outlook. This meant I couldn’t reply to anything unless I used the web mail site, which is not so convenient, to say the least.

Of course, the first thing I do is search the web with my error and I find that ZoneAlarm may be the cause. Recently it suddenly, without my asking, put a spam filter on my Outlook. Now, actually, I thought this was quite good and I quickly got over my initial reaction of ‘why are you doing something to my machine that I didn’t ask for?’.

So, I have been watching it rather closely since then to see how it goes. I had almost got to the stage where I was trusting it and then, I find, it may be the cause of the sending emails function to fail.

So, how to switch it off? Well the ZoneAlarm console says it IS switched off. A check on the forums shows that it was an accident with one of their updates and that it did cause problems with Outlook and provides a link to be able to switch it off.

So, that’s what I do. But there is only a slight change in the error message that I can display when it won’t send. But then on another part of the forum I find you have to also do something else. Which I do. And the error message changes again.

And then I remember that I read on one of the forums that a persons ISP had suddenly blocked port 25 (used to send mail) except for their own smtp mail function. So I try, just in case. And then it works.

So was the problem Alice or ZoneAlarm or, even, both at the same time?

Either way, I’m now thinking that I will try and find another Firewall product (I haven’t really liked ZoneAlarm since Checkpoint took over) and then, if Wind/Infostrada get their act together, I’ll let them move me after all.

Of course, that almost certainly makes me a little, no, probably completely, crazy, but Alice have annoyed me twice in a week now. Cazzo Alice, and ZoneAlarm is only slightly better!