The situation whereby Earthlink was blocking messages from arrl.net to their system has finally been resolved. Actually, they were putting the messages in a process described as "null routing" which is basically delaying the delivery of the messages. In this case the delay could have been up to 8 hours or more. However, Earthlink's actions were not the direct result of what we thought might have been a large amount of spam coming through arrl.net. It was much more convuluted than that. Apparently a spammer was using a fake e-mail address in the "from" line of his messages. While this is not new or suprising, this particular address was one that Earthlink had designated (they thought it was a private, known only to them address) as a "spam trap". Any mail sent to this address was automatically considered as spam and the source, a spam host. They would then start null routing all messages from that domain for 8 hours. At the end of the process, they would remove the block. What happened was, this spammer sent messages to bad arrl.net addresses (again, not surprising) which would bounce as "addresses unknown". They would bounce back to the "from" address in the spam which was the super secret spam trap address at Earthlink. Earthlink's automated process identified the messages as coming from arrl.net and would block traffic from the server. Then, when the block was removed 8 hours later, mail would start flowing, again including messages bounced to the super secret address. The block would go back on. And around and around it would go. This is why we were seeing intermittent service. The entire process on both sides was automated. To resolve the problem, the arrl.net server has been configured to reject any connections for messages that include the super secret return address. That way, none of these messages will be accepted by our system. In addition, we have asked Earhlink to "whitelist" the arrl.net servers but they have to review our request and we won't know for a while. We will post an item to the ARRL web page once we can see messages flowing smoothly through to Earthlink again. In summary, this whole situation is the result of a well intentioned, but flawed attempt to block spam. A situation which will arise again in a different form, I'm positive. 73, Barry, N1VXY