Tech schmuck

I've called my ISP twice over the weekend to ask why oh why can't I post to the newsgroups? I can download messages just fine, but no posting. The first guy I talked to on Saturday was like, "Huh, we have newsgroups?" Now, I know newsgroups aren't as cool as blogs or mailing lists, but they exist and for God's sake, if you're tech support at a company that offers newsgroup access, shouldn't you know what they are? I called again today and the tech I got knew what newsgroups were but then said, "Oh, you have the wrong news server. We changed it." So I changed it to the new news server as directed and that worked even less good than the old allegedly defunct one.

When in doubt, go with your gut. So I deleted my newsserver account, re-added the old allegedly defunct server, so I knew password info etc., was correct and then I re-subbed to my groups. I still couldn't post, even though I was able to download messages, so I turned off my pesky firewall -- to no avail. So I thought I'd give it one more try and voila -- I figured it out. Basically, because of the multiple accounts I've set up through Mozilla, I have two seemag1@yahoo.com identities -- and even though you might think all seemag1@yahoo.coms are created equal, they are not! There is the regular email account through Mozilla and then there's the newsgroup identity and they shall never meet. Basically, I was trying to post to the newsgroup using the email seemag1@yahoo.com instead of the newsgroup seemag1@yahoo.com and therein lies the problem.

Yeah, I don't get it either. I'm just glad I can finally post again.