Do tiscali stick adverts on all outgoing mail?

I just received some email from a friend; his address is @tiscali.co.uk, not
that there is anything wrong with that, other than tiscali being panned quite
regularly in this group, and offering a mass-market product with mass-market
levels of service (i.e. next to nothing actually useful)

However, I noticed that his email had
A) Originated from a 10.x.x.x address
B) Had a tiscali advert appended at the end.

Is this the normal state of affairs for tiscali customers? A net-10 address
suggests that everything is proxied. I must admit that my opinions of tiscali
are obviously not low enough yet.

Jim Howes wrote:

> I just received some email from a friend; his address is @tiscali.co.uk, not
> that there is anything wrong with that, other than tiscali being panned quite
> regularly in this group, and offering a mass-market product with mass-market
> levels of service (i.e. next to nothing actually useful)
>
> However, I noticed that his email had
> A) Originated from a 10.x.x.x address

What significance do you attach to this ?


> B) Had a tiscali advert appended at the end.

What do you mean by an *advert* ?

Graham

Eeyore wrote:
>
> Jim Howes wrote:
>
>> I just received some email from a friend; his address is @tiscali.co.uk, not
>> that there is anything wrong with that, other than tiscali being panned quite
>> regularly in this group, and offering a mass-market product with mass-market
>> levels of service (i.e. next to nothing actually useful)
>>
>> However, I noticed that his email had
>> A) Originated from a 10.x.x.x address
>
> What significance do you attach to this ?

Network 10 is a RFC1918 netblock, and is not (or rather shouldn't be[1])
routable on the internet. This usually means that the end user is behind some
kind of NAT or proxy server, which may prevent a number of things from
operating. For the typical point-and-drool internet user, this is not a
problem. For anyone who may happen to want to run services, or rely on
protocols that accept connections from the internet, rather than simply initiate
connections using a limited set of protocols, this is a problem.

I'm not saying that a private address like that is a problem, but it does imply
extreme cheapness on part of the network operator (from my point of view at least)

>> B) Had a tiscali advert appended at the end.
>
> What do you mean by an *advert* ?

I mean
-------------------------------------------------------------
"Tiscali Broadband only £9.99 a month for your first 3 months!
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/products/broadband/"

appended.


[1] RFC1918 addresses are 10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16; Routers are expected
to ignore/reject routing information for these ranges; occasionally a bad route
leaks out, but this is not the case here. Demon are correctly rejecting routes
to them today, last year sometime they actually did attempt to route the packets
somewhere.

On Mar 8, 11:42 am, Jim Howes <sewoh....@moc.gisorp.backwards.invalid>
wrote:
> Eeyore wrote:

> >> B) Had a tiscali advert appended at the end.
>
> > What do you mean by an *advert* ?
>
> I mean
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> "Tiscali Broadband only £9.99 a month for your first 3 months!http://www.tiscali.co.uk/products/broadband/"
>
> appended.

AFAIK That only happens when the poster uses web based e-mail. Don't
all isp's do that? As for the 10xx address im not sure but I have
access to a Toscali account and am quite happy to test this theory if
you like.

On Thu, 08 Mar 2007 11:42:03 +0000, Jim Howes wrote:

> Eeyore wrote:
>>
>> Jim Howes wrote:
>>
>>> I just received some email from a friend; his address is
>>> @tiscali.co.uk, not that there is anything wrong with that, other than
>>> tiscali being panned quite regularly in this group, and offering a
>>> mass-market product with mass-market levels of service (i.e. next to
>>> nothing actually useful)
>>>
>>> However, I noticed that his email had
>>> A) Originated from a 10.x.x.x address
>>
>> What significance do you attach to this ?
>
> Network 10 is a RFC1918 netblock, and is not (or rather shouldn't be[1])
> routable on the internet.
> ..
>
> I'm not saying that a private address like that is a problem, but it
> does imply extreme cheapness on part of the network operator (from my
> point of view at least)

Not really, gmail does the same thing, you're simply assuming that large
websites are organized in the same way as SOHO networks.

The actually webservers that do the work are hidden behind some kind of
frontend. When you lookup www.google.com you don't expect to get
thousands of routable IP addresses.

The Last Outpost wrote:
> AFAIK That only happens when the poster uses web based e-mail. Don't
> all isp's do that? As for the 10xx address im not sure but I have
> access to a Toscali account and am quite happy to test this theory if
> you like.

Hmm. He had said he uses outlook, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was
confused. If I hadn't already binned the message, I'd check the X-Mailer: and
other microsoft signage in the header.

I am probably overreacting. I'm probably still grumpy from my recent clash with
the TalkTalk NoHelpDesk where they offered to reset the password, 'but it will
take five days'.

On 08 Mar 2007, Jim Howes <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>I'm not saying that a private address like that is a problem, but it does imply
>extreme cheapness on part of the network operator (from my point of view at least)

To me it implies network management that keeps intermediate (mail) servers in
a company's service from being attacked from outside... It's not uncommon to
have a number of servers in a chain within something like Google Mail, and as
Tiscali is running services in several countries, some parts of their kit may
be kept in a private network walled off by 10.x.x.x addresses from access by
the 'outside world'.

On Thu, 08 Mar 2007 10:34:23 +0000, Jim Howes wrote:
> However, I noticed that his email had
> A) Originated from a 10.x.x.x address
> B) Had a tiscali advert appended at the end.
>
> Is this the normal state of affairs for tiscali customers?

I am using tiscali here and you do get a real (publically routeable) IP
address (dynamically assigned). I can't comment on their mail system as I
have never used that, but I assume that he was using tiscali's Webmail.

BTW, as far as I understand it, there might be a difference between ipstream
and datastream customers.


Christof

--
http://cmeerw.org sip:cmeerw at cmeerw.org
mailto:cmeerw at cmeerw.org xmpp:cmeerw at cmeerw.org

On Thu, 08 Mar 2007 10:34:23 +0000, Jim Howes wrote:
> However, I noticed that his email had
> A) Originated from a 10.x.x.x address

That's probably just the IP addresses used on Tiscali's internal network.
I've noticed a similiar thing on the headers of email from Gmail.

"Jim Howes" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:esp1mb$j1b$1$(E-Mail Removed)...
> The Last Outpost wrote:
>> AFAIK That only happens when the poster uses web based e-mail. Don't
>> all isp's do that? As for the 10xx address im not sure but I have
>> access to a Toscali account and am quite happy to test this theory if
>> you like.
>
> Hmm. He had said he uses outlook, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if
> he was
> confused. If I hadn't already binned the message, I'd check the X-Mailer:
> and
> other microsoft signage in the header.
>
> I am probably overreacting. I'm probably still grumpy from my recent
> clash with
> the TalkTalk NoHelpDesk where they offered to reset the password, 'but it
> will
> take five days'.

At least they didn't call you "a pikey" )

(kim)