Yesterday I posted my displeasure at a nearly month-long flood of email spam, and my hope that my provider, Earthlink, would do the right thing and try to fix it, especially since I did everything they asked me to do from setting my spam-blocker to high and uploading my address book so it could weed out trash email.

I posted out of frustration because . . . well, because I COULD (nice, that) .. and, of course, because the problem hadn’t been fixed, because I never got promised call-backs, because I’d rather spend my time writing than picking through spam for legitimate emails.

Also, I figured I wasn’t alone. Many folks in Los Angeles and across the country probably use Earthlink for the same reason I had originally signed on in pre-webmail days -- hundreds of access numbers, baby! -- and could be having the same problem. But without a public outlet, only their poor spouses or co-workers or low level tech support staff would listen to their complaints.

Is anyone out there on Earthlink also having this problem? It can't be just me.

To my surprise, two helpful ladies from Earthlink contacted me within hours. One, Mary Youngblood, has worked in anti-spam there for eight years. The other, Lindy Frank, is a senior manager in Operations Support Strategy. I doubt they scan the web for bitchy posts; maybe someone forwarded my rant. I’d like to think they both read LA Observed! In any case, they were both quite nice and determined to be helpful. Many unfiltered emails were exchanged about why emails to an earthlink.com address were getting through to my address at earthlink.net. Shouldn’t happen. But some spammer had been using my email name with the .com suffix as the faux sender of their garbage. Hence, when trash bounced off spam filters worldwide, it bounced back into my mailbox even though I hadn’t sent it.

Why was this happening? I won’t trouble you with the technical details, except to say this:

Back when Earthlink started, most every internet address ended with .com, .edu (for educational institutions), .org (organizations), or .gov (your government). There was also .net – but no one used it much, especially in the commercial websphere. Then Earthlink decided to use .net. Sounds better – a net linking the earth. If there had been a .web they might have used that.

But because people were so used to typing .com – and Earthlink had registered that domain as well, just to be safe – they set up a forwarding system so that any emails mistakenly sent to “name@earthlink.com” would go to “name@earthlink.net”.

It’s sort of how like Microsoft kept building operating systems that were backwardly compatible with the earliest versions of MS-DOS so that people’s investment in software wouldn’t be worthless. It was helpful at the time.

Eventually, even Microsoft had to move on.

My new friends at Earthlink spent hours looking into the problem, sending test emails, asking me to forward email headers to track abusive IP addresses, and have apologized that they can’t just flip a software switch and make my problem go away.

But they wish they could.

Actually, they can, if Earthlink wants to assign some coders to figuring out how to change it’s outdated policy. They’d not only solve my problem, and those of similarly abused users, but they’d lighten the load on their own staff who have enough to deal with trying to figure out which sub-Saharan government official really will give someone 20 percent of the money he’s trying to smuggle out of the country if only someone will give him their bank account number. I jest. It's 15 percent.

Now, with all sorts of internet addresses (both email and world wide web; and you don’t even have to use www anymore in some urls), it’s time for Earthlink to come into the new age.

I want to say: Cut the .com cord. Stop forwarding incorrectly addressed emails. Instead, set up an automatic server response to bounce back those earthlink.com emails with a note that it’s .net, not .com. However, I'm aware that it's probably more complicated than that. After all, how did the spammers get my username in the first place? (It can't be those mail-order Russian bride websites I'm researching for an, uh ... future book.) And why don't spammers just use .net in the first place? Are they so unsophisticated that they make the same .com/.net error Earthlink was originally afraid of? I know it's all about being untraceable -- unlike spammers who actually send junk directly to me. This is just an obfuscatory move. I know it's not personal.

Still, I want it to stop. I think legitimate emailers are smart enough to handle the difference between .net and .com now. And the providers are smart enough to figure out a work-around.