Since CathInfo moved to an in-house web server, there has been one downside: e-mail service.

If you signed up for a CathInfo account but weren't able to activate it (because you never received the activation e-mail) you're not alone.

The good news: I'm activating the accounts manually now. So just sign up for your account, and wait a bit. I'll eventually come in and set your account to Male or Female (depending on which gender you chose during sign-up) and that will activate your account at the same time.

The other good news: Every account that has ever been created has been activated. So if you tried "some time back" and didn't get anywhere, try logging in now.

For the nerds out there, here are the details: the problem is that I can't get a reverse DNS record set up for my e-mail server. When various e-mail servers query, "who is this (insert CathInfo's IP address here)? They get the response, "Oh, it's an IP address belonging to a household Internet service provider, GVEC.net" so the server reacts with, "A consumer ISP, eh? So it's some guy running a spam mail server on his laptop? That's not exactly a trustworthy source of e-mail. REJECT!"

And thus all e-mails from my server are rejected by Comcast, AOL, Bellsouth, Att.net, Mail.com, and many others.

I've actually given up on trying to fix this, and for good reason. GVEC.net said they won't set up the reverse DNS (which would fix the problem) for me unless I had a Business Internet account -- which would cost $250/month instead of the current $89/month, and it wouldn't even be as fast! So much for that.