Apparently any email containing a URL to this journal (http://11011110.livejournal.com), even as plain text, is being interpreted as "URL Obfuscation" by the AT&T Research email servers, and permanently blocked. I haven't done enough experiments to tell whether they don't like any URLs, or just not mine, but my guess is that it has something to do with the purely-numeric domain name component.

If gmail shows you an email with an attachment but says "Scanning for viruses..." and won't let you actually open the attachment, try forwarding the problem email. You don't actually have to send the forwarded email anywhere: the new-message composition window for forwarding it will show you the attachment with an accessible link.

Are you using https rather than unsecured http to connect to web mail accounts such as Gmail? You should be. Via Slashdot: unscrupulous ISPs are or will soon be paying attention not just to the sources and destinations of your internet traffic, but also to the content, reading your email and possibly even altering it. A bit of a scare piece but a good excuse to make sure you're taking reasonable precautions.

For the last week my email has been a casualty of the daylight savings time change, so if I've been more than usually unresponsive, that's why. My regular email client wasn't working and I was stuck with a difficult to use webmail system as fallback. Today we finally tracked down the problem. Turns out to be a three-way incompatibility between the department's newly recompiled IMAP server (needed to deal with the time change), Thunderbird 2.0 beta (which I had been using), and SSL (so my password isn't transmitted in the clear). So I'm back to Thunderbird 1.5 and working again.

This mess did convince me to set up a new gmail address: david.eppstein@gmail.com. It's likely that I won't check it as regularly as my department mail address, but it could be useful in the future in case something won't get through my default spam filtering, and I'm leaving it as the default for my LJ notifications.

ETA: I'm very quickly remembering why I switched to the 2.0 beta in the first place. 1.5 has this nasty habit of getting into a state where none of the controls work, not even the quit command, I have to force-quit to get out of it, and I lose whatever email drafts I was working on... 2.0, despite being beta, was much more stable. I was also becoming quite fond of its new "move again" key-command.