Yahoo resolves problem with Minnesota ISP -- finally

Q I am an Internet user who has been annoyed by an e-mail problem with Yahoo. For the past several weeks, Yahoo's spam filter has been blocking e-mails from our region's main Internet provider, Paul Bunyan Telephone. Efforts to contact Yahoo have not been successful. What can we do?

REBECCA SNYDER, BEMIDJI, MINN.

A Your problem was solved this week. But for most of April, Yahoo blocked e-mail originating from Paul Bunyan's more than 10,000 Internet customers in northern Minnesota -- for no clear reason.

Paul Bunyan had been frustrated, not just because it believed the blockage was unjustified, but because it was taking so long for Yahoo to fix things despite the phone company's requests, said Brian Bissonette, a Paul Bunyan spokesman in Bemidji.

Standard practice between Internet service providers is for one to block the other's e-mail to stop an onslaught of spam -- usually originating from a PC that's been secretly taken over by Internet hackers. But such problems are normally solved in a few hours, or at most a day, Bissonette said.

I called and e-mailed Yahoo, which responded a week later -- the day after it had quit blocking Paul Bunyan's e-mail. So, did I solve your problem? I have no idea.

Q When I tried to back up music to my external hard drive, I kept getting this message: "Would you like the replace the existing file, 01 Intro, 664KB, modified Thursday Nov. 15, 2007, with this one, 135KB, modified Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2007." How can I stop this message from showing up?

A You might want to heed that warning. It says you are trying to overwrite an existing song file that has 664,000 bytes of data with a newer song file that has the same name, but only 135,000 bytes of data. That means you may be overwriting one song with an entirely different one.

If you click "yes," the newer and smaller file will replace the older and larger one. If you click "yes to all," you might be doing the same thing with a large number of song files that have duplicate file names.

Listen to both sets of songs to see if you want to erase one to save the other. If you want to save both the existing song and the new one, simply rename the ones you've already stored, or the ones you want to save. To rename a song, left-click the song file to highlight it, right-click it to pull up the menu, and select "rename." Of course, if you rename a song, you'll have reimport it to a music program such as iTunes.