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A Cox Internet Email Outage?
notthere asks: "In Florida, Cox High Speed Internet (the home service) has been having problems with out-of-network emails for almost a week, since that is the date on the latest piece
of email in my Inbox. I contacted Cox tech support this morning. The first responder read a statement to the effect that 'there were some problems, and they do not know when the problems will be fixed.' When I complained and demanded some clear explanation of what the problem was and when the service would resume, she said 'Cox HSI is an entertainment service, so we do not guarantee service. If you want to talk to our people in the business division, I'll be glad to give you their phone number.' I then asked to talk to a manager, who was certainly nicer (he apologized), but offered no answer or projection as to what the problem is and when it will be fixed. Interestingly, the Cox support web page reports no outages." If you use Cox's Internet service, have you recently had trouble connecting to your mail servers?
I've experienced normal service today. In fact, I received an email as I read this very piece! I am in Arkansas though, so it may be a regional issue. Best of luck to you! At least your spam influx has ceased ...
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
I am on central.cox.net servers. Working fine for me. Try using pop.central.cox.net instead of east and see what happens.
What a useless Slashdot story. So your email was down for a day or so. DEAL WITH IT. This is not news, services do go down. My internet connection has been down several times. So has my eletricty. Where is my front page slashdot article?
Hacker Media
pop3 problems it seems with no time to repair.
Looks like they use InterMail pop3 server (telnet pop.east.cox.net 110) and
smtp server
(telnet smtp.east.cox.net 25): 220 lakermmtao11.cox.net ESMTP server (InterMail vM.6.01.03.02 201-2131-111-104-
20040324) ready Mon, 24 May 2004 19:00:55 -0400
(was 4xx too busy a minute ago)
Intermail is/was produced/sold by Openwave
Intermail is no longer available and support has been discontinued. For Openwave email products please visit our Email Mx page.
So, no support.
Indications are that it runs on windows servers.
Draw your own conclusions
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Charter has great ads on TV saying how great their internet service is but the exact same attitude when support is talking about their services.
They tout a 2meg (down only) connection, but you are luckey to see 1/4th of that.
They only provide mail service as an "extra."
Forget having any sort of Perl script, PHP, etc. on your web pages.
Their attitude seems to be that you pay for the bandwidth and bow at their feet for anything else they provide. Like Usenet, Mail, IRC, Web pages, etc.
Connections drop all the time, DHCP servers get reset without causing the client address leases to expire, mail is slow most times, etc.
Forget them ever being pro-active and telling you of planned service outages.
The only difference I have seen, was that Charter screwed up their mail servers certificates and the servers couldnt exchange mail with SOME other servers for months. I had been complaining for a LONG time (as in being on a first name basis with three or folks in their top level tech support group), so they gave me three free months of access.
Charter is a Cable TV company, not an ISP, and it shows. But then again, it was started by Paul Allen, so maybe that explains a lot.
Seems like Cox is in the same boat when it comes to service.
----- Lotus Super 7 - A real car.
Cox. Cocks. Geddit?
WTF are you smoking? Cox == Cox Cable, one of the largest cable companies in North America.
A(lan) Cox may be slow responding to email due to the fact that he is busy getting his MBA. I think the term is near completion, so he may be writing papers and whatnot. In the mean time you may wish to try this processor.
Attention shadfc!
The site you were looking for was NOT ask.slashdot.org, but DSL Reports (Cox HSI forums)
Thank you for your cooperation.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"WTF are you smoking? Cox == Cox Cable, one of the largest cable companies in North America."
And with a clever edit...
"WTF are you smoking? Cox..."
I was a Cox business customer for the last several years, purchased this for their supposed better availability and better support.
Their support "engineers" are typical of many minimum-wage call centers, absolutely useless beyond resetting the modem and verifing TCP/IP settings. When I found that I switched from Cox Business to Cox Residential simply by switching from my assigned static IP to DHCP, I was rather annoyed. How can they guarantee greater uptime for their business network if it all runs over the same hardware? I'm now a Cox Residential customer (I dislike the company, but DSL is not available in my area) and strongly advise against the business service.
I sent my mother an Amazon gift cert for Mother's Day and she never got it.
I asked for them to reissue (and they did after 3 emails, Amazon's CS is getting poorer, too) a week later and she still didn't get it.
My parents have been using Cox for a couple of years (Norman, OK) and I've been able to send them Amazon certs before.
When they checked their SPAM folder they didn't have anything from Amazon at all, but Amazon thinks it went both times.
When she called, my mother was told that they had a problem but it was fixed a couple of days later. It would appear that other parts of Cox (and perhaps all parts) are still having the problem.
To be honest, I was never impressed with Cox when I visited, but they didn't like their DSL experiment so they decided to stick with the cable modem.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I have Cox HSI ... or so they tell me. We're getting 1Mbit cable, but that's not mentioned anywhere on the Cox.com website. But our cable TV provider is Cox! Hmm...
... now back to the email subject. My email is perfectly fine, but I have a cox-internet.com email address, not cox.net. (Another reason I think I'm only getting pseudo-Cox internet.) That could have something to do with it.
Okay
-MrM
I live in California and the problem has existed for over a week on both their east and west email servers. email outbound for their servers has been delayed and in some cases has never arrived.
This affects a SIGNIFICANT amount of Cox's customers.
You did some really interesting, yet wildy inaccurate research. Let me take a minute to explain this confusing tale...
Intermail was a software.com product. There were 2 versions: Intermail KX and Intermail MX. Post.Office was a totally different product, aimed at the "Exchange" market.
There was another company named phone.com that seriously mangled wireless applications such as a WAP proxy, MMS-C and other things that ended up being called MAG - Mobile Application Gateway.
The 2 companies merged (or better yet, collided) and formed Openwave. Intermail KX was killed in favor of Intermail MX. Intermail MX was renamed to be Openwave Email MX. Its a bunch of crappy marketing. Intermail (which is what everyone calls it still, inside openwave and out, as well as the app itself) runs on Sun Solaris. I think there may be support for HP-UX or AIX, but it has always been developed on Sun SPARC.
I work at an ISP that depolyed it (good or bad) about 4 years ago. The real weakness comes in the "MSS" or messagestore. This is the server that actually houses the messages. Looks like COX is running Intermail 6. The system stores the headers in a database and the message bodies as text files in giant filesystems. In Intermail MX 5 the headers were usually stored in an oracle database. This is where I guess, but I think the last DBA quit at openwave, so they decided that they will get better performance using "sleepycat" in imail 6. I call it berkleyDB. bad, bad, bad idea IMHO.
*sigh* With this kind of marketing company (openwave), there isn't a whole lot you can do. It's like telling EMC that their Symmetrix needs X, Y, and Z. You may as well just call Hitachi.
my 2c
It's a shame, considering how top notch their news admins are you'd think they'd hire the same level of email admin.
well,
actually, the current spate of problems dates back to 31 march of this year when they initiated 2 new "features":
1. anti-spam
2. anti-virus.
I have received some credit for my time in having to deal with this (to the tune of 1/3rd of my monthly internet services for the reason: poor QOS).
The biggest problem in all of this: I cannot use anyone elses smtp server based e-mail because cox (in their infinite wisdom) has blocked all access to port 25 except for that which is directed to their e-mail servers. That pretty much means that the so-called "free service" which is e-mail has become, in effect, a "locked-in feature".
One additional point, it seems that cox.net is using a mail service package that hasn't been vendor supported in close to 4 years (this means no tech support and no updates are available). it would be simpler to just convert their entire server farm to a linux/unix based solution and go with avguard for the anti-virus and spamassassin for the spam control 9and use a decent BL such as spamcop). However, it seems they won't do this, even though the TCO for such would be considerably lower, and the QOS (Quality of Service) would improve.
I guess making all that money does funny things to ones common sense, eh?
- Proudhawk (aka Technomage Hawke)
Understanding is much like a 3-edged-sword. in this: there are always 2 sides and the truth.
Keep getting a "server too busy" error on send -- usually if I try about 5-15 times it will go through. Plus their virus scanning "service" is deleting a good portion of my incoming mail from my family (which is scanned on the transmitting side -- so I know it's virus free). I'm done with cox -- as soon as I can get dsl installed they're gone.
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
I don't remember there being any outage. I use the same email server as FL. The closest I came to that was the outage of a third-party NNTP server.
there are apparently some third party email providers around who can do other than port 25 for mail...that should solve your problem, although fwiw it's bound to be in contravention of their rules somehow. However Cox should fix their servers, easy to do as you point out, it's not brain surgery!
They have three servers for their Netcom customers' "free" home pages (i.e., home.netcom.com resolves to three IP addresses in random order (probably for load balancing)).
One of these servers is down, which means that pages are inaccessible one third of the time.
I have complained about it twice within the past two weeks, but nothing has been done.
They just don't seem to care about their customers any more.
Working just fine for me. Just asks me for my password every once in a while, which tells me that the server probably got rebooted or its tokens flushed. I have had a few problems sending mail to cox.net from outside the domain, but the mail gets delivered in about a day. I have been getting the standard 421 Server Busy messages.
I hate sigs.
Outgoing SMTP is broken here in RI, and the bastards block outgoing SMTP to everything except their SMTP servers, which are broken, so I essentially can't send mail right now. Fucking Cox.
Lots of people out there seem to have had connectivity issues with them, but I have to say I've been very impressed with the speed/reliability here in San Diego. I've had Cox now at four different locations (two apartments and two houses) since 1997 (@Home) and haven't had any major problems.
I'm currently peaking at around 3Mbps downstream (256k up -- boo) and haven't had any downtime at all in the last year (that I've been aware of). My last apartment had about 3 days of downtime in 15 months.
Their email, on the other hand, has never been particularly wonderful. I'm forced to use their SMTP server due to port 25 blocking (they really don't have a choice in implimenting blocking, after all the abusive users and WinDrones out there), and it's been OK. I've never used their incoming email simply because I've never needed to -- I have too many email addresses as it is. To you guys that do, I'm sorry. (I gladly accepted their $20 Amazon GC mea culpa though!)
The impression I get is that connectivity service varies dramatically by city, but in 3 different areas of Greater San Diego (SD, La Mesa, El Cajon), I've been quite pleased. And for the record, I work for two of their competitor ISPs in the city.
My two cents.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,