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?

Comments

Normal Service

[sithkhan]

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 ...

No problems in central

[XBL]

I am on central.cox.net servers. Working fine for me. Try using pop.central.cox.net instead of east and see what happens.

They admitted it now

[samjam]

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

Taking a hit for the team.

[Ayanami Rei]

Attention shadfc!

The site you were looking for was NOT ask.slashdot.org, but DSL Reports (Cox HSI forums)

Thank you for your cooperation.

Cox is rarely honest

[bobthemuse]

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.

re: A Cox Internet Email Outage?

[proudhawk]

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)