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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.
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
He is not saying he knows of anyone else out of his local coverage area that is having problem. This is not dealing with anything close to the whole North-eastern edge of the USA. If it was then this would be an interesting article. Instead it's ONE guy bitching about his lack of mail for a week. Boohoo.
Hacker Media
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.
50 million people losing power is significant. A guy not able to get his e-mail through a cable provider in Florida is not. I also recall tons of front page articles during the California rolling blackouts. If e-mail is that important to you then register your own domain and setup your own mail system.. or just use hotmail or yahoo for mail. Jesus, if there's anything i've learned it's to NEVER use a cable provider's services for web/dns/mail/usenet... they suck. Use them for bandwidth and find service providers for that shit elsewhere.
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
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.
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
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.