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Comcast Blocks Yet Another ISPs E-Mail
Nom du Keyboard writes, "Last week Comcast shutdown e-mail forwarding from NameZero entirely. People who have bought private domain names (i.e. yourname@yourdomain.com) and have e-mail forwarding to their current Comcast e-mail account through NameZero aren't receiving it any longer. No warnings — no e-mail. Now, again without warning, they've blocked out The Well, one of the oldest ISPs on the net. And nobody can get through to the Comcast people in charge of this to discuss the issue with them. Not the ISPs being blocked. Not the customers who pay Comcast to deliver e-mail to them. Comcast says they're protecting 10M customers from spam. I am a current Comcast broadband customer and I feel I should have the right to whitelist and receive e-mail from whomever I designate. I don't want as much protection as Comcast is giving me. Is it a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever I desire, or does Comcast have the right to censor as they wish?" Last week Comcast was also blocking mail from alum.mit.edu. I (probably among many others) left a complaint on the phone line identified in bounce messages; the block was eventually lifted.
Mr. Anonymous sez:
Not to be snarky, but there's your problem right there.
Hopefully, you have some sort of alternative broadband provider. I humbly suggest you show Comcast what you think of them with your dollars and avail yourself of one of the alternatives.
I myself put up with Comcast's antics for quite a while (longer than I intended, actually):
When I first resolved to switch to WOW, I waited all day for the installer, who was a no-show. When I called to complain, I was told that the installer had in fact shown up, and I was the no-show. I knew this was a lie since not only was I in the house the entire day, the installer failed to tag the door as a no-show (you cable installers out there know what I'm talking about). I was so incensed by this that I cancelled my order, and remained with Comcast for another three whole months. But, eventually, I was forced to switch, after Comcast upped its rates yet again, and tried to make me pay for a service call to replace one of their defective converters.
I'm with WOW now, and I haven't looked back. Service is far superior, and I'm paying $40 less per month. Ditch Comcast...you'll feel better.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
They shouldn't. Oh well, blame it on trying to be nice for their customers.
they're protecting 10M customers from spam
I'm all for blocking spam, but this doesn't sound like a way to reduce spam - it sounds like runaway stupidity. Spamcop makes a lot more sense. Maybe they do that already, and it wasen't enough.
They may want to adjust that "10M customers" figure in the near future.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Thank God I don't have them anymore. One time it took two weeks to convince them to send a technician out since they told me the problem was on my end and not the street. Turns out that the last technician who worked on the street box installed the part backwards. Go figure.
Is there some way to find out who a specific ISP is blocking at any given time? I am thinking specifically of Comcast (since it affects me), but if there is a general repository of this information it would be nice to know about also.
No.
e-mail is not a 'right'.
You are free to terminate your service contract with Comcast and stop paying them, of course.
I am working for a CLEC here in NH.
You might know the type. Quality internet access with low latency.
Public IPs available for customers and no firewall to speak of.
A support staff that will support your linux gateway and be pleased
to see you using it. Yup, you can run your own dns and smtp servers.
Please comcast, keep screwing your customer base.
Drive away the power users to us.
thanks,
matt
Is it a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever I desire
No. Next question?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have a feeling that it's a lot more than just two ISPs.
Ever since spam became a major nuisance, every of the ISP's I've used have instituted spam-blocking... and the nature of the block will vary from time to time, and they never tell you exactly what they're doing or what's being blocked or what you should do about it. Most of the time it's fairly reasonable, but I've suffered numerous multi-day "outages" during which overzealous spam filtering blocked messages from friends. Since the chances of learning about a blocked message is very small unless it's someone you're in regular non-email contact with, I'll bet that there have been a hundred valid messages blocked for every one that I know about.
What I don't understand is why ISP's can't send me an email every few days listing the subject lines and senders of everything they've blocked, with a link to click on to retrieve the blocked messages.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I am a comcast subscriber (get over it. It's my only choice.) and as with all my past ISP's I've found their email service to be poor so I do the intelligent thing and use an email service that doesn't suck. That is why there are so many out there, lots of competition makes for good service. Go out and choose one.
Sorry my bullshit sensor overloaded.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Find someone else to run your e-mail. pobox.com, for example, is fairly cheap. I run my own mail on a colo box and choose my own spam 'rules'.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Horseshit... I called Comcast to complain about the amount of spam I was getting from a single domain. Previously I had (or remember having) a method to block email as I chose. Now they're telling me to use filtering rules? Way to protect me there thanks. You can't whitelist you can't blacklist and your dynamic ip isn't so dynamic. Comcast doesn't care. The Abuse@spammers has been more helpful than my own isp. But thats okay because they blacklisted The Well whom Ive never recieved a normal message from let alone spam.
Dreamhost (my hosting provider) is having the same problem. Check out the excellent summary of the situation in this blog entry.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I've been slowly blocking out Comcast's virus-infected customers using iptables. I receive spam, analyze it to find the IP address of where it came from, whois that IP address, and then simply block the CIDR address covering that range of users. Lately most of the spam I've been receiving is from Comcast IPs along with other large cable companies (RoadRunner, Adelphia, Cogent, Sprint, etc), and I'm very happy with the resulting reduced load on that machine.
Thanks spammers! You've helped me build a very effective spam firewall!
A contract is an agreement whereby two parties exchange consideration. One party's consideration might be a promise to pay money now or in the future. The other party's consideration might be a promise to provide a service, such as email.
When you form a contract with another party, you earn a "right" to receive the consideration from them that you bargained for.
Amazingly enough, courts will actually enforce this right. I'll be around in case you need any more corrections of your obviously wrong assumptions. Thank you.
Dreamhost.com, the company that hosts a website and e-mail for the bussiness I work for, has also had their forwards blocked by comcast this week. The funny thing is, gmail gets way more forwards from dreamhost and they don't have a problem filtering spam. Comcast said that the majority of the mail recieved from dreamhost is spam, which is not true. Here is the message dreamhost users recieved... Comcast forwards to be disabled, and AOL Update Posted 21 hours, 36 minutes ago (August 30th, 2006 at 2:40 pm PST) by Karl Today we have some good news, and bad news! We've been contacted by someone very helpful at AOL and I think we have that problem squared away, at least for now. There have been no further blocks and the AOL contact has indicated that our thresholds for blocking are much higher now. We're waiting for a bit to see whether this will solve the problem long-term, and are looking at implementing some suggestions they have made in the meantime to ensure that we can hopefully stay on their good side. We still won't be allowing new AOL forwards or forwards that have been removed to be re-added, but the existing ones won't be disabled for the time being. I still recommend setting up a local mailbox rather than forwarding any mail if possible, as forwards of any type add a potential failure point in your email's path. Now, for the bad news -- Comcast has become an increasing problem in the last two weeks and is now completely denying our unblock requests. As a result: In 7 days, on Wednesday, September 6th, we will be disabling all forwards to @comcast.net addresses. As a bit of background: Comcast blocks are atypical from the others that we've been having problems with in that they last indefinitely until unblocked manually. Unlike AOL blocks (which phase out automatically after 24 hours - though may reappear) someone has to flip a switch over there for any future mail to go through. The unfortunate part is that they have zero human availability and all we get from their blacklist email address are auto-responses -- either the IP is automatically unblocked, or the unblock is denied and the phone number of their abuse/security department is given. Unfortunately, this phone number is a completely unmanned voicemail drop-box. We've left no less than six messages on their voicemail in the last couple months, and despite numerous requests we have never received a phone call back or an email response. We're not even asking that they remove the blacklist -- we're simply asking for more information on why the IPs were blocked, and for a sampling of the typical spam they are supposedly getting from us! In fact, the only response we can get from them (if we get one at all) is an automated form message saying that "most of the email" received from our IPs is spam, which we know, in fact, is false. Again we regret that this decision had to be made, but we're currently wasting a great deal of time answering complaints regarding Comcast blacklists, not to mention calling and emailing Comcast to have those blacklists removed (unsucessfully) -- and they are a very small fraction of our total email forwards. For reference, our number of Comcast forwards is 1/12 of our GMail forwards, and GMail gives us zero problems while somehow managing to filter mail very well for its user base. For the people who have Comcast forwards set up, I recommend that you remove them yourself and set up a local DreamHost user where mail can be downloaded via client software or checked via webmail. You can edit the destination of an email address by going to "Mail" -> "Manage Email" on the left-hand side in the DreamHost control panel, and click on "Edit" next to the email address in question. If you have difficulty with this, please contact support. Next week, for those addresses that don't have an alternate recipient other than a Comcast forward, we will create a local email account for mail to be routed to, so that nothing is lost. Posted in Email Changes I will never sign up with comcast after seeing how much of this they are using. And to block The Well, that's too much. Besides pushing for the different levels of internet, this is one more reason to drop comcast.
(Speaking of smugness, could one of you irritating grammar dorks tell me whether the possesive apostrophe in ""netizen"'s" goes inside or outside the closing scare quote?)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Is it spelled out in the contract that they will block some traffic addressed to you?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They can't send you the subjects of the e-mails because they don't have them. Blocklists are often IP address based. If a connection comes in to the mail server from a forbidden address, the connection is forcibly hung up without receiving any data.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
With the availability and increasing quality of 3rd party email services such as .mac (Pay for) and gmail (Free) (Not to mention yahoo, hotmail etc...) I can't imagine ISP based email for home/personal use remaining relevant in the comming years.
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
You should know something is up if their entire ad campaign is just mud slinging. I'm a current comcrap subscriber, and have every service they offer with the exception of digital voice. The voice plan, btw, is 40 bucks in my area. VOIP, however, is much cheaper.
I've had nothing but problems for the last several month, including with receiving the credits they offer me for my frustrations. I'm moving in 7 weeks, and I will never again be a comcrap subscriber.
A few examples of their misdeads:
Installer couldn't figure out how to hook up component video.
"on Demand" rarely works, and is slow when it does.
Three motorola boxes that didn't work.
Cable internet occasionally takes the night off, and frequently takes potty breaks (about ever 1-2 nights).
Ditch the Box before it's too late.
PS: That is what part of the alphabet would look like if the letters "Q" and "R" were removed.
Is it a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever I desire, or does Comcast have the right to censor as they wish?"
Comcast has the right to do whatever the fuck they want with their own network, as long as it is within the TOS contract you signed (which it probably was since it likely said they can change it at will with little to no notice). Also, you as a consumer have the right to ditch Comcast for any other ISP you want (assuming again you weren't locked into a TOS contract). Welcome to capitalism.
What you say? You have no other options for high speed in your area, or you have to keep your @comcast.com email address since it is not portable? Welcome to monopolies.
/ http://suffocate.us
/ http://johngrayson.com
They can't send you a list of "blocked" messages, because they probably don't HAVE the messages in the first place.
Most of the really effective anti-spam systems rely on "blackhole" lists (like Spamhaus), and greylisting. Both of which simply drop the message before it is even delivered to your inbox.
I work for an ISP, and the spam problem is so bad that if you have to block a non-trivial amount of legitimate mail in order to block a HUGE amount of spam, then that's a more than fair trade-off. There is simply NO WAY to effectively block the junk without block quite a bit of real mail. At least, not on an ISPs e-mail server. "Private" mail servers are a different story.
I live out in the woods, too far for DSL, and comcast has the only wires capable of broadband (unless I want to get a T1 from Verizon).
:-) will provide your ISP services in place of comcast. So, my email isn't being filtered by comcast. BTW, since I only have broadband service, I'm paying something like $42/month (I own my own cable modem). The billing is all handled by comcast; but I have an earthlink IP address and name service.
But, Earthlink (which doesn't suck mostly
The only problem's I've encountered were when Comcast "forgot" and (I assume) caused the DHCP server to give me a comcast IP address instead of a Earthlink one. Then, I couldn't connect to the earthlink email server...
BTW, I also have an alum.mit.edu email address that is set to forward to my
earthlink address; AFAIK, there were no bounces or glitches.
Comcast black listed IEEE accounts as well for a while. Morons.
Like others, I'm on Comcast cable, and I don't really have a choice for another broadband provider.
My question is this:
What geek (or even normal user) actually uses the email address that the ISP gives them? If I have to change providers and then change my email address, too, that's a ton of work. Why not just have separate entities for Internet access and email service? This really doesn't affect me, since I use Gmail.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
What I don't understand is why ISP's can't send me an email every few days listing the subject lines and senders of everything they've blocked, with a link to click on to retrieve the blocked messages
Because ISPs don't block IP blocks because they're trying to protect you from spam. They block IP blocks because they're trying to reduce the load on their incoming mail server (and save costs). Implementing a system that tags spam and sends you subject lines would cost money.
The real problem is that email is seen as a loss leader. Everyone expects an ISP to provide email, but they can't charge really anything for it as it's become a commodity. Thus many ISPs try to chince out and provide the bare minimum service. Basically if you want good email service sign up with a service that only does email. I run my own mail server, but I've had good luck with fastmail.fm. Let the ISP provide internet connectivity only and let someone that knows how to do email provide email service.
AccountKiller
This is just another blacklisting implementing the flavor of the day. This "flavor of the day" is now blacklisting not the origin of the spam but the last server/ISP/hop of the spam to the recipients.
Spamcop starting doing this a while back in their list. They, now, ban you not if you sent the spam but if the spam was forwarded from you or was the result of an autoresponder (spamcop therefore has said you should not use any autoresponders at all--"you should have a co-worker answer your email when you are gone" (How's that for privacy?)). Spammers send to email addresses with autoresponders or spam filters which bounce the email back to the return address--the return address--which is faked--is now the intended spam recipient. Therefore if your server/ISP/spam filter is setup to reject spam you will be targeted now and included in spam listings.
So, if you don't do anything and spam flows through you, you are on the list. If you actively reject spam, you might make the list. This is just going to get worse before it gets better. And good luck getting any information from a blacklist--they actively will not tell you the reason for the listing anymore because then (as they say) "spammers will use that information." Gee, doesn't help you fix any problems does it (if even you have a problem )?
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Sometimes, this happens simply because ISPs are making use of automated blacklists downloaded nightly (or at least regularly) from the net.
The blacklists are good, but not perfect - and it can be really difficult to get your domain removed from one once it's mistakenly put there.
For example, my workplace started having problems with customers reporting their emails to us were getting bounced back as undeliverable. It turned out it was because the consulting firm that sells us our T1 line and spam filtering for our mail became a target of spammers. Spammers apparently got upset that they were being so efficiently filtered out by these people, so they started filing *their* IP address range as a source of spam with the blacklists. It took them weeks to get it removed again, so they had to route our incoming mail through other hosts in the meantime.
I gave up a few lines into reading your magnum opus because it's just about impossible to read. If you want people to read your brilliant contribution to this site, split up your text into paragraphs next time you post.
Thank you...
From personal experience the 'net needs protection from Comcast's virus-ridden customers more than the latter need protection from the rest of the net.
The real question to me is why this kind of domain filtering happens at the ISP level. It's one thing to have good contextual filters but filtering domains, especially ones that are by in large legitimate, seems draconian. My ISP uses SpamAssassin to identify spam, tags e-mails as such, and sends a message through to me which tells me what has been filtered (and why), offering me a chance to view the message anyway if I so choose. It's not perfect, of course, but I don't think any spam filter can be perfect.
If a consumer (sysadmin or individual user) wants to apply domain filters to e-mail, that option is available in most e-mail programs and it's pretty easy to set up.
I might have to use Comcast when I move in about a month, and I dread that eventuality. I'd far and away prefer DSL+satellite to take care of my Internet and TV needs.
We've been blocking comcast for 3-4 years now. One of our MX's has rejected over 120 mails with rdns in the comcast.net zone since logs rotated at 12 AM local on Sunday morning. This compares with around 90 rejected for having rdns in the verizon zone. The MX in question is our public facing departmental server, it only accepts mail for non-public email addresses and yet we reject around 3000 msgs a week with legitimate mail around 10% of the reject figure. It's pretty fucking hypocritical of witless spamming fucks like Comcast to block others when they can't even manage their own customers.
ISP's attempt to block spam before the spam arrives in their network. If they can block it (ie a specific mail server is a known spam source, so block the IP via a realtime blacklist) this reduces the bandwidth to receive the message, the cpu cycles to do a spam/virus scan and the resources to store the message.
For my private company mail servers, they end up averaging about 60%-80% of all incoming mail is SPAM. I'd expect with larger ISPs, such as AOL and Comcast, this ratio is even worse -- perhaps 4 spams or more for every 1 legitimate mail (or greater) due to being a much larger target for things like distributed mail campaigns, dictionary-based mailings, etc.
So this is a HUGE problem. Unfortunately it is getting worse with no real tangable solution available. As a result, spam filtering is getting more agressive and false positives are more common.
..... everyone knows Comcast and Beelzebub are bound at the hip. God, how I loath Comcast. My building in downtown Denver sports 'free internet'. Oboy. Gotta love those 2000ms ping times. Makes Qwest look positively angelic (btw, freakin' great service, Qwest. These days....). That's it. Dance w/ satan, and whaddayawant?? skeezix....
--I do what I can, I work in the dark.
I recently found out that all of my emails coming from Blockbuster (for the monthly subscription service) were being blocked as spam. I ended up logging into my comcast webmail and noticed that a new spam filter was turned on and set to automatically delete any message that it thought was spam (instead of moving it to a folder). I have since turned off the filter completely but it sounds like I still may not be getting all of my mail if there is a higher up block.
My ISP SBC/Yahoo's spam filtering sucks so utterly that I would find it pointless to forward mail FROM somewhere to my SBC/Yahoo account. No email sent to my SBC/Yahoo account is ever read. Apparently Comcast's spam filtering is run by morons too, so why bother to forward TO your ISP?
My mail gets forwarded via Godaddy to Gmail. Godaddy does a halfway decent job filtering out most of the junk and Gmail handles the rest. The idea being to forward TO the agent with the most effective spam filtering.
The Well has a pretty good reputation, and I would expect them to be fairly adept at spam filtering, and have decent customer support. Why forward backwards?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I gather both NameZero and alum.mit.edu are services for redirecting e-mail?
I've found e-mail redirection to be a huge problem with spam reporting when the users reporting spam don't understand how reporting works. In particular, a lot of people out there using spamcop don't set up any Mailhost configurations even when they're forwarding/redirecting mail across domains. This means users end up reporting their own ISPs in cases where that ISP is the last verifiable hop in the Received: headers before the account where users actually read their mail.
Things are much worse with AOL, where there's apparently no provision for customers' letting their system know that e-mail is being redirected to them from somewhere else.
What about a tarpit? Or Teergrube, if you prefer?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't know what everyone's so upset about, from what I hear their service is nothing short of Comcastic!
While critism of comcast's current antics are certainly warrented, as an ISP they have provided the most reliable and high bandwidth service in my area, out doing AT&T's t1s as far as reliability ( with a sample of 2 years ).
Sure, they are also damned expensive ( at 50-60 bucks a month ), but there is no reasonable alternative otherwise. AT&T/sbc/mabell doesn't count as reasonable.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I have Comcast, but I've never used their email account, so this isn't a problem. All my email goes to a variety of gmail accounts. I can't think of a good reason why I would want to use the Comcast account anyway.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
My dad just got his first email address (i know, i know) with yahoo mail, and excitedly emailed his brother, a comcast member. Bounce.
Comcast is blocking a whole range of yahoo IP addresses. I've emailed them three times asking them to open up the whole block, but they won't do it, they'll only open up each IP i send them individually.
Moo.
and with net neutrality issues. If they are not blocking it for a bonafide technical problem like DDoS or spam, they lose their common carrier status until everything is resolved to perfect legality. Then, let the lawsuits and prosecutions of the ISP commence in the mean time.
That will teach them to play king maker.
For those unfortunate souls who would be relegated to dialup if it weren't for Comcast, I suggest that you do not rely on Comcast's email services. Free mail services, such as Google mail, while not particularly privacy-oriented (can one expect privacy of emails??) offers pop3 over SSL and doesn't appear to suffer from blockages as of yet. I can't remember if the SMTP service supports SSL, but if it does, it may not be blocked by Comcast. Otherwise, you can still use Comcast's SMTP service.
Send your ISP a message by not relying on their email service. If enough people do this and complain, they will certainly get the message.
They like to protect their customers from spam, yet they allow spammers to constantly use their servers and IP's to spam people.
Sounds like someone there needs to read the RFC standards and rules on email systems.
I don't know about your spam filters, but if mail comes in from comcast to our mail servers, it's an automatic 2 point tic on their spam scores...that's the default.
As the sysadmin of an outfit who provides email news letters for sports teams and leagues, the blockheaded nature of "spam control" major ISPs implement these days is quite frustrating. On a daily basis, we deal with Subscriber Subset A who decide they no longer like their hometown's minor league baseball team and click the "This is Spam" button in their pretty little ISP-GUI inboxes (AOL, *cough*). This, in turn, causes ISPs to freak and rate limit us until the cows come home. Meanwhile, Subscriber Subset B missed last nights game and is irate that they did not receive the Game Notes and Box Score. While we are dealing with our clients complaints, the ISP has already contacted our upstream provider who is now threatening to unplug not only our SMTP box, but our entire WWW pool.
And, hell if I'm going to pay GoodMail for beans. Sigh...
I run a small web host and one of our users complained about their mail no longer forwarding last week. I contacted comcast at the address provided in the bounces and got a response within half an hour.
From: abuse-noreply@comcast.net
Date: August 22, 2006 12:10:25 PM EDT
Subject: Comcast.net Blacklist Removal Response
Please do not reply to this message.
This is to notify you that your request for removal from the
comcast.net blocklist has been received.
The following IPs were found within your request. Below each one,
we've included the results of our research.
38.xxx.xxx.xxx
The IP you previously provided has been removed from the
Comcast.net blocklist.
After review of the blocking, the IP you submitted was found to
have been blocked due to the fact that the majority of the traffic
from that IP contained content indicative of spam. If you are not
aware of the traffic that could have caused this, we recommend a
review of your outbound mail logs and ensuring that all computers
connecting to through the submitted IP are clear of any security
exploits.
Thank You
Comcast Network Abuse and Policy Observance
As a professional spammer and a comcast member, I feel I have the right to white-list whomever I want for whatever reason I want too. But I guess thats why I (and the author) aren't in charge of security at Comcast.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
or
to help out with the communication a bit.
Really. Try it! No extra charge.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
|Is it a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever |I desire, or does Comcast have the right to censor as they wish?"
I am not sure we have a "right" to broadband but I wont get off track on that. . .
Good grief! With all the solutions out there the best thing they can come up with is this? Sounds like they need to get some different people on the spam team!
My Son-in-law runs a political web site, AfterDowningstreet.org. He found that all of his emails were being blocked because he included a link to the web site in his signature. Subsequent investigation showed that Semantic had been hired by Comcast to do filtering. They were invoking filtering on very flimsey compliants. There were no warnings or indications that mail had been blocked, other than people called him and told him that they had not received expceted communications. Eventually the block was removed; but, not before they had caused plenty of trouble.
It should be pointed out that Comcast uses the Brightmail/Symantec system
for spam filtering. So if they're dumping legit mail, so are probably all of
Symantec's other customers: Hotmail, Earthlink, MSN, etc.
Do not pay Comcast any money and move your ISP to another provider.
However, when they block those senders for all of their customers, without prior consent, then they are overstepping their bounds.
I fail to understand why ISPs have taken it upon themselves to dictate who is a "legitiamte" sender, and who is a "spammer". There are many 3rd party anti-spam services whom people pay to do that. Provided, they don't catch everything, but most people will agree that some false postives are better than getting cut off completely because their contact's address falls within a certain sender domain determined (by who knows) to be a "spamming" sender.
I can understand ISPs protecting their bandwidth, but blocking entire email domains is the worst way to do it. Invest some infrastructure in smart technology, etc. Otherwise, you might as well start with "aol.com" if you plan to stop spammers the old-fashioned way.
It's Comcastic!
Or even better Gmail for your domain. https://www.google.com/a/
TODO create witty sig.
I used to be a comcast subscriber.
They have a unique way of dealing with their customers.
One day after I got home from work and wanted to check the news I found my internet was down. This was upsetting as my phones were going through the cable modem and I had recently gotten vongo. I didn't think it too out of the ordinary their reliability wasn't great. I got out the cell phone and started calling customer support. Half an hour later I managed to get that there was positively no technical problems in my area. 20 Minutes and 2 supervisors later I found out my account was blocked. In order to do anything to fix my account I had to call the abuse dept. Aptly named that it was, the abuse dept abuses you. Calling them got me a tape recording telling me to leave a message and they would get back to me in one to 3 days. A day later I get a call from them. The abuse people, tell me I have been using the service too much. This was based on the average use in my area. No mention was made of this when I had it installed, nor in the advertising when I bought their "Always on service". Anyway I was told my account would be back in half an hour and I should curb my usage. Oddly enough my account didn't come back.
The following is not moral or ethical but it was immensely enjoyable. I called direct tv and had them install a system with a tivo at the earliest. I let comcast run up their bill to the max and when the direct tv was installed I took comcasts equipment down to the recycling center.
Comcast treats its customers like crap. They do so because they have a monopoly. If you can attend a Public service meeting town council or whatever your municipality uses to call them to task.
I think the last one got dropped from the final draft following heavy lobbying at the Continental Congress.
13 years ago my buddy recommended that I seperate my
bandwidth provider and email provider.
I need to call him and say thanks again!
The area I'm in, it's either comcast cable, or bellsouth dsl. for speed, in this area comcast is better, not to mention my IP never changes without paying extra for static. BUT! When I called to say that my server could not email to a comcast subscriber, they try to say my server is the issue and make up excuses as to why my server might not be sending correctly.
As soon as another provider gets here in my area, or bellsouth gets cheaper for the same bandwidth, I'm sticking with them.
Okay, in a forum about spam, you post the email address of a guy who doesn't know much about computers.
Was that so he would get flooded with spam and give up the account? Or is that "email addresses have been changed to protect the innocent"?
You're right about the normal users though. Hard to deal with.
There's an incredibly simple solution to this, and it seems to me that smaller shops (the type where the sysadmins call the sysadmin shots) are heading in this direction:
Email is never blocked, but simply cleaned and labeled.
- If it contains some sort of known malware, that file is quarantined before sending on the email.
- If it's "obviously" spam, then *******SPAM******* is prepended to the subject.
- If an html link appears to be a phishing attempt (tagged url doesn't match href url or similar) then it's put in plaintext with a warning
It's easy and simple. Yes, you need to slightly educate your users, but if you intelligently modify the subject or body it really shouldn't be a problem.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I use Namezero and I was wondering why i didn't receive a single email in the last 5 days. I see why now.
I'm going to call Comcast assholes and complain.
No company's perfect! http://malfy.org/
I am absolutely sure that a large proportion of your customers would vehemently disagree with you. Recieving junk mail is an annoyance. Not receiving non-trivial amounts of potential important legitimate mail is a show-stopper.
I take it you give your customers the ability to opt in and out of your shonky anti-spam system?
Anyone else start getting a banner ad at the bottom of their channel guide with Comcast digital cable? As of Tuesday night, I now have lost about a fifth of the screen, an entire channel row, to a big ugly ad. It's even better that the ad changes every time I page up or page down.....gahhhhh.
Google up what you can find on the old Usenet Death Penalty.
Get the affected ISP's admins, and who ever is sympathetic to their cause, and black hole * from Comcast.
Don't just do it, tell them you're doing it, and tell the press. When the press gets word that an ISP is being shunned as a bad neighbor, they climb all over it.
It took a dozen people issuing cancels for all messages originating from UUNet, and 3 people talking to the press about it, 4 days to force Worldcom to change their corporate policy with regards to their downstream customers' behavior. I'll always treasure the 10 minute fabulously obscene rant I got from John Sidgemore over it. Nor will I forget his VP and cheif scientist literally crying on the phone asking us to lift it. Sidgemore must have been a bitch to work for.
That was a 4.5 G$ US company. They live on their profit and loss statements, and how those affect their stock prices. Those stock prices are extremely sensitive to loud blasts of bad news.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I am a current Comcast broadband customer...
Hopefully, you have some sort of alternative broadband provider. I humbly suggest you show Comcast what you think of them with your dollars and avail yourself of one of the alternatives.
We don't all have a choice in who we get broadband from. My ISP is Earthlink but it's through Time Warner, now Comcast. I had wanted dsl but I don't think it's available where I live. A few weeks back I got a form letter from Comcast saying about how their looking foreward to serving their broadband customers and was improving the service. I didn't know what it was all about until a few days later I was told Comcast bought Time Warners operations here, guess I don't pay enogh attention to local news. Now I'm waiting for the price of broadband wireless that is mobile, WiMax, to drop.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The issue with The Well has already been taken care of.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
They're a forwarding service rather than an ISP, and they have an enlightened spam block system that tells you what it's blocked and lets you allow things through. They're been outstandingly reliable about delivery, as well.
FYI E-Mail, is communication, and is covered by the first amendment. That however only protects against governmental infingement. Private citizens and corps. are allowed to block etc. if they wish.
Comcast is a US corporation. The notion that they are trying to protect their customers from spam is ridiculous. Is it possible that less traffic through their systems saves them money? Do you suppose they will pass that savings on the their customer base or their shareholders? Eventaully, if a Comcast user wants to get email from anywhere, the sender will have to be a Comcast customer as well. Comast will continue to whittle away at the allowed list of ISPs until they are the only ones left on their network, at least where pop3 is concerned. I would not be too shocked if going to the gmail site becomes impossible eventually. Modern US corporations have no impetus to be concerned with the welfare of their customer base (Qwest's refusal to play ball with the government notwithstanding). Too many citizens can't think for themselves anymore. Weren't there many people saying that all those worrying about losing net neutrality were so many Chicken Littles? Perhaps not after all, and actions like this will continue and calls for accountability of such unilateral actions will go unheeded.
Sure, I may be "Conspiracies-R-Us," but I see no reason to trust any entity holding so much power whose primary motivation is profit, and is allowed to engage in the most egregious behavior with what often amounts to a free pass from the federal government.
For those unfortunate souls who would be relegated to dialup if it weren't for Comcast, I suggest that you do not rely on Comcast's email services.
Yep! It's best to treat email service and your ISP as two different entities. It makes it easy to drop your ISP if you need to. This could mean using any number of the free or inexpensive email services available or simply registering your own domain with a company like pair.com and having even more control over your email service.
On comcast - no one at home uses their email anyway. Its surprising that they blocked alum.mit.edu even for a while. Any ideas on why?
I'm surprised this is so much of a problem - how many people are going to be affected by this. At home all of us use the university email. I don't even use the comcast smtp since our department offers it. I've got Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and rediffmail. All of the above let you see what they've marked as spam atleast and you can whitelist it. They really ought to give you that option. Heck even label the damn thing ***SPAM*** and I can use a filter to dump it into a seperate folder and sort through it later. I'm all for blocking spam but you can block it intelligently and give users some control over it. I don't know any email provider that gives you a resason as to why email is marked as spam and frankly I don't care. Most of the time they are right and I can catch the rare false positives. I'd let any email provider censor as they wish if they are doing it intelligently and allowing me to whitelist. If Comcast doesn't then there are hundreds of others out there. I'd be happy to send you a Gmail invite if you really want.
This is more stupid company does stupid thing that is frustrating for a while but will get sorted out when enough people complain. Yes in an ideal world the GP would have a right to intelligent service which is basically all hes asking for. This sort of thing is not going to do any lasting damage and can be sorted out quickly. Just get a few more people to complain.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
I used to use Direcway before they were bought our by Hughesnet. They used to provide a message once a day that was just what you discribed. They listed the sender of the message and the subject. If you wanted to release it, they provided a link to a webpage that displayed all of your blocked messages. There you could release or delete the messages. After 30 days the messages were automagically deleted.
I also use and have used several products by different vendors that allow that very thing to be done. It is not hard and once the time is spent to set it up, it just works. It is not perfect and occasionally things get through, but I can deal with those.
You toss around "right to censor" as if Comcast were a fourth branch of government. If you don't like it than leave.
Browsing through the comments I'm thinking people are missing the bigger picture here.
I know that Roadrunner blocks email from all of the static IP addresses from my local cable provider without even sending anyone a message, poof - the email just disappears into the ether without so much as a by your leave.
Maybe Comcast has crappy service and/or incompetant technicians but what they are doing amounts to the regulation of free speech. If we all just accept this then how can we trust that we are getting all of the email that is destined for our mailboxes? If we can't trust that all email sent to us through our ISP is getting to us then how can anyone depend on email at all? We might as well go back to using the telephone or physically meeting with people. And I hate dealing with people.
Is it possible that Comcast could be limiting our freedom to associate with whomever we want? I mean, I trust my phone company, I know they wouldn't limit my ability to call other people or give away all of my calling details to say the government despite it being a federal offense or expressly against my wishes. Maybe someone has asked Comcast to just stop emails from certain domains, like nytimes.com or truthout.org, iraq.com or nasa.com. Would we really know?
Can anyone here really tell me that an email they didn't know they were getting didn't get to their inbox? Maybe this has been happening for a while now? Maybe I'm a crazy conspiracy theorist, but if someone was censoring what email gets to people's inboxes wouldn't you think this was how it would start?
Yeah, I'm sure it's Comcast's incompetence and not a freedom of speech thing. Anyone seen where I left my shiny new hat?
JtK
Here's a brief rundown of the story:
- Guy notices his phones aren't working
- Guy calls in Comcast to get phones fixed
- Comcast line tech digs up a buried cable
- Comcast line tech chops the aforementioned cable into little tiny bits
- Comcast line tech marches into the house and hurls abuse at the guy's wife
I have to admit, destroying someone's property, then screaming at his wife.. that's a good one. Obviously the tech was too much of a coward to actually confront the guy about it, and instead opted to throw abuse at his wife instead....It's an interesting story - at least read the messages from the OP before replying, he mentions a lot of important stuff later on (for instance, the cable was actually a private LAN cable and wasn't wired up to the DSL at all)...
Like others, I run my own mail server and have never used my comcast email account. Frack, I don't even know what my "username" is since I use them solely for connectivity... a situation that can cause interesting problems when I need to make a service call.
Besides unannounced blacklists, there are several other reasons to use third-party mail hosting, if not running your own mail server.
1) ISPs can change headers at will. Specifically, they could replace your outgoing "myname@mydomain.com" with "mycomcastname@comcast.net" at any time. This would be a PR disaster, but it's an easy and effective anti-phishing tool and the ISP may be forced to do it under threat of an internet death penalty.
2) ISPs can record every single message you send. (Recording all inbound mail may not be cost-effective, yet, due to the high spam volume.) A year ago I wouldn't have worried about this too much, but between the AT&T wiretapping case and the ongoing calls for mandatory data retention for two years I think you now have to treat it as a given. Maybe not this day, but definitely within the next few years at most. I know email is protected by law, but (iirc) recent court decisions have held that the law doesn't apply to email "at rest", to say nothing about doubts whether anyone would actually obey the law.
3) Finally, there's also the risk that a business competitor, divorce lawyer, etc., can compromise somebody at the ISP and get copies of all of your email anyway.
A mail hosting provider should take care of the first problem, and the second is trivial with your own virtual host. (I recommend tummy.com) I get all of my mail (in- and out-bound) over IMAP/S and SMTP+TLS over an openVPN network.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I'd expect with larger ISPs, such as AOL and Comcast, this ratio is even worse -- perhaps 4 spams or more for every 1 legitimate mail (or greater) due to being a much larger target for things like distributed mail campaigns, dictionary-based mailings, etc.
Given that a lot of spam comes from zombies, the ISPs would do well to look up the term "egress filtering". It's their perogative to filter spam coming in, but it's their *responsibility* to make sure as little of it as possible leaves their network. If it costs them money to do that, too f'ing bad - if they're letting that traffic out when it could have been stopped, they're just as much to blame as the spammers themselves.
This is a good solution except for one thing: the reason that big companies are filtering spam emails completely is that it greatly reduces storage and resources. As someone else mentioned, if you have a ration of 4:1 (spam:legitimate), and you process mail in the millions daily, it is going to be very annoying having to store all of that spam for so long.
Gmail handles the issue pretty well -- everything that is considered spam is marked as such. If you want to view it, go ahead. Anything marked as spam is deleted within 30 days. I use Gmail myself, and of the ~225 spam emails I get daily, around 95% get marked correctly.
What's also quite funny is that both AOL and Comcast have blocked Telecom Italia -- well at least various subnets of it. I work at a school in Italy that uses Telecom as its ISP, and no one has been able to send emails to comcast.net or aol.com addresses for almost a year. From what I gather, all requests (including those coming directly from Telecom) have been ignored. Not that Telecom Italia is known for its stringent enforcement of its TOS...
I have a couple of clients forwarding their incoming email to their GoDaddy hosted domains, because of them doing this our server constantly gets listed in their "Attacking Hosts" blacklist. I've finally given up dealing with GoDaddy after at least 6 attempts to get it lifted, having it lifted and then being right back on in a couple of days. Now I just recommend the clients not use GoDaddy to forward email to as I cannot guarantee email arrives there and won't waste my resources continually asking GoDaddy to lift the block.
Only so much I can do when a client prefers to forward all their mail off my servers to outside hosts, forwarding all their mail means everything, spam and all. We filter as much spam as we can but we can't stop it all.
I've tried complaining to AOL, which of course was an utter waste of time. And it's not very helpful to tell AOL customers what the problem is, because they like AOL (for the most part) -- and actually, it's hard even to explain the problem in terms that they understand.
Sure, I could work around the problem by routing @aol.com mail specially. And for a while I did that. But then one day I was feeling particularly grumpy and decided that it wasn't my job to work around their idiocy.
This sort of thing is right up there with ISPs who block pings (yeah; mine does that. And when I complained I got the standard: "it's to protect our customers from viruses"). But I digress, and am getting myself cross again. Time to go get myself a cup of tea and calm down.
But the basic point is, I guess, if ISPs insist on being idiots and imposing their idiocies on customers, why oh why can't they provide opt-out options. (And also notify the customers when they change things. That's another thing that irritates me. I noticed a sudden decrease in the amount of spam hitting me. Guess what? My e-mail provider had silently installed a filter. At least they also installed an opt-out option. But still, why should they be permitted to change the service whenever they want without at least notifying me that they have done so?) Argh! I really need that cup of tea. And maybe a browse of http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/.
Use a email service like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.
In many places in this country, the cable co's have a monopoly on broadband services.
It's a slave market, many people ARE stuck with Comcast. (Or Cox, or whoever their provider is)
It's amazing how many asshats fail to grasp this very simple concept.
The whitelisted spammers are hammering my hotmail account so badly I can no longer use it. I'm getting spam in my inbox for viagra and all those other great keywords that obviously make the mail spam and these messages are immune to Hotmail's junkmail filters altogether.
As for Gmail, do you really trust a company to look after all of that data in your gmail account and not wrongly share it or give the wrong people access to it?
I like keeping all of my information as close to my chest as possible - on my server at my house.
No I am not sitting in a rocking chair on my front porch with a shotgun on my lap. But I'm seriously considering it.
I could have forgiven Verizon for blocking email from my Hushmail account to my Verizon account.
Except they wouldn't admit there was a block when I called the first couple of times, even though they had told Hushmail that there was a block and that Verizon was going to leave it in place until Verizon customers asked about it. Except that they answered requests to open a ticket with "I can't do that". Except that Hushmail wasn't on any of the MAPS-type lists, and I checked all of them. Except that when I asked point-blank that they update the block list on their servers they said it was impossible and they didn't have any control over their servers. Except that I asked for supervisors and got rude responses that were so nonsensical that they didn't even rise to the ethical level of a lie. Except that I called the emergency ombudman number and they promised to get back to me, and that was a lie too.
Comcast would deserve a lot less criticism if they'd applied some glasnost to the situation.
The problem isn't what Comcast does, it's what they don't do: Provide humans.
Every try reaching someone with any authority at Comcast? It's impossible.
Not difficult: Impossible.
I'm beginning to suspect Comcast some sort of outsourced Vogon corporation and their offices are full of large green lumbering creatures, and anyone human is simply a hired shill, I mean, lobbyist.
Want to test? Try calling and asking a support monkey for the address of their ntp server(s). Not "nntp" (they have that in their keyword scripts), not usenet news, rather ntp as in time. It's a whose-on-first comedy routine trying to convince them that ntp != nntp and when you do, they escalate it, say someone will call you back, and nobody does. Ever.
That's a trivial geeky example but emblematic.
Every aspect of Comcast: Front line without power, whose only recourse is to ditch and run, and no second level. Nobody accountable, nobody responsable, just useless monkeys.
Heck, for two years after Comcast bought out ATT BI my net address from Comcast resolved to "maggard.ne.attbi.net". Who to call to get this updated? Nobody knew. Ever. Utter clulessness, absolute uselessness. Eventually my vanity setting went away entirely with nobody to talk to about reinstating it under comcast.net (so much for an easy VPN address!)
Email routing problems: Nobody to report to. False spam blocking: No recourse. Wonky DNS servers: Tough luck.
If anyone ever does get a phone number of a bipedal hominid at Comcast, with some degree of authority, please post it!
In the meantime the next time Comcasts license comes up in this town I'll be there recounting my stories with them, the outtages, blocked ports, the service people who never show up, the email problems, their own spam, etc. Oh, and 2 weeks ago Verizon ran fiber to my property line. At least I'll have a choice of scoundrels now - who it worse, the cable company or the phone company?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Actually it's fairly easy. ISP's block all outbound port 25 traffic from customer's computers (except to their own smtp server); and then unblock anyone who complains - the rationale is if you know enough to complain, you know enough to keep your own system reasonably safe. it's not 100% perfect, but it eliminates 99% of zombies which reduces whe whole spam problem to a managable level
The answer is usually economic, switch to a different provier (dsl or fios maybe). Ok for those who don't have any other broadband, stop using your ISP's email! Get a gmail/yahoo/hotmail account. That way jumping ISP's is easier should you need to...
It's amazing how many people fail to grasp this very simple concept.
It is amazing how many people still don't get it into whatever they have for brains that this is not a realistic option for many people. No, dialup is not a realistic option in quite a few cases, no matter how much you want to believe it is, and many people simply have no other alternative.
And yes, having internet access is a requirement for my job, and is used for so many things nowadays that not having Internet access is not a realistic option for many people.
I happen to live somewhere where switching providers is quite an option, but I get out and talk to people enough to know this isn't true for many (without moving to another country or at least to quite far from where they live now and have their income)
Anyway, how about you comning back with your 'then switch to another isp, dumbass' kinda statements when YOU pay the extra cost of getting the place wired up to another ISP, even if that means getting another ISP to provide broadband access in that area?
I really cannot understand why people use their ISP (Comcast, in this case) for their email. This limits the freedom to switch from one ISP to the other (as they would lose their email address)! Why not just get an account with Gmail, fastmail.fm, or any other of the many good independent email providers out there? Those providers are in the business of providing email to you, so they will make sure it works; and of course, if you switch ISP, you can keep your email address.
Even if you buy your own address, forward it to something else! Get yourself a Gmail or fastmail.fm or some similar account, do the email there, and be done with the problem.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
If people do that then comcast will just feel free to eliminate E-Mail service entirely with the reasoning that "No one ever uses it anyway"
Great way for them to save, not run mail servers & not have to support it should free up more $$ for executive bonuses!
And don't think they won't jump at it, look what happened to Usenet. Does comcast even have news servers?
Ideally, NameZero would prevent the spamer from using their hosting service. Since NameZero won't be responsible, Comcast has to do it. SPAM is a big problem today. It waists bandwidth on mostly illicit unsolicited junk mail. In addition, SPAM hurts most users, because you have to spend time dealing with trying to filter it, virus scanning it, and clean it out of your inbox. Hurray for Comcast!
...with a GMail Account. Problem solved.
I work for an ISP that has had the same problem with Comcast. They blocked all of our email and it took over a month of calling them every day, gradually working our way up the chain of command, and finally talking to one of the big wigs before we were finally put in touch with an actual person who worked in the abuse department (this is apparently more difficult than getting an appearance with the pope). After talking with him we finally found out the reason we were blocked - are you ready for it? Someone (not related to us whatsoever) sent out a spam that included an image (a bank logo) that was part of a site we host. So the spam email had nothing to do with our mail servers whatsoever. It was just that the HTML in the spam included an image that resided on one of our web hosting servers. For this, they blocked thousands of legitimate emails to Comcast subscribers from our customers. This was half a year ago, and it sounds like things haven't improved one bit. I would strongly recommend not using Comcast for any services whatsoever if you can help it. They are completely incompetent when it comes to email, tech support, and internet services in general.
When did Government-Sanctioned Monopoly get redefined as Free Market? I must have missed the memo...
The 'net users who are experiencing Comcast's silly blocking of email from perfectly mainstream ISPs are getting a taste of what the Internet will be like if Net Neutrality laws are not passed immediately.
For all we know, Comcast is just fed up with people who are getting their 'net access from a less powerful competitor. They are saying "Sign up with us or this is what happens". Do you know who's the biggest ISP in the area that is served by The Well? Comcast, that's who.
An Internet without Net Neutrality protections would be like letting the auto manufacturers own oil companies. We'd start seeing Fords not able to run on Saturn's gasoline. Or letting auto manufacturers own the toll roads. Drive a Chyrsler? Well, you can use our road, but you have to stay in the slow lane.
Let's let the telcos continue to make huge profits from monthly fees for 'net access. But please, PLEASE, let's not let them become the owners of the Internet.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Email is never blocked, but simply cleaned and labeled.
- If it contains some sort of known malware, that file is quarantined before sending on the email.
- If it's "obviously" spam, then *******SPAM******* is prepended to the subject.
- If an html link appears to be a phishing attempt (tagged url doesn't match href url or similar) then it's put in plaintext with a warning
My ISP does block some spam but you have to agree to it first. There are two ways they do it. First is if you get spam you can designate as such then the addies used will be blocked. Then there is a filter you can sign up for which puts any email coming from an addie that's not in your online addressbook into a suspicious folder and not into your inbox. You can then login to your email online and checkout the email. And once a day they send email saying what was blocked or put into the suspicious folder.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Remind the rest of the nation to stop shipping you food and fuel. We never heard of your elite provider, and now..we don't care, and we shouldn't be encouraging such arrogance to *breed* and possibly spread around.
That's the thing: you wouldn't know about mail you failed to receive because Comcast failed to forward it. I run a mailing list that has alum.mit.edu subscribers and I can assure you that for 5 or 6 days, mail sent to alum.mit.edu was not getting forwarded to the Comcast subscribers on my list who are behind those addresses.
...then listen to my story. Comcast didn't raise my rates, they put a debt on my credit score when they owed me money.
I had recently cancelled Comcast, and checking through my bank records I found that I had paid them for an extra month. I called up, gave my old account number, and said that I overpaid and would like a refund. They rattled off some number that was only about half of what I paid, but I didn't want to deal with the hastle of pushing the issue and accepted it. Soon thereafter, I moved, completely forgetting about the refund check that I should have received.
About three months later I go back to collect any mail that collected for me, only to find three notices from a debt collector- "is due, pay soon", "is due, pay now", and "is due, you're screwed"- on behalf of Comcast. Checking the amount owed, it was exactly the amount that they owed me!
It was Christmas day, I had had surgury less than a week before and was still in pain, so this just made me furious. I called the 800 number for comcast, who said I had to call the local place (they couldn't even provide the local number, feh). I dialed the local area, and, surprisingly, I got an answer. I explained my predicament to the woman on the phone, she saw where they had made mistake, and fixed it, removing the debt. I'll give them credit for being able to take care of my problem on Christmas day, but I will work my hardest to never use their service again.
I should have pushed to get my refund, but I decided that I didn't care that much, and I didn't want to wind up with another debt notice on my credit score. I really should check it to make sure it got scrubbed.
While I agree that ISPs should block outgoing 25 for residential users (according to RFC2476, port 25 should be used by MTAs only -- generally running a server is against the ISP's TOS for residential/personal accounts), unfortunately, it is not an Internet law enforcing this for all ISPs. As an ISP, there is no managable way to only accept mail from "authorized" mail servers (ie other ISP run systems).
add my ISP aplus.net to the list
Yet another reason to go to FIOS!!!! Once that truck is done laying fiber I am leaving Comcast in hopes to be slightly less unhappy because it's like Politics, you have to realize both sides suck and don't have your best interests at heart.
It is not a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever you desire. Comcast does not exist to accomodate your every whim.
If you want them to give you a new feature (ability to opt out of such blacklists, for example), then by all means bark at them until the cows come home. But in the end, they offer a service; if you find it of value, pay for it. If you don't like their rules, play somewhere else.
I hate censorship as much as the next guy, but it's their service they're providing. Make some noise, but don't think it's your right to demand and receive a given service.
This is nothing new. I am a Manager at a fairly sizable ISP on the west coast. Comcast has blacklisted up to 3 of our mail servers at a time. We call them, they say just wait 24 hours and a couple hours later mail is flowing. Our customers get pissed at us but will eventually understand that we can't control a huge corporation like comcast. Comcast doesn't have whitelists according to their engineers. Its all an automatic process. What a way to run a company. Its Comcastic! Or like we like to say.... It's Craptastic!
The Poetry of Google Voice is very strange.
gv-poetry.com
"I've suffered numerous multi-day "outages" during which overzealous spam filtering blocked messages from friends"
I would wager that every one of those "friends" received a proper Delivery Status Notification (DSN) and simply ignored it.
Mail is handled. It is either delivered or denied. If it is denied, a DSN is generated and returned to the sender. The only time a DSN is not delivered is when the sending source refuses the bounce message (as in the case of spam). Many mailing lists also refuse DSN's, but that is NOT the fault of your provider. Once the DSN is placed in the mailbox, it is up to the sender to actually read it and take action to correct the problem. Most of the time though, they just pick up the phone and bitch to the recipient. The recipient then bitches at their provider because their friend is too fucking stupid to read the message and address it properly.
Pull my finger for my public key.
But, Earthlink (which doesn't suck mostly :-) will provide your ISP services in place of comcast. So, my email isn't being filtered by comcast. BTW, since I only have broadband service, I'm paying something like $42/month (I own my own cable modem). The billing is all handled by comcast; but I have an earthlink IP address and name service.
I first signed up with Earthlink years ago and though I've moved four tyme since I still use it, first dialup now cable through Time Warner now Comcast. Actually that's in part why I went with Earthlink, because I planned to move and whated to keep the same ISP. Other than a problem with the cable outside needing to be replaced and the modem going bad I haven't had a problem with Earthlink, but lately I've noticed that some webpages take a little while to load. I wonder if this is because of Comcast or something else.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"What I don't understand is why ISP's can't send me an email every few days listing the subject lines and senders of everything they've blocked, with a link to click on to retrieve the blocked messages."
My alumnus email account through my university does exactly this. I have yet to find any false positives in its list.
Like any good monopoly, I am sure they will are very interested in and responsive to customer requests.
It's like those commercials for specialty channels that end with "If you don't get , just call your cable provider and ask them to add it to their lineup".
Yeah, right. Bryan Roberts doesn't make $30M a year giving the consumers what they want.
Why anyone would buy ANYTHING from Comcast is beyond me.
Wonky DNS servers: Tough luck.
See for example OpenDNS, David Ulevitch's startup that aims to give everybody access to superior DNS service for free.
National Customer Service
1500 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102
215 665 1700
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have a friend who has a wireless ISP in East Texas. We live in a crappy Sprint (Embarq) territory, but for his backend, he manged to pull in a sweet 6 meg connection on fiber that just happened to run into an AT&T territory, so he got a really good price on it compared to Embarq.
While pusing a little over 100 customers, what is his big bandwidth trouble? Movie traders or music traders? No, he does have trouble with that, but that isn't what got him. He hooked up a mail server for our county courthouse (a pre-exisiting domain) with several hundred e-mail addresses on it. The amount of Spam hammered his bandwidth like crazy.
He spent an entire day or two building filter lists to cut out a lot of the crap.
If spam to one domain with a couple of hundred addresses on it, can seriously degrade a 6-meg fiber connection, then imagine what huge ISPs are having to deal with.
(And then combine that with all of the traffic on the Net from owned Windows boxes searching around for other system to take over. There must be a real shit storm of useless crap constantly hammering the Net).
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Comcast got all TimeWarner contracts in Tennessee in some kind of swap. We are switching out soon.
No I live in Minnesota.
Plus, I can take the dish camping...
If only... I'd love to go hiking and have wireless broadband with me. As a photographer I could then upload my photos when I get a DSLR.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Look closely. The block happened last Sunday. Yes, Comcast also blocked the WELL 3 years ago and Declan McCullagh's intervention dissuaded them.
But it can't be a freedom of speech thing, because Comcast is not a government entity.
They can't limit your *right* to associate with others. As an email service provider they can and apparently do limit your *ability* to associate with others specifically via the email service you *voluntarily* purchase from them.
Note that this is different than them limiting your ability to associate via the internet service you get from them, as you could use hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc. via your broadband connection and exchange email with whomever *those* services are not currently blocking.
Is this an endemic problem from The Well? I am quite surprised by this.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
Sounds more like a personal grudge.
What geek (or even normal user) actually uses the email address that the ISP gives them?
I do. I have three email accounts with my isp but I rarely use two of them. I also have three other addies, one with Yahoo!, one with a club I'm a member of, and one for education. But I mostly use the primary email with my isp.
FalconShould there be a Law?
No. "Basic rights" are things like the right to an attorney while being questioned by the police. They're rights that you posess as the side effect of having been born a human being. To paraphrase a rather famous document, you were endowed with them by your creator.
You may or may not have contracted with Comcast for them to deliver, or not deliver, e-mail to you. The rights and duties of both parties would presumably be written out in the contract between the both of you, and that's something you should be able to determine by reading it, not the Bill of Rights.
Shared host Crystaltech have just announced that they're no longer supporting the auto-forwarding of email from their hosted accounts to ComCast email addresses I think (I'm not in the US, so I might be confusing them with another ISP). ComCast would auto-blacklist on spam received, even if it was just being forwarded by a CT customer.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
It also means, if the ISP is being dumb and uses excessive filtering or places crazy restrictions on it, I don't have to worry, even if they are the only ISP I can access in a given geographic location.
Filtering is one reason I like using my isp's email. First they allow you to identify email as spam, which they then block the addies it came from. Then they allow to divert all email from addies that are not in your online addressbook, instead of it going to your inbox it is placed inside a suspicious folder. Then when you check your email from the web if you want you can look at the messages and decide if you want to delete it, put it in your inbox, or put it in the inbox and add the senter to your addressbook. Every day the ISP sends you a message with the sender and subjectline of all of the blocked or diverted messages. So I never get spam in my inbox. I also went with my isp, Earthlink, because it's a national isp not regional or local. I've moved four tymes since I signed up and haven't had any problems in the about 9 years I've been with them. That's not to say I don't have other email accounts, I do. I have an account with Yahoo!, for almost as long as I've had access to the net, another addy with a club I'm a member of, and a third account that is an education account. It is this account that I use for backup.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Call your hosting provider and ask the for a different port....
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Former students set up forwardings from their alumni accounts to their ISP, then when spam aimed at their alumni accounts gets forwarded to their ISP account, they report it as spam and we (the university) get blacklisted. And when these ISPs do it, they don't just blacklist the alumni system, they blacklist our entire domain and network block.
And, of course, it turns out that the same former students who filed the spam reports to their ISP use their alumni e-mail address (since it's more prestigious than AOL.COM or COMCAST.NET) as a contact point, and now complain that their mail isn't getting forwarded. Apparently, they have the notion that their ISP actually examines the spam and takes action against the spammers. Nope, the ISP just adds a black mark against whatever SMTP client delivered the message, and when enough black marks come in they blacklist.
As for filtering...the spammer tricks to sabotage content filters are having the desired effects. The number of false negatives is going up, and worse, that of false positives is going way up.
It's gotten to the point where we're seriously rethinking whether we want to have alumni accounts and/or forwarding from alumni accounts.
I manage the K12OSN (K12OpenSourceNow) list hosted by RedHat.com. None of our Comcast members are receiving posts. So the best answer seems to be, keep on paying for your connection but don't use their service.
Rhapsody (limited free service to comcast members) however is a GREAT product. I'll keep paying my $42/month.
That's no solution at all. Verizon is just another ISP who may be imposing the same blocks as Comcast. AT&T was also doing it. Don't think Verizon won't now, or in the future.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Greylisting most certainly does not just drop the message. It sends a tempfail to the sending host, which should try again later. If enough time has elapsed between tries for the tuple (to, from, relay), then the message is accepted. If the sender's mail system is misconfigured IT might drop the message without notifying the sender, but that is NOT the greylilsting system's fault.
"Is it a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever I desire, or does Comcast have the right to censor as they wish?" You have a right to switch service providers.
For those who are fed up with Comcast and can't switch (like myself) you can always roll your own: Sendmail (or other) + Rollernet.us + No-ip.org (or other dydns service). When they started blocking port 25 I just decided to go with it and use Comcast. But then when they started block ALL of my email (my domain name is with "mydomain.com") I decided to roll my own again.
Blocking such email addresses does more good then bad. Millions of customers will no longer receive spam and the few that it effects is only a small concern. Decisions like this are only made after proper research. I own and operate a WISP and know that it is often critical to block out specific servers. I've done so many times and never have received a complaint. I understand that some customers would like the freedom to decide how they need to protect themselves when online, but the majority are enthused not to receive that piece of unwanted mail. The ./ community is unique in thier stance against this because there is an above average of intelligence reguarding technology, but for the average customer does not have the intermiediate knowledge required to properly block themselves from unwanted email and other malicious activity.
Reading comprehension is key.
He doesn't use comcast as his ISP. His mail doesn't go through comcast.
There are areas where, if you want any kind of broadband, you have no choice but Comcast. What are people supposed to do who live in, for example, areas of Portland (Oregon) where DSL does not reach? And before you say "wireless, dumbass".. remember that Verizon and Sprint (for EVDO) both have a ToS that is not agreeable to some people (it essentially says that you can only websurf, not run any "applications" or anything).
Comcast is a monopoly carrier that has government protection from competition (because, after all, there can effectively be only one cable provider in any given area). This kind of behavior is not acceptable.
So, no, people don't necessarily have the "right" to "switch providers".
Is it a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever I desire
Nope.
People these days get rights and privileges all mixed up. You have no rights whatsoever. You have no rights to receive email at all, you have that privilege by earning the money to pay a service provider to provide a service. It is up to you to select the correct service provider and if that service provider fails to provide that service you may change to another.
Stop bitching about rights and exercise your privilege.
Incidentally, you have no right to freedom, no right to privacy, democracy and no right to protection from a facist government. In the western world most people are lucky enough to currently have the privilege of being able to exercise democratic choice. If you lose that privilege because someone takes it away from you, or you neglect to exercise it, then you have to fight to get it back in the same manner that all those people fought to get it for you in the first place.
Be nice, sponsor me: http://jailbreak.ragabonds.org.uk
I had comcast for three months. They failed to send me a bill and I almost got sent to collections. No phonecalls, no nothing. Internet just went out one day. And when I try to get things straightened out and have the internet turned back on, they then lie to me and tell me that "someone has to come out to physically connect it again" when my tv cable works, and when I point my webbrowser at google the request is redirected to their customer page. I hate them.
have you checked your credit report [experian.com] since to make sure they didn't report you as late?
If you get a dinkmark on your Experian credit report it'll stay there your whole life. Though you can contest something on your credit reports and the credit agency has to look into it Experian drags it's feet and then won't change the report. Experian is the worst of the three major agencies, and I wonder why anyone uses them. I've asked this but I couldn't even get an answer from my brother-in-law who's a Certified Financial Planner, CFP.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yet again a poster needs to find a roundabout way to tout his own achievements.
"I couldn't send an e-mail from an alum.mit.edu domain while blackberrying from my private jet lolzor!"
In most US locales, your ISP is NOT operating in the free market. Neither are your phone companies, cable companies, power companies, and/or you water/sewage companies.
;-)
WHY?
Because local govenment has granted georgraphic monopolies to specific firms. In fact it's one of the only places you'll find true monopolies; when they are granted, supported, and possibly even subsidised by the government.
In a free market situation we would have many more options, much better choices all because the firms would be competiting for your dollars. This is why the government should be limited to its most basic functions and stay the HELL out of the marketplace!
ps - vote Libertarian!
Libertas in infinitum
The Comcast mail/ISP system is basically whiteboxed AT&T / SBC.
FYI - they block Doteasy as well. "I'm never wrong. I thought I was wrong once but I was mistaken" http://celestial-reasoning.blogspot.com/
Heres TFM:
s s/15393026.htm
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/busine
It contains a link "On the Web: A record of what happened." to this
http://seclists.org/politech/2003/Jul/0020.html
This indeed did happen 3 years ago.
Perhaps this event did happen yesterday, but it's difficult to get much info from the actual story that says so.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Is it a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever I desire
Um, No, I dont think its a basic right. I personally support ISP's right to deny mailing service from other companies who cant stay off the black lists. You have the right to find another method to receive email, but you dont get to dictate how an ISP handles Spam issues.
And, this is WHY I don't do anything except self-host any more.
For me, those "missed" messages can mean the difference between a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars
and NOT having it. I'd rather some garbage got through the screens and I got NO false positives. Seems that
I am getting pretty decent results with SpamAsssassin on my server right at the moment.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
That's the address of Comcast's corporate HQ, a 30-ish story building they occupy (almost?) entirely. Good luck getting past reception. Funnily enough, it's about a block from a building owned entirely by Verizon, and both are right next to City Hall.
Oh, c'mon. If an ISP said, "We provide you with an Internet connection. We believe in doing only some things, but doing them very well," and sincerely meant it, I think a decent number of people (especially Slashdottians) would flock to them. *Cough*google*cough*
The problem is that all the big, established broadband companies have monopolies on local lines (especially in DSL-less markets.)
They blocked our email server. I just route to another server. This stratagy won't protect users from spam, it's too easy to route around.
If they just generate an SMTP error then the sending server should bounce the message. Now, if they say that the message was deliverd and don't do it, they're violating the RFCs and users are going to get annoyed when their messages just vanish without nary a warning. There really isn't any reason why ISPs can't at least generate bounce messages.
Weird; the Mercury News article is apparently current, and yet it links to email from 2003 about a similar problem.
I know for sure this was a problem during the last few days, this current week. But heck, it's hardly news.
...get its head out of its ass and do something about the hundreds (thousands?) of spam-spewing zombied machines on its network, instead of blocking incoming mail from legitimate servers.
Same goes for RoadRunner, SBCglobal, and Charter.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I use Bigfoot.com to forward my email - a week ago, Comcast blocked them without warning. The embargo was finally lifted this morning.
Cheers, Tim -- Tim Janke Part mad scientist, part lion tamer: sr. software engineer, global team leader, project mana
Common Carrier status just means a whole lot of problems for them - they have no reason to want it, and have done lots to avoid it. And they don't have it now (at least for internet).
--LWM
I'll save my own rant against the monopolies for some other time.
I work at a small ISP. We recently had our smtp servers blocked by Road Runner because of the draconian practice of black-listing.
To their credit the techs there were helpful in getting us cleared, but it was still a great inconvenience for a few of our customers.
They don't need to do it, really. We gray-list to fight the infected machines. Esentially we bounce the first email from an unknown address. A real server will try again, an infected PC will not. That kills a lot of it. Of course there's plenty of spam that comes from real mail servers.
We then run everything throught a Barracuda Firewall that our customers can customize for their accounts. They can both Black list and White list for themselves using a web interface. Only mail from addresses that score very high on the "mark as spam" or blacklist from our users get blocked.
So yeah, our users do get some spam, but we don't block legitimate mail.
We actually respect and even like our customers. (well most of them)
"Oh drat, these computers, they're so naughty and so complex." Marvin the Martian
Comcast has also been blocking email forwarded from domains parked with Tucows/Domain Direct.
Spamhaus shows that Comcast is part of the problem!
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
We're all "geeks" here, right? So, why not just put up your own mail server? I have two old machines that are not good for much of anything. What they are good for is running FreeBSD and acting as a firewall (PF and ALTQ) and a mail server (currently SendMail, but planning to upgrade to Postfix when time permits). I have a few domains and all but one are hosted on my personal mail server. I run my own internal caching DNS too (forwarding to OpenDNS) because of all the issue Comcast had early on with their DNS, and my external DNS is with ZoneEdit.
... the list goes on. I have not yet had any issues. I've had some service issues - bad amplifers down the line, etc. Those issues have taken some time to resolve on occassion, but over all the service (a high speed connection to the net) has not been bad. I count my self lucky for that since it is my only choice short of getting a T1.
The wonderful thing about Comcast (aside from the fact that my employer has direct billing for my service) is that they don't block ports like other ISPs (Verizon among others). You can run your own mail server, your own web server, etc. Yes, the EULA says they do not permit it, but the fact (based on my experience) is that the don't enforce it unless you are high traffic. None of services I host are high traffic. Ya, I've got list traffic going to my mail server and some of them are high traffic, but they don't look at frequency - they look at volume. If those lists had multi-megabyte attachments on most of the messages, they'd probably say something. The only issue with running a mail server is that you have to use Comcast as a smarthost for outbound mail delivery because most email servers that have any kind of block list are blocking the Comcast user IP blocks.
I've got all kinds of non-standard (for Comcast) traffic running of my line, IPv6 tunnel (Freenet6), mail server, web server (Apache), VoIP (Vonage), SSH to get into my network when not at home
If you dont like the email service provided by Comcast, then switch. And yes, I understand for 'broadband Internet access', there is for the most part a monopoly. You get to pick from the monopoly telco for DSL, or the monopoly cableCo. This is woeful, and the solution is a long ways off (it involves legislation to prevent broadband customers from being forced to buy other services such as phone service, from the same provider [aka illegal bundling]), and taking control of wired infrastructure (both telco copper and cable coax) away from the current monopoly corporations and returning it to the communities who subsidized its buildout.
However, all that notwithstanding, the 'email' service provided by broadband ISP's is for the most part useless, and of no value. You can continue to obtain your broadband from them, but instead obtain email service elsewhere. There exist many free options I am sure most are aware of, as well as a multitude of paid-for ones, and they are happy to compete fairly for your business (eg, there is one out there somewhere that offers the level of spam control you want) A side benefit of *not* using the bundled email service that comes with your broadband, is portability - if and when you do ever have the option to get faster and/or cheaper broadband, there will be one less thing keeping you tied to your current one.
While you wont have the satisfaction of no longer paying Comcast, you could at least theoretically send them a note explaining why you will no longer be using their email service. And depending on your mood, you could either sign the old address up for a pile of spam in the hopes of causing them to have to deal with it, or cease using it (perhaps turn it off, if possible). Neither of these is signifigant individually, but if large numbers of people did this it would either cause them more headaches, or theoretically reduce their costs (and when hell freezes over, they might actually reduce their price as a result) - but at the very least, they will know there is one more customer who will happily ditch them if a better deal comes around (be wary of DSL year-long lock in contracts with big termination fees though)
I work for an (unnamed) webhost. We constantly have problems with comcast, so this is no news to me. We've been blocked many times, generally being unblocked again by the time we get in touch with them. The situation is pretty ridiculous, and has been going on and off for a while now. There's always the occasional provider that blacklists us, but as of recent comcast has been the big one. Oh well, so goes it. I'm honestly a bit fed up with blacklisting in general, after seeing how much trouble it causes on both the sending and receiving side (we use some blacklists as well, we are no where near as bad as comcast and generally work to get issues resolved, especially with big providers. It still seems to cause more trouble then it's worth, and spam still occasionally gets through our filters) Many of the big blacklists are far too ineffective and are way too easy to get on. It should take more then a single occurance to get on a black list.
Plus, as a webhost you always get people trying to abuse the service, there's always some asshole who runs some mass mailer program and sends out 20,000 messages individually spaced out over a period trying to beat our mail admins....of course they get caught but it might have already landed you on a blacklist by the time that happens...you can't go around black listing huge providers (ISPs or web hosts) just because some idiot abused the service and was of course promptly kicked off it. What if people did the same to comcast? Surely someones abused their services before...whether it be zombie pcs or what not...
Some providers are just not willing to work out solutions, even if you're a big provider and have the credentials to prove it. That's just bullshit IMO. Infact at this point I've just started to really hate e-mail in general as a communication medium...seems so outdated and inefficient. Oh well.
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
If the ISP used Maia Mailguard, then they could indeed do just that.
(Disclaimer, I'm a Maia developer)
i have comcast but i never use there email. nore have i on any isp i had.webmale system like gmail yahoo etc are better couse when/if you change providers thers no change in your email.
Expect to get clobbered. There are people that honestly think only Satan and his brother would dare to use a blacklist. People can become insanely, irrational on the topic. Beware.
Unfortunatly, even in some areas where you would think another company would have sprung up, Comcast has almost a complete monopoly. I live in the Seattle (ish) area and if you want cable internet service around here Comcast is your only option. (Granted my research is 3 years old, but I'm pretty sure it holds up.) I've been fortunate enough to avoid any problems with them at all thusfar, and I don't use their email service so I'm good there. Still, I'd love to switch to a more ethical company.
I'm running a site for a local soccer club. The site is hosted at dreamhost and they've just announced that they are dropping all forwards to Comcast because of being blocked by them and months of being unable to actually get any replies from contact attempts. This matters to me only because I have "vanity" addresses set up (president@soccerclub.com, etc) which forward to their real email. I have them set up for more than vanity reasons, of course. About two weeks ago the same thing happened with AOL - that caught another 3 or 4 people. I'm not sure what can be done about it (people can use the web interface to read mail, but I wasn't trying to make it more difficult when I set all this stuff up.)
But, when I signed up for service, the installer actually showed up in the afternoon close enough to the scheduled time and told me not to use the comcast email, because they were having problems w/their email servers at the time. Completely blew me away!
I've had good luck with fastmail.fm as well but I'm not having good luck with them right now. I've not been able to check my fastmail.fm mail since Wed. night. And, according to their blog:
"Hopefully"?!? You do not want to hear engineers saying that word. And 30 hours from the time of that post in my timezone means Fri. at 8:10 PM. I will have been out of my fastmail.fm email for close to 40 hours at that point.
Think twice about fastmail.fm.
Did you RTFA? The whole thrust of the original article is that permanent, vanity if you prefer, e-mail addresses aren't being accepted by Comcast from various services that host them. The addresses in question are already portable. However, when you're already paying for Comcast broadband and Comcast multiple e-mail addresses, you really would like to get your e-mail delivered where you're already paying to receive it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
1) Too good for dial-up, but despite that opted to
2) Live where there is no second option for broadband besides Comcast.
If you're going to live in a place so sparsely populated that there is simply One option only for broadband-- You get what you chose! Maybe it's inconvenient, but perhaps that was offset by the cost of housing, reduced commute times, quality of life, etc, whatever would make you live in a place that has Only One ISP (except dial-up, which you're too good for).
Your argument is just too prissy.
They might disagree, until they saw what happens when their ISP REALLY turns all the filtering off.
How about 100 spam emails per day? 1000 ? Had enough yet?
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
is to have two mail servers. One with a spam-blocker that is provided to end users by default - and an unfiltered server that people who wish to use can switch to.
This way most of your customers who object to spam can carry on as before and those who wish to run their own protection (or buy massive quantities of generic viagra) can.
You see, there's a problem with your theory. First, email isn't that reliable in the first place. Second, if you're recieiving enough spam, you are likely to delete ham inadvertantly anyway. The best fiters are actually more accurate than manual sorting.
If you don't like it, you can shift providers.
As I stated above - it's not censorship, it's their privately owned network - they can do as they please.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I think the GP meant that you can migrate your email to a provider not hosted on comcast's network. eg, gmail, hotmail, or pay for your own virtual server and retrieve it from externally via imap/whatever.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I just discovered yesterday that mails from smtp.snet.net (SNET, now part of SBC, is CT's phone company, so this will effect many DSL and T1 subscribers in CT) has also been recently blacklisted by Comcast.
I used to work for a small webhost, and in the last couple of months I was with them, our mail servers got blocked by Comcast a couple of times also, and it was sheer heck to get them to take the block back off again. It's not just big companies' mailservers that have this kind of problem.
One funny thing I found out is that a lot of less adroit mail forwarding clients actually report their own forwarding mailboxes as spammers, due to reporting forwarded spam via spam-reporting systems that then assume the forwarding account was in on the spamming.
Really, there's just no point in using your ISP's mail drop as your permanent mailbox anymore. It's just one more point of forwarding failure, and one more thing to make it harder for you to switch ISPs if your current one screws up badly enough. Use an independent email provider instead. Gmail is an excellent independent mailbox solution--or if you have privacy concerns, get a webhosting account somewhere cheap and reliable (these days it might cost you all of a couple of bucks a month) and get your email sent there.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
They did, it is just that when they sent 10,000 emails within 2 minutes, all containing a list of all know spam "keywords" and addresses, it didn't get through the spam filters for some reason
"Is it a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever I desire, or does Comcast have the right to censor as they wish?" I don't know about that. More likely it's the same as living at home. You're abiding by someone elses rules, like it or not. I do know, however, that you retain the basic right to stop using Comcast. You also have the basic right to setup your own ISP, etc., if you think you're being treated unfairly.
IMHO, Net neutrality is just a clever way for the big ISP's to try and gather more business.
This accomplishes two things: They get more revenue, and their competitors get less.
Forget what anyone says about company X not wanting to foot the bill for through-traffic. What they really want is for *all* traffic to go through them, so that they can be collecting all the associated fees for that traffic.
This is what happens when you let the accounting department drive the company. No disrespect intended toward that very honorable and difficult occupation, but simply put financial accounting does not take into account intagible values.
As always, though, the ultimate judge in this case is the consumer.
It's *your* money, not theirs (at least, not until you pay the bill).
Many people employ multiple internet providers (forwarding your NameZero email to the home account at ComCast, for example).
If you pay company X for service, and they decide to limit said service, then it is only logical to assume that you will limit payment accordingly.
This being a capitalist society, less revenue for company X - or the threat of it - will be the ultimate determining factor in solving this "problem".
Another thing to consider is that the internet, still being relatively new, is in a rapidly evolving state. Some view it as a commodity to be bought & sold, some as infrastructure to be made equally available to anyone who may wish to use it.
I'm leaning toward the latter, though again as we live in a capitalist society I can certainly understand why others would view it as the former.
However, just because it's a societal infrastructure does not mean it's free!
It just means everyone has to foot the bill evenly for its use. There are over 6 billion people on the planet now. Sure, not everyone has a dollar to their name, and not everyone even has access to the internet. But everyone *should* pitch in just a little bit, just as gramma who only drives to church on Sunday pays the same amount for road maintenance as a taxi-cab driver.
The internet is a trans-national entity, and as such we really don't know yet how to - or who should - handle its operation. Should it be helmed by the United Nations? (Logical, as it's global, but way too much beauracracy.) A private company? (Too great an opportunity for financial abuse.) Some sort of rotating volunteer group? (Perhaps, but how do we decide who gets put in place, and how do we trust they're doing a good job?)
In the long run, we all need to pitch in and stop trying to micro-manage the accounting end of internet usage. Some folks will be hogs, some will barely use it, but if we all pitch in equally things will work out just fine.
However, if some of us get greedy & try to grab a bigger piece of the pie, it'll just get ruined for everyone.
How about 100 spam emails per day? 1000 ? Had enough yet?
That's what Spamassassin is for. Don't drop any of it, just make sure it's marked in the headers. I get easily 1500 spams a day. I just configured my personal filters to delete anything that scores 10 or more and move anything between 5 and 10 to the spam folder.
The point is that marking it is a service to all users. They can then make their own decisions about how sensitive they are to spam vs. missing an important email. The only reason to block mail strictly by IP is to reduce the load on a mail server that should probably be upgraded anyway. It certainly is NOT for the sake of customers no matter how marketing tries to spin it. A decent(ish) compromise might be greylisting.
I work at The WELL. First, a tiny correction -- we are not an ISP. We were once one of the first commercial ISP sites, but we gave that up in 1996 to focus on being a community site on the internet instead of an onramp to the net. However, we still offer email to some of our users, and we have given our people the choice of forwarding with a classic .forward file if they wish. So from our point of view, it is tempting to say it's your toolset, do what you want with it.
Hard bounces kicked in last Sunday for people trying to reach about two dozen users who are mutual customers, with both well.com and comcast.net address. This was not a case of illicit spam relaying, nor of people mass mailing anything from The WELL (That's a service we do NOT provide in any way). It only involved mail sent to those who forward well.com mail to comcast.net. Turned out though that that includes Howard Rheingold. His initial blog entry at smartmobs and the information that the SJ Mercury news was working on the story got the public relations people at Comcast interested. (We phoned and emailed the PR folks about the situation) They eventually got a conference call set up for us, with one of those temporary bridge number/passcode conference appointments. We sorted out the issues and they have dropped us from the blacklist for now. We are going to request that that small group of users filter for spam on our site -- actively managing their Spam Assassin configurations -- before it goes to Comcast.
You'll note that Comcast wants to deny their own email customers the convenience of managing mail -- including spam that came to their addresses on various sites -- in one place, at Comcast. That isn't ridiculous, it's up to them to define the service they offer. But the weird thing is that Comcast is effectively placing the customer support burden on the sites that provide forwarding by holding those same mutual customers hostage to hard bouncing rather than telling the customers what services they are willing to provide them. I'm willing to communicate with WELL members about how tio make this work -- it's only a couple of dozen people out of 4,000, after all, and they are very communicative sorts.
Email address persistence is like cell phone number portability in a way. We are seeing some of the interesting problems that come from people having the same cherished email address for 21 years. More sites will start seeing these issues, we just have a little more tenure in this area than most. Some of our members are indeed targets of shocking volumes of spam brought on by being out there on the net for years. The volume is scary and expensive, even after we discard a giant chunk of it off the top with RBLs before even accepting it at our site.
It's going to be interesting seeing companies try to figure out what to do about forwarded spam. It's not trivial, it's not resolved yet -- but Comcast needs to be reachable by the management of other ISPs and email providers if they are going to block noraml forwarding services offered by those sites. Bypass their customer service lines, (your mutual customers should be reporting there!) and call their corporate HQ. The other best practice we all need is for Comcast (and other sites) to communicate the terms of using their email addresses to their own customers, rather than holding the customers and their legitimate correspondants hostage by bouncing, and assuming that the rest of us will do the customer support for them. Obviously that's not playing well with others.
Anyway, I do appreciate the time Comcast took to work this out with us. It was a valuable exchange of actual info once we got through all the barriers. I urge them to commit to taking some time with others in the same position, since they are trying to figure out a different understanding than the one we have all had so far.
Wish I could see an easy fix to the big picture issues of spam forwarding. This looks like it's just the beginning of providers trying to make somebody else do more of the heavy lifting. And the spam load is not going to get lighter.
Yahoo's web interface doesn't do a terrible job of filtering, I'll agree. But the POP spool seems to be completely unfiltered. So, again, why forward to a POP account when the web mail interfaces work fairly well.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Sure sounds like it to me, though.
My suggestion was that you not utilize any email service from Comcast - it is trivial to obtain email service elsewhere, including storage of that email that you can retrive directly via POP/IMAP/webmail without having to utilize anything related to email that Comcast has any control over.
And in fact, very little of what you pay Comcast (or any broadband provider) is related to their email service. The primary cost is the broadband access. The only reason they provide email at all is to help tie customers to them to discourage them from switching if they find a better deal for access. Heck with SBC you get 'Yahoo email', which is free anyway.
Qwest has been doing something similar for its customers for some time now. I have Qwest Choice (TV and Internet access, all supplied via VDSL over the phone lines to my house), and my fiancee and I have found that e-mail to our qwest.net POP accounts is routinely filtered, and has been for almost 2 years now. We have no control over what gets blocked and what doesn't. We have found, through trial and error, that much of the blocking is being done on mail messages with multiple recipients -- but there's no hard and fast rule for this, so you can't say "messages with more than 2 recipients will get blocked." Various mailing lists don't get through anymore.
Qwest initially wouldn't admit they were doing any filtering or blocking of e-mail. This is SOP for them -- when I caught them blocking outbound NTP, the tier-1 tech support flatly denied they were doing any such thing, and I eventually had to escalate the matter to one of their network engineers, who finally admitted that someone went on a port-blocking binge to shut down customers who were reselling bandwidth (running porn sites from their houses, running their own ISPs, you name it). Apparently, the engineer who did this blocked NTP in both directions, so my Mac couldn't set its clock using Apple's NTP servers. (Their initial solution, after admitting to what they did, was to ask if I could use a non-default port for outbound NTP requests. I was using Mac OS 8 at the time, so no, I couldn't... but even if I could, most NTP servers in the Real World listen on the default port.)
When Qwest finally admitted that they were blocking/filtering e-mails, they would not commit to addressing any of my concerns. They have never implemented any kind of spam quarantine system, even though this blocking is supposed to help them fight spam. The messages often don't even get bounced; in these cases, they just get routed into a bit-bucket, so the sender has no idea that the recipient never got the message.
My fiancee and I now rely on other e-mail service providers to route around Qwest's brain-damage. We don't expect our qwest.net inboxes to be reliable.
What galls me, though, is the lack of transparency and accountability. These ISPs apparently feel no obligation to tell their customers that they have altered the terms of service in a potentially negative way, oftentimes because they have convinced themselves that they haven't actually changed anything -- and when called on it, they express neither shame nor guilt, but instead initially deny they did anything, and then when they realize that won't work, they offer mealy-mouthed excuses but continue to do nothing of substance.
Maybe you should learn to not assume things that you know shit about if you want some kind of serious discussion.
Why people live where they do? maybe they were born there and don't have the means to move somewhere else? It is just an example, I can think f a few others without efford, I m pretty sure that unless you really have shit for brains, you can think of some as well. The fact that SOME people have that choice in no way means everyone has, and that invalidates your argument.
Seeing how there are quite a few places with a few hundred thousand inhabitants and ONE SINGLE broadband ISP, it seems like you are either extremely badly informed, or you are suggesting overcrowding major cities to an even larger extent then is already the case, which sounds like a perfect solution indeed. Do you have more such briliant and well informed ideas?
Besides, nothing of what you say changes the fact that that One ISP should provide decent service, and in case of cable or local telco, has some privileges on your territory (they can run their cables there.. try running your own cables through someone elses gardens and see how long it lasts), and demanding proper service in return is quite reasonable.
Special privileges come with special obligations.
I think we should not expect you to understand such things however, seeing how you didn't grasp the basic concept of logging in or creating an account, not because it makes it more (or less) true what you say, but at least someone can know if they are still talking to the same person throughout the course of a discussion, and could look back at other things you said to provide some more context.