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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
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.
I have a feeling that it's a lot more than just two ISPs.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
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.
Currently, my Yahoo Mail inbox, an account on every spam-list in the known universe (being old enough to go to school), has 23 junk messages, versus 2,218 caught and put in the junk folder. I'd call a 1% failure rate on a bulk filter pretty good. I suspect they must be using a weaker filter for accounts where there isn't a bulk folder to collect the odd false positive.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Let me clarify...
They can do whatever they want within the bounds of their contract (TOS) with their customers. Sometimes those decisions cause them to lose revenue or customers.
But I want to point out a distinction that the first amendment only applies to restrictions on the government.
Libertas in infinitum