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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.
No.
e-mail is not a 'right'.
You are free to terminate your service contract with Comcast and stop paying them, of course.
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.
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
I switched from Comcast to BellSouth about 6 months ago and haven't looked back. Sure it's a bit slower, but honestly? It actually works. I've had almost zero downtime with it, as opposed to when I was with Comcast and had about 60% packet loss 90% of the time. No joke. It was an 8 year old modem, and Comcast refused to replace it. They couldn't believe the modem could possibly be going bad. They skipped out on all four appointments I made for them to come out, didn't even show up.
I called up BellSouth, got it all set up, and it's been wonderful. They had the package out to me within 4 days after signing up. My modem got a bit funky - the ethernet jack broke when I was moving it. I called them up, they had a new one out the next day. I get very consistent download speeds, it isn't like with Comcast when I'd get slower than 56k dialup speeds at night, if it worked at all... I easily had 2 second or higher ping times to just about everything.
BellSouth's tech support is much much better too, you call up and you can actually get yourself transferred to someone who knows what they're doing. After the initial install I had a few problems - I missed a filter on our DirectTV unit... They actually put me directly on the phone with the line tech who got it resolved in a very short amount of time.
Go for it, you won't regret it. Just my two cents!
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
I agree, and would add, that I've NEVER used an email address I've had with an ISP, and would not reccomend it to anyone. I like to keep my options open. Good thing too, because in the past 5 years I've had 3 unique ISPs and 5 different accounts. (Time Warner -> Verizon -> College network -> Verizon -> Time Warner)
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
Protecting their customers from spam?
What about protecting the rest of us from spam being sent through zombie hosts on their network!?
I read an article about a year ago that said that over 60% of the mail leaving Comcast's network was spam, Comcast knew it, but said the problem was "too expensive" for them to fix.
I think they need to turn their spam filters around the other way. Block all outgoing mail. That'll fix the spam problem!
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?
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