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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'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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
They invented something called Paragraphs and it doesn't even have any patents on it. Next time I suggest you use some.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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
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.
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 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?
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
By the way, the referenced story was written yesterday, but the actuall event happened three years ago .
Fucking editors.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
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)...
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.
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 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.
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.
...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.
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?
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