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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
No.
e-mail is not a 'right'.
You are free to terminate your service contract with Comcast and stop paying them, of course.
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.
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.
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
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...
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?
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
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
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.
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.