North American Network Operators Group
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Re: comast email issues, who else has them?

  • From: Stephen Sprunk
  • Date: Thu Sep 07 14:43:18 2006 
Thus spake "Sean Donelan" <[email protected]>
But there is no requirement to use your ISP's mail server or any other
application from your ISP. Likewise there is no requirement for a ISP to offer any E-mail or Usenet, or FTP, or legal music downloads, or any
other application to its customers. There isn't even a requirement for it
to have any customer service. Few of the large free Email providers
have any easy way to talk to any human about mail problems. So you
don't even get the satisfaction of yelling at a first level tech about your
frustrations.
However, the reality is that a significant fraction of users will use their ISP's email service, if one is provided. They'll tolerate minor failures because changing your email address and distributing it to everyone is such a hassle. More and more folks are wising up to this and switching to Yahoo mail or Gmail so they don't have to do it ever again, but OTOH those services are better-run than most ISP mail systems.

I happen to think the problem is with the bulk mail forwarding services that don't pre-filter mail. But that's just my opinion. I choose not
to use unfiltered bulk mail forwarding services so I don't have those
problems.
That's not the problem, because I'm not using a bulk mail forwarding service. It's just a single vanity domain hosted by a single Linux box with a half-dozen accounts. And I read the mail _on that box_. There is nothing complicated going on here; we're talking stuff people were doing just fine in the 1980s. I can get email from and send email to anyone on the planet reliably except Comcast customers, which, unfortunately, includes several family members and friends. And even that worked for years; it just broke a few months ago.

The real killer is it's broken in both directions; I can't come up with any legitimate reason for that. Inbound (to comcast), I could blame on spam filters, but not outbound.

S

Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking