Commie-Tastic

I have Comcast (to be referred to by it's correct name from here on out) as an ISP. You may have read the news about 3 months ago that ComCrap decided to put the brakes on high-bandwidth users.

Here's an interesting write-up of THAT annoying process.

My problem with them tonight is a bit different. I have put on a new hat with my yacht club, that of Newsletter Publisher. Once a month, I am going to write and publish the club's newsletter, some members receiving it by email and some by snail mail.

Day before yesterday, I formed a distribution list in Outlook and yesterday I decided to test it and ask for replies to confirm the addresses. I was quite intense about getting the mass email sent out, but overlooked the "subject" line, leaving it blank. One of the members who replied noted that empty subject lines could be detected as spam by those with tight antispam controls set up.

Tonight, I get an email from ComCrap's "Customer Security Assurance" division. This email informs me that I have been identified (doesn't say by who) as a spammer, and says that I have to click on a link to restore my full emailing privileges. I have no way of authenticating this email without doing a long and boring "whois" lookup, so I just go to their chat room and chat up a support person.

The chat was interesting, if primitive. I was using better chat software than ComCrap uses when I first started computing in the mid-80's. Theirs won't even word-wrap a sentence, and with this VERY chatty tech, there were some looooooong sentences. Never mind. I quickly established that yes, I was accused of spamming, and I then established that I could clear my good name with this chat service, but they tended to hem and haw a lot, so I played the trump card by asking them if their flagging my account was an attempt to force me to use their antivirus software suite. It is the horrible MacAfee, and I attempted to use it when ComCrap first started giving it away free to customers several years ago, but after three attempts to install it, the last time with the help of their support system, and never getting it to function in any manner than slowing my computer to a crawl, I gave up and went back to AVG Free, where I sit snugly to this day.

Right after I threw down the trump, I got a curt message that my account was restored. It may not be, since I haven't been able to send a message to my other account at Yahoo! Update: a second visit to the chat room was required, and this time they had me reset the outgoing port on my Outlook from 25 to 587, and that cleared up the block. I guess they blocked port 25 and can't really undo the block, so they had to have me reset the port to another one. I wonder why the original support tech didn't think of that?

This may push me over to Verizon Fios, which is now available in my town, but was only approved by the city gummint last week. The company still isn't sending out any fliers confirming the TV availability.

Any other abused ComCrap victims out there? Feel free to discuss, with the only limit being no terrorist threats against the company, please.

Comments

[BillH]

I don't use Comcast but many in my family, church, and service group do. I find that if I have a newsletter or an email with a link or a photo or two in it, or if I try to use one of my distrib lists, many of the Comcast addresses send me "Fail" notes a day or two later, after flagging my email as spam.

No terrorist threat here. No business from me either. And I always make sure to inform those who have an email account with them that they probably aren't getting all of the email that is sent to them. "You see, it's like this... if you put your mailbox on a real high post, and the mailman can't reach it, how much mail do you think you're really getting?"

[Light & Dark]

Uhhh... R'dog, I think yer barkin' at the wrong windmill on this one. (Mix metaphors? Me?)

What you did in sending to your "distribution list" looked to an email server exactly like what spammers do. As a good citizen of the Internet (and to protect their own servers, natch) they blocked your ability to do it again. This is a good thing, especially for all those who love to complain about how much of a problem spam has become. (And remember, vast numbers of home users' computers have been compromised by malware to function as spam generators too, so ISPs must protect themselves and their users from unwitting as well as malicious spammers.) In addition, since you're email is sent from a mailserver's shared IP address, your behaviour could cause others sharing that server to get blacklisted by other ISPs as well.

Are Comcast's limits too tight? Possibly, but the reality is that, in this day and age of massive spam, personal email accounts are going to be more and more restricted from sending "email blasts". If your email looks like Spam, the servers are going to nail it. Not to piss you off, but because the vast majority of their customers are screaming for better spam protection and they must respond, and other ISPs will block them if their policies are lax.

Personal email accounts are for sending personal email. Use the right weapon for the job. There are plenty of services out there whose purpose is to effectively deliver email newsletters to legitimately opted-in recipients. I have one I can strongly recommend; it's dead easy to use and will offer significant benefits you can't get with Outlook (wanna know how many people actually opened the newsletter or clicked on a link?). And if your list is under 100 members, it's free! If it's over 100 members, you have no business sending from a personal account anyway. :) (Exactly ho big is your list?)

Give me a holler if you'd like more details.

Paul

ED. NOTE: Good to hear from you again Paul, I thought maybe you had been eaten by a bear up there in the Frozen North, then arrested by Her Majesty's Bear Protection Police for poisoning the bear! Of course, I yield to your knowledge of these things, because you have so many stars on YOUR wizard hat that it is snow white....

That said, my beef with ComCrap is that having blocked me, and then having quickly convinced them that I wasn't a spammer (which they could have decided for themselves merely by reading the suspect email), it took me and them two tries and 2 1/2 hours to restore my email, in the middle of the night when no one had anything better to do.

A heavy hand of protection (maybe justified, as you say) can't justify their inability do do a simple task correctly without two attempts at it.

I'll probably still switch to Verizon Fios when they get their ducks in a row in my burg.

[Light & Dark]

Sorry to have misunderstood the gripe, Cap'n.

I absolutely agree with the frustration of getting an intelligent, fully thought out answer from just about any kind of tech support anymore. I really wonder what would happen if a supplier created a truly top-notch tech support system with excellent training and retention strategies, and charged a premium price for their commodity. Would the market reward the concept? I'm thinking particularly of computers. CHARGE for the support, but make the support truly excellent.

Actually, Microsoft does this with their top tier server software. A support incident costs over $400, but you get access to the gurus, not just the script readers. My buddy was team lead for on eof these teams. There were incidents that he worked on for 12 hours, then did an hour's overlap with the new tech who was taking over the shift, then did another hour overlap 12 hours later when he came back to work and the issue still wasn't solved. In a few cases, he was able to pull in the guys who wrote the actual kernel for the software if that's what it took.

As opposed to your guy who can't even remember to tell you to switch over to the alternate smtp port. Oy vey.

And as for the frozen North? Not hardly - we were at 7C today, and no snow on the ground yet except at elevation. Very strange for this tiem of year in the mountains.

P.