comast email issues, who else has them?

Thu Sep 7 18:10:03 UTC 2006

Thus spake "Sean Donelan" <sean at donelan.com>
> 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
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