comcast blocking smtp25

[jkinz at kinz.org (Jeff Kinz)]

the following e-mail response was created using Dragon NaturallySpeaking
speech recognition software.(anomalies may be present)


On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 07:32:23PM -0400, Bob Leigh wrote:
> Hi, Jeff,
> 
> > Comcast limits outgoing email to 20 addresses  per email and something
> > less than 300 per day.
> > 
> > Exceed these limits and they shut you off from emailing completely for
> > at least 3 or 4 days.
>  
> > Comcast will willingly lie directly to your face abut these policies.
> > If you ask Comcast about these policies they will deny that they exist.
> > 
> > But if you hit them and get blocked when you chase the problem down with
> > them, they will tell why you were blocked.  
> 
> How did you get the customer service drones to tell you _why_ you were
> blocked?

Hi Bob,
in my case it was rather obvious.  I jumped from my usual trickle of
a few tens of e-mails per day to suddenly several thousand within one
24-hour period.  I was working on diagnosing a problem with somebody
else's e-mail list and that required sending an individual, and unique
e-mail to everyone on the last.  (Generated automatically of course :-)

soon after starting this effort, about 900 e-mails in, I have found
e-mail SMTP relay stopped working.  When I noticed this I called Comcast
and began tracking down the problem.  I don't recall having to do
anything special but I was certainly being "rather directly assertive"
(but not quite reaching "abusive" :-)) about dealing with the issue
in getting the problem fixed.  During the resulting conversation
the Comcast technician basically revealed the two above parameters
regarding their e-mail limits.  I believe the 20 addresses per e-mail
when it is actually documented in their user agreements, but the 300 per
day limit, I believe, may not be.

Is only because of the extreme contrast between my normal flow and the
work which caused the problem that made it so easy to identify.  Why the
technician chose to reveal the other limit to me is rather muddy.

the text above has several errors in it.  Sorry about that.  I am using
a, gasp, Windows box as a voice front-end to my Linux machine to access
my mutt e-mail client.  Unfortunately, my ASR software has no idea how
to do corrections inside vi.  If you encounter "nonsense" it sometimes
helps to read it out loud quickly to see what it might sound like.

Ordinarily when I catch these errors I can manually correct them,
however, for the next few weeks I am a newly minted "lefty" rather than
the right-hander I have been used to being for 40 odd years.

Hopefully, this transcription process will improve as I get more
practice, and the software has more opportunity to train on my voice.

Thanks for your patience.  Jeff

> 
> In a similar situation recently, I called them on behalf of
> one of their customers and was simply told that Comcast had detected
> spam coming from their address, and they should install AV and anti-spyware
> software, have their system "professionally cleaned", etc, etc.  But
> the drone would not provide any specific evidence, and claimed that
> after the system was cleaned, the block would automatically vanish.
> 
> It was very annoying for me and for the customer, especially since
> the system in question _is_ clean.  However, the customer does send
> out email via other ISPs' SMTP servers -- might that look like spamming?
> Well, I guess.

that just sounds bizarre, to me.
Perhaps Google could start up yet another business model selling Spam
recognition technology to ISPs.  :-)

They're filtering on G-mail seems especially intelligent.


> 
> (I found a workaround:  send via other ISPs' non-port-25 servers!)
> 
> -- 
> Bob Leigh	bobleigh at twomeeps.com
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at blu.org
> http://olduvai.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 

-- 
speech recognition software was used in the composition of this e-mail
Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.