Comcast: evil and incompetent on a national scale

[dsrtao]

You may recall
( http://dsrtao.livejournal.com/96943.html )
that Comcast has turned off port 25 inbound to my account, without warning, effective at 3:17AM yesterday, and that after speaking to four people I was told that I was a spammer.

This morning in the Interesting People list I discover a message from the esteemed Dave Farber ( http://www.epp.cmu.edu/httpdocs/people/bios/farber.html ):
> [IP] the idiots at comcast suddenly started
> to block port 25 in Pittsburgh, No notice and no reason
> Of course i worked around it but DAMN idiots NO NOTICE

and eight more messages on that subject from around the country.

RCN installers come one week from today.

Comments

[cellio]

So this "you're a spammer" excuse is even less credible than it was last night. Lovely. I'm so glad I have DSL available and thus can avoid Comcast's clutches. (Well, they serve my cable, but not my internet connectivity.)

FIOS is sprouting up all around me, but so far not on my street. I'm beginning to take it personally. :-(

[dsrtao]

Well, it's hard to get less credible than zero.

- There are no Microsoft machines on my network. Forget any theories about worms. There's one Mac, sometimes two.

- There is exactly one machine with access to inbound ports. It listens to TCP 22 for SSH, TCP 25 for SMTP (answered by qmail) and TCP 80 for HTTP (Apache). It's a Linux box, kept updated by a professional systems administrator (me).

- Looking through my logs shows that in 2007, I received just over 110,000 messages and sent about 7,500. That's sending about 21 messages a day. Do spammers do that?

- Coworkers with Comcast accounts are reporting similar filters.

[cellio]

You're right; I worded that poorly. s/less credible/more ridiculous. There's no upper limit on ridiculousness the way there's a lower limit on credibility.

What I meant, of course, is that if Comcast is doing this to everyone, then any claim based on you is clearly bogus.