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

[jducoeur]

Of course, now it suddenly occurs to me that you started having this problem right about the time I stopped being able to send email *through Comcast itself*. That is, smtp.comcast.net keeps refusing my mail, and has been doing so for a couple of days now.

I wonder if something is deeply, deeply hosed over there...

[dsrtao]

Yes. Comcast shut down port 25 bidirectionally.

You can still reach smtp.comcast.net on port 587, I believe.

Isn't it nice of them to tell you that?

[jducoeur]

*Blink*

...

Okay, I believe the only reason I am not *ragingly* angry about this is that I'm in shock.

I am going to have to try this, to prove that it is so. If it is, it's going right into the "Why I'm quitting your service" letter. That sets a new standard in incompetent customer service...

[jducoeur]

Lordy. Yep, that works just fine. They have just pushed me over the edge: that went beyond any explanation I can reasonably accept, into simply screwing with their customers because they can...