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

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Maybe they're run by the TSA now? it would explain a lot.

"I'm sorry, Mr...Bush, was it? George? Your name is on the list; you can't fly."

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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...