Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:03:15 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: "Livingood, Jason" <Jason_Livingood () cable comcast com> Date: October 14, 2008 3:57:46 PM EDT To: <dave () farber net>, "ip" <ip () v2 listbox com> Subject: RE: [IP] Comcast blocking mail to its customersComcast routinely filters spam for our email users, and most of this is automated based on user-reported spam. It is in our customers' best interest, and therefore our interest, to assure good deliverability from large senders like this, as well as banks (statement emails), etc. We also have a special web site for such senders at http://postmaster.comcast.net, which includes the ability to signup for a Feedback Loop so that a sender understands what messages may have been reported as spam by our users.
I will investigate this now with my mail team and provide an update. Regards Jason Livingood Internet Systems National Engineering & Technical Operations Comcast From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net] Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 3:07 PM To: ip Subject: [IP] Comcast blocking mail to its customers Begin forwarded message:
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com> Date: October 14, 2008 1:45:19 PM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Comcast blocking mail to its customersI am a happy user of DynDNS's Mailhop BackupMX service. Just got the following related to Comcast's blocking of inbound mail from DynDNS's Mailhop Forward service. Wholesale blocking of all mail intended for customers from a particular intermediate distributor, merely because they route it through an external service that adds value.While this doesn't affect me personally, it represents a "reach" on the part of Comcast. The "Mailhop Forward" service allows a user to have mail directed to him personally at another domain (foo () bar com) to be directed to his comcast.net mailbox. As such it is like the "forwarding" that I do with my MIT Media Lab mail to my "reed.com" mailbox (hosted on a service provider).Comcast is, in this case, rejecting its own users' specific choice of mail delivery path. Do they plan to do this for other forwarding services? What is the competitive rationale for blocking supposed "spam" that the users have elected to receive (and presumably delete once they determine they are, in fact, spam)?From a legal point of view: Spam is defined as "unwanted commercial email" - it is NOT "bulk" mail (bulk mail includes such things as College Acceptance Letters to a whole class of accepted students). Comcast's ability to determine "unwantedness" against its own customers' expressed interests seems to be the overreaching issue here.Did Comcast issue a statement to its users that warns them of this tinkering with the mail addressed to them?-------- Original Message -------- To: dpreed () reed com Subject: Comcast and MailHop Forward From: DynDNS Lists <automailer () dyndns com> Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:23:14 -0400 Dear DynDNS MailHop Forward Customer, As you may already know from our previous communications, our DynDNSMailHop Team has been working with Comcast over the past year to better the quality of mail delivery to comcast.net email addresses from our MailHop Forward system. The DynDNS MailHop system experiences regular problems when trying to promptly delivery e-mail to comcast.net e-mail addresses because Comcast believes that we are originating and sending comcast.net e- mailaddresses large amount of SPAM.This is simply not true, rather, MailHop Forward regularly receives SPAM, which we scan with Spam Assassin to tag messages as such, and depending upon customer preference, may forward to Comcast. Comcast, on the other hand, ignores this tagging and believes that we are sending SPAM, whichleads to the eventual block of our servers. We have worked with Comcast to come to reasonable compromise on how toincrease the reliability of e-mail delivery to comcast.net email addresses, but have not reached a workable solution. For most DynDNS MailHop Forward customers, we permit the customer to filter e-mail according to their own needs. However, as an intermediate email forwarding provider, ignoring our SPAM tagging efforts, Comcast's policy is to continue blocking our mailservers on a regular basis. Because of the restrictions that Comcast has in place we are making a change to our MailHop Forward Service, which will affect only thoseaddresses that forward to a comcast.net email address. As of November 1st;any MailHop Forward email to a comcast.net email address will be SPAMtagged if the message is given a SpamAssassin score of 6 or higher, andwill be automatically discarded if given a score over 10. These newautomatic settings will only apply to forwards to Comcast email addresses; you will be able to customize settings for other forwards. By reducing the amount of forwarded SPAM, we believe that our reliability of delivery tocomcast.net email addresses will significantly increase. For more information regarding this issue; see our page: http://www.dyndns.com/support/kb/comcast_and_mailhop_forward.htmlIf you have questions regarding this issue, we have created a forum topicregarding this issue: http://dyndnscommunity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=904If you run into any trouble because of these hard coded settings on our side; you can re-route your MailHop Forward alias to a non-Comcast email address or contact Comcast directly at 1-800-COMCAST and encourage them toreconsider their policies.Thank you, The DynDNS MailHop Team at Dynamic Network Services Incorporated
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Current thread:
- Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 14)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 14)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 14)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 15)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 15)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 15)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 15)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 16)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 16)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 16)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 16)
- Re: Comcast blocking mail to its customers David Farber (Oct 16)
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