Re: Comcast Mail Blocking Issues Related to DynDNS

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Livingood, Jason" <Jason_Livingood () cable comcast com>
Date: October 14, 2008 10:02:53 PM EDT
To: "Barry Gold" <bgold () matrix-consultants com>, "NNSquad" <nnsquad () nnsquad org 
>
Subject: [ NNSquad ] Re: Comcast Mail Blocking Issues Related to DynDNS

Conflicts as to what is considered spam are indeed quite common as  
Barry points out.  I disagree with another poster that there's a lack  
of transparency here, based on much of the information disclosed at http://postmaster.comcast.net 
, the fact that senders like DynDNS can and do signup for a mail  
Feedback Loop to see why messages are being rejected, that we  
regularly meet face-to-face with large senders to discuss  
deliverability at forums such as the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working  
Group (http://www.maawg.org), etc.

Also, we often hear of situations where a user might configure a  
forwarding service to mark email as spam / forward all spam, but on  
our system they do not have a spam folder setup, meaning they want us  
to block / drop the spam.  So we do what the user tells our system to  
do in these cases, but a forwarding service is upset that we didn't  
accept the mail since the user did not configure their forwarding  
system similarly.  These can become complicated situations, which is  
why we make an effort to work closely with senders and why the email  
industry as a whole continues to examine standards-based approaches to  
better securing email, and preventing spamming and phishing.

Regards
Jason Livingood
Comcast


-----Original Message-----
From: nnsquad-bounces+jason_livingood=cable.comcast.com () nnsquad org on  
behalf of Barry Gold
Sent: Tue 10/14/2008 5:11 PM
To: NNSquad
Subject: [ NNSquad ] Re: Comcast Mail Blocking Issues Related to DynDNS

> > 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 customers
> >
> > I 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).

I find myself wondering if Comcast is blocking _all_ mail from Mailhop,
or only mail for users who have a setting that block "spam" (as Comcast
defines spam, which clearly isn't the same as the way Reed prefers).
Conflicts in what is considered "spam" can be quite common, as ISPs
attempt to apply heuristics to figure out what is spam and what isn't.
This is never as good as the actual human looking at the headers and
deciding.

Too bad Comcast doesn't provide a "whitelist" service, where Reed could
say, "yes, I want to receive mail from DynDNS, regardless of what your
software thinks."

Now if I could just figure out what piece of errant software is adding
[[!!SPAM]] and [[??Probable Spam]] to my incoming mail.  Time Warner
claims it isn't _their_ server.  I use Spam Assassin at my Nyx account,
but only a small percentage of my mail routes through there (and _none_
of my Yahoo! groups mail, which are often so mislabeled).  And I
wouldn't expect Thunderbird to be doing it -- AFAIK T-bird puts a little
flame next to mail that it thinks is spam.

Oh well...






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