Pollywogs!

I wrote this as an email to a work colleague earlier today, and realized that it ought to be made public and saved for posterity.  Comcast can lick my left nut.  They’ve been blocking our legitimate email from our work because they are lazy, retarded cunts.  To wit:

The problem is Comcast is blocking emails on a server level, rather than on a user level //on your end//.  Email should be filtered, not blocked.  When I get email, not a single message is ever blocked, it all comes into my email client software, where spam filters are run.  I can then adjust the filters myself on the fly, tweaking things as necessary, marking ’spam’ messages that get through and marking ‘not spam’ messages that are accidentally filtered as such.  I don’t know where Comcast got this 1996 mentality all of a sudden, but it will never, ever work as a long term solution.  Simply black-listing an entire IP address or bank of IP address is ridiculous, it would be exactly like me setting up a filter to block every @comcast.net email address just because I got spam from one Comcast user…

No serious email provider today ‘black holes’ email: they forward the email to a spam filter for human review.

A Small Orange is a hosting company, just like any other hosting company.  Each PC in a rack of servers hosts a large number of services (web, email & others).  Each PC would have an IP address, and each location that ASO operates would have a bank of IP addresses.  For Comcast to request that we have our own server moved to another PC in the rack is the very definition of asinine.

GMail is compatible with POP clients, you simply enable it in the settings, and then enter the information into your email client (if you’d like to continue to use a conventional client with your email).  They properly (and effectively) filter email, they never block it.  I can’t see any way to continue to send you messages to a Comcast email address reliably in the future, as long as their default behavior is to simply ‘black hole’ email on their server side.

For more information, read what Stanford University has to say about the situation: http://www.stanford.edu/services/email/antispam/blacklist.html

Why is rejecting mail that comes from a blacklisted machine bad?

Blacklisting causes problems when the administrator of an email system decides to simply block all messages coming from a machine on a blacklist. Blacklists are not intended to be used this way. Competent email service providers usually filter spam, employing methods that consider multiple factors before deciding whether an email message is spam or not. Most email administrators don’t reject mail just because an email server is on a blacklist, but will tag or quarantine suspicious messages and provide the intended recipient with ways to view the message safely. Even SpamCop advocates this method of using its blacklists.

Still, there are overzealous service providers who simply reject messages based on blacklists. This is bad because it prevents people from getting perfectly good email. It happens because many service providers are lazy. Using blacklists alone against spam is basically a cost-shifting exercise: instead of spending the necessary time and money to configure an email system correctly, the service provider pushes all the work for dealing with spam onto the administrators of remote email systems like Stanford’s.

I’d send that to Comcast myself, but obviously they’ve hired Bozo the Clown (or worse, an accountant) to head up their anti-spam departments, probably not much use in trying to instruct them better.