[IP] Re: Comcast Response

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: WJCarpenter [bill-ip@carpenter.org]
Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2008 1:52 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] Comcast Response

> We have seen the flurry of posts about Comcast and e-mail blocking and customer communications.  I would like to take this opportunity to provide Comcast's position on these comments.
> ...
>
> Declan Forde
> Snr. Director of Security
> Comcast
>

Well, someone with that title should certainly know, so I have to
conclude he's either lying about the policy or something outside the
policy is going on.  The policy just doesn't square with observation
over the last week or two.  It's pretty clear that we are now seeing a
pretty pervasive outbound port 25 block, and there is NO notification.
(I'm not opposed to port 25 blocking.  Like many others, I merely
objected to it suddenly starting without any notice.)

I'm even willing to believe I lost my email notification in the spam
flow, but there have been a heck of a lot of "me too" posts on I-P and
elsewhere.  Since it would be uncivil to call a complete stranger a
liar, my suspicion is that he's either out of the loop or some port 25
blocking network config is happening via some technical accident.  I
switched to port 587, of course, so my own inconvenience is over.
Nonetheless, I'd be happy (as I'm sure many others would be) to have
someone from Comcast explain why my particular account is blocked (but
I'm not willing to play phone games with first-line support just to have
them parrot the policy).

For the heck of it, I tried outbound port 25 again just now.  The
symptoms are slightly different from the day it first got blocked, which
very slightly adds to the suspicion of a technical mistake in the
network.  (On the first day, I just got timeouts.  Today, I'm getting
some kind of partially opened connection that still does nothing
productive.)


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