true story: Comcast breaks email. bring on the cloud!
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| Author | Content |
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| tuxchick Feb 28, 2010 5:31 PM EDT |
A friend of mine who is stuck with Comcast at her job called me for help with her email, because all of a sudden she could not send, but only receive. She uses a non-Comcast host for email, and has her own domain name. I tested her email servers and they're fine. Outlook is giving her an error message with a number code, and the number code means "can't find your mail server." So we check firewall, DNS, and anti-virus, and they're all fine. Well, to make a long story short, and you've already figured out the answer, the brilliant persons at Comcast decided that customers must use Comcast's SMTP servers, and blocked port 25. Without any notice, of course. She gets on the phone with Comcast and gets this seriously stupid condescending tech dood who must have special training in being a jerk, because first he as good as tells her she is wrong and her email is fine. She keeps trying to get escalated to someone with a brain, because even though she is only a little tech-savvy, she is people-smart and knows when she's getting snowed. He won't escalate the call, so she hangs up and tries again. And gets the exact same dork. Hangs up once more, and once again-- you guessed it, same idiot again. So she keeps pestering him until he deigns to admit that oh maybe Comcast might be responsible, and walks her through the steps to configure Outlook to use Comcast's mail servers, SMTP and POP. She already knows she can use any SMTP server, and is pretty sure that using Comcast's POP server won't help her any, and persists in trying to get him to understand that she uses an outside mail host. He insists with equal fervor that no no no, she is dumb and wrong and must do what he says. She does, and now she can send but not receive. So she calls him some choice names and hangs up and calls me. In less than a minute we get her POP mail set up correctly and all is well again. Except she is still trapped in Comcast. Bring on the cloud, for lo our service providers are top notch! |
| techiem2 Feb 28, 2010 8:20 PM EDT |
They've had access to external standard smtp blocked for some time on the residential accounts.
Fortunately decent mail providers run their smtp servers on the secure alternate ports as well.
Obviously they would claim it's for security, to reduce spam, etc.
But it's a huge disservice to customers. And yes, the front line techs seem to know absolutely nothing. Like the one in the "network security" division I had to deal with when our church/school connection got cut off and he kept telling me that "your network is hosting a phishing site", until I finally got him to just read the complaint notice, which turned out to be simply "a machine on your ip sent out phishing emails". Yeah....an infected Windows machine someone had on the network is a tad different issue than a rooted server hosting a phishing site.... |
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