Interesting People mailing list archives
Comcast blocking personal mail servers
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2006 16:22:48 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Robert Alberti <alberti () sanction net> Date: April 9, 2006 2:44:38 PM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Comcast blocking personal mail servers Reply-To: alberti () sanction net For IP if you deem appropriate... I run my own mail and web server, and over the last few weeks I have begun receiving messages such as this one following an e-mail to my birthmother... 550 Comcast does not support the direct connection to its mail servers from residential IPs. Your mail should be sent to comcast.net users through your ISP. Please contact your ISP or mail administrator for more information. I am quite annoyed by this message. On the one hand, I understand a desire to limit spam. On the other hand, I doubt this will be particularly effective or that it is justified. If I were a Comcast customer I could protest this move by canceling my service. But I am not a Comcast customer: why should I be subject to their foolish rules and what recourse have I? My birthmother IS a Comcast customer: is she being served by this policy? I checked Comcast's website, and while it mentions a 48-hour anti-spam blocking policy, there is no mention of this more permanent policy. It seems if I want to communicate with Comcast and other ISPs with this policy, I must reconfigure my mail server to send through my local ISP server. This adds another point of failure into the process of sending and receiving e-mail. And it offers an additional point of exposure for my e-mail (and please don't talk to me about e-mail encryption until you produce for me a product that can be remotely supported from a thousand miles away). Finally, what right does this company have to inhibit my communications? Would I be pleased to find that the phone company had determined that a lot of prank calls came from pay phones, and tried to "help" me by preventing pay phones from calling my home? I don't think so. If I wish to contact my birthmother I must either use another address (such as a Yahoo or Hotmail address, where as we all know no spam originates), or waste my time reconfiguring my mail server to relay through my ISP. And for what good? -- Robert Alberti, CISSP, ISSMP <alberti () sanction net> Sanction, Inc. Phone: (612) 486-5000 x211 PO Box 583453 Fax: (612) 486-5000 Mpls, MN 55458-3453 http://www.sanction.net "So you've backed up your data... Have you ever tested recovering it?" ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- Comcast blocking personal mail servers David Farber (Apr 09)