Speaking of Comcast -- Downtime today?

[mikegideon]

http://www.tngunowners.com/forums/tn-gun-owners-announcements/46118-unexpected-downtime-sunday-september-12th.html

This might have something to do with it.

No. my problem cropped up on the 9th.

[Guest DeadEye]

I am having severe probs with TGO for the last 2 hours today!

[Il Duce]

im so glad i dropped comcast and got epb. no more of this stupid crap and crappy service

[Guest drv2fst]

im so glad i dropped comcast and got epb. no more of this stupid crap and crappy service

What's EPB?

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Ok... what am I supposed to do about Comcast's mail service?

Hi David. Am certain you know a whole lot more about the interwebz than me, but a couple of ideas for what its worth. I don't work in that area, just a couple of things have noticed.

* Perhaps in an attempt to improve security or reduce spam, some email servers seem to have gotten real picky about how the email headers are formed. I've occasionally gotten a few email bounces where the email server replied complaining that it didn't like features in my email header, though I always use bog-standard Mac and Winders mail programs. Little dumb inconsistencies, like maybe I receive a message from one email address, but send the reply from another of my email addresses. Some email servers seem to think something like that is evidence of criminal activity.

So PERHAPS there is something in your email headers that comcast doesn't like (if in fact comcast is blocking you).

* My company does a fair percentage of direct web sales, and a few times per year we send legit mass-mailings to the registered customers. There are spam lists that many services cooperatively share. Sometimes if there is a lot of spam from a server close to the company's domain, some ISPs will block us along with anybody in that general area, and they share the blacklists so it can cause you to get blocked a lot of places. And sometimes you get put on a spam list from a 'false positive' detection.

I don't work on that specifically, just hear about it from the web guys. I think some of those blacklists only last a couple of weeks, so you eventually get automatically un-blocked. Think I recall that occasionally our web guys will contact a big ISP that is blocking us, and get us un-blocked. Could ask for more details if you like.

It is similar with anti-virus lists. If one anti-virus company decides your product is dangerous, sometimes all the anti-virus companies will adopt the same policy. Nutty stuff. A couple of times lowlifes have written trojans that were propogated in the same commercial installer program that we use, and the anti-virus check would be amateurishly written to alert on every piece of software that used that version of that installer program. So hundreds of legit programs would suddenly be identified as malware until the error would get corrected.

EDIT: Sorry I just saw your reply on the "comcast email hosed" thread, and you know everything I was trying to say already.

Edited September 14, 2010 by Lester Weevils

[Guest drv2fst]

Ok... what am I supposed to do about Comcast's mail service?

A friend of mine runs a web site with subscribing members since 1997. He has had similar problems with ISPs blocking his emails to his members. Some bonehead spoofed a spam to look like it came from the legit site and got the legit site blocked. He worked it out with the ISPs and all is well. It may not be something that TGO is doing at all. A chat with Comcast may help resolve it.

[mikegideon]

I ragged at comcast. Had to go thru the typical support response from Bombay. Sent the support chick a header and told her to get it to the server admin group if she really wants to fix it.

[Il Duce]

What's EPB?

electric power board