NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Comcast limits on outbound e-mail traffic?
I think a point that's tangential here, but is still worth mentioning is the cost of "avoidance" to these restrictions. I've got Comcast as my HSI provider at home, and have had my email address (either my POBOX.com or my tarpify.com one) forwarded along to whatever ISP the time I was using. After Comcast bought AT&T Cable (I live in Chicago), I figured it'd pretty much be the same service...it wasn't. I travel _a lot_ (every week), and I was spending literally hours at night the first couple weeks trying to get my home email outlook profile to connect, on the road to Comcast's server, once they migrated us onto the Comcast.net POP3 server. I then discovered that you can only slurp your mail if you're on a Comcast IP...and since their webmail client blows, I ended up deciding to shell out for hosted exchange ($9.95/month/user) for myself and my wife's account on tarpify.com. I bring this up to illustrate the point that in attempting to "manage" their network, they most certainly discriminated against traffic from another network attempting to make a POP3 connection to their server...even for a user who was a legitimate customer of theirs, and simply wanted to read his email. Instead, after frustrating me for hours, not being able to find out this simple fact (one would think that this would make an excellent Q to put on the support FAQs), and then only finding this out after I wheedled my way into tier 3 support, I decided I'd rather thrown money at the problem then fight the system. My rationale for going with hosted exchange...no hotel/café/etc is going to block Outlook to exchange on their network. Why? Their core business (travelers/business people/etc) are going to want to be able to download that last email with the presentation as they're waiting to go to the big presentation. The lesson I learned from this: it's easier to throw money at the problem (network discrimination) than trying to make some level-3 techie understand and hope he can talk to someone who can make a difference. --Matthew -----Original Message----- From: nnsquad-bounces+tarpy=tarpify.com@nnsquad.org [mailto:nnsquad-bounces+tarpy=tarpify.com@nnsquad.org] On Behalf Of Bob Frankston Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 12:37 PM To: 'Lauren Weinstein'; nnsquad@nnsquad.org Subject: [ NNSquad ] Re: Comcast limits on outbound e-mail traffic? Long ago when I used Comcast's outbound mail server I did run into such limits. I don't have the exact details but switched to doing my outbound mail then to DynDNS outbound mailhop service so I don't have recent information. I plan to post my own attitude towards NN issues in the near future. I see this as more peripheral to NN in that it is an optional service and there are alternatives though the primary alternative -- sending one's own mail directly is problematic since AOL and others treat user-originated mail as spam so you pay a third party like DynDNS for vouching for you. A problem with many service-provider mail relays is that they have naïve authentication that depends on being directly connected thus you have to make other arrangements when traveling anyway. This creates the problem of hotels intercepting port 25 as a favor to you but a favor you often don't want. A related problem is that we have chosen to use mail protocols -- especially an addressing scheme that creates names relative to a service provider -- that make us unnecessarily dependent upon third parties and unnecessarily inviting of spam.