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[ NNSquad ] Re: Comcast Mail Blocking Issues Related to DynDNS 

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>
Date: October 14, 2008 1:45:19 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Comcast blocking mail to its customers

I am a happy user of DynDNS's Mailhop BackupMX service. Just got the following related to Comcast's blocking of inbound mail from DynDNS's Mailhop Forward service. Wholesale blocking of all mail intended for customers from a particular intermediate distributor, merely because they route it through an external service that adds value.

While this doesn't affect me personally, it represents a "reach" on the part of Comcast. The "Mailhop Forward" service allows a user to have mail directed to him personally at another domain (foo@bar.com) to be directed to his comcast.net mailbox. As such it is like the "forwarding" that I do with my MIT Media Lab mail to my "reed.com" mailbox (hosted on a service provider).

I find myself wondering if Comcast is blocking _all_ mail from Mailhop, or only mail for users who have a setting that block "spam" (as Comcast defines spam, which clearly isn't the same as the way Reed prefers). Conflicts in what is considered "spam" can be quite common, as ISPs attempt to apply heuristics to figure out what is spam and what isn't. This is never as good as the actual human looking at the headers and deciding.

Too bad Comcast doesn't provide a "whitelist" service, where Reed could say, "yes, I want to receive mail from DynDNS, regardless of what your software thinks."

Now if I could just figure out what piece of errant software is adding [[!!SPAM]] and [[??Probable Spam]] to my incoming mail. Time Warner claims it isn't _their_ server. I use Spam Assassin at my Nyx account, but only a small percentage of my mail routes through there (and _none_ of my Yahoo! groups mail, which are often so mislabeled). And I wouldn't expect Thunderbird to be doing it -- AFAIK T-bird puts a little flame next to mail that it thinks is spam.

Oh well...