An Experiment of a Webmaster

I hate mail server administration right now. Actually I always hate it. Mail servers probably piss me off since thats one of my weak areas when it comes to administration. My mail server only exists to get support emails related to my online roleplaying game and to send out lost password/registration confirmation messages. For the privilege of sending these out I have to deal with spam quite a bit, and I’m pretty serious when it comes to defeating spam. We rarely get any in our support queues, and I rarely get any in my personal box.

I am a novice when it comes to proper mail server support, but even I seem to know way more than the kind folks at comcast who have established their own blacklist. I’m iffy when it comes to blacklists. I use quite a few of them in calculations that helps my scanners figure out if something is spam. I would not trust them to bounce messages though since they are often wrong. Comcast has decided to bounce messages at their gateways based on a blacklist they created though. Not only are they doing this, but they aren’t informing their customers that mail is not being delivered! Thats just crazy to me. You should find a way to mark messages as possibly spam and have them deleted or ignored on the users request, not silently discarded without their knowledge this filter even exists!

Of course as a corporate environment, there is no way they can properly support this list as it doesn’t bring any money in. Customers don’t even know it exists, so it can’t be the highest funded project. Google has tons of complains in their index about companies who are listed, and most have no real resolution. It reaks of being someones pet project for promotion and then being abandoned to the clueless help desk.

The kicker is that our server isn’t on a single other blacklist, so why are they blacklisting us. If we were sending out spam, how would comcasts inept staff be the first ones to notice? What about the spam fighters who do it for fun and challenge? It would make a lot more sense for comcast to team up with a black list operator and use their data rather than trying some patched up in house solution.

Until comcast gets back to me I’m going to be advising the 1740 comcast subscribers of our to sign up with a company that can reliable handle email such as gmail or yahoo rather than a flakey and unreliable service such as comcasts email.