Comcast E-Mail

[W3WN]

Out of idle curiousity, has anyone been experiencing problems with outgoing Comcast E-Mail the last few days?

Here's what happened:

I had a call from Bill W3WH on Friday. Seems that he suddenly could not send e-mail from either his home (M$ Outlook) or business (Outlook Express) mailboxes. Had a chance to go over to his place last night, no changes to the configuration on either email client. (I'm sure, as I set them up on his laptop a few months back). At first (roughly 5 PM EDT) everything appeared OK, so I went on to help him with a different problem (getting his laptop to talk with his Elecraft K3).

Before I left (circa 6:15), I double-checked his email... and once again, neither could send. Receive fine, but not send. Couldn't ping either outgoing email server, either. Figured it was a Comcast problem.

Got home about 7. Checked my email around 9:30 One test email (Outlook) came through with a timestamp of 7:11 PM.

The other test email? Came through at 1:50 PM today.

Bill called Comcast support. First tier support told him that there was nothing, nothing, not a thing wrong with their servers, no nothing, nothing at all. Obviously the problem was with his email clients, so he should uninstall & reinstall them, and all would be just peachy keen! Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I've learned that my father-in-law and my sister-in-law, both Comcast users, have been having the same problems the last few days. KB3ERQ, who has the cubicle next to me, told me that he was in a conversation with a neighbor yesterday, who is also a Comcast subscriber, and HE had the same problem as well.

Sure odd that four different people in four different Comcast-served communities would suddenly have the same problem with their email packages, isn't it? Incidentally, the in-laws use Comcast's own web-based email client.

So I'm wondering if anyone else has had the same thing happen.

...oh, and don't worry about Bill. We've contacted a club member who's on the "inside" at Comcast. His first response to what first tier support said can't, or shouldn't, be repeated here. Suffice to say it involved the waste products of male bovines & leave it to your imagination...

[kf0rt]

No recent problems with Comcast email in Denver that I'm aware of... We did go through a round of Internet problems a few weeks back, though that affected everything including VoIP.

[ad4mg]

Verizon recently changed the port number for outgoing (smtp) mail from the usual port 25 to port 587 in an effort to thwart spammers using their network. That should be effective for at least 2 or 3 days ... :roll:

I wonder if Comcast has made a similar move? On the Verizon network, if you didn't make the change, outgoing email won't work.

Just a thought.

[W3WN]

Verizon recently changed the port number for outgoing (smtp) mail from the usual port 25 to port 587 in an effort to thwart spammers using their network. That should be effective for at least 2 or 3 days ... :roll:

I wonder if Comcast has made a similar move? On the Verizon network, if you didn't make the change, outgoing email won't work.

Just a thought.

It 'twas a good thought. I'd heard about that, but turns out, that wasn't the case after all.

Spoke this morning with my contact inside Comcast IT. (Best not to reveal his name/call in this thread). He raised holy hell with the Comcast.net guys. To make a long story short...
yes, they were having major troubles with their outgoing email server;
no, they weren't allowed to tell customers;
no, W3WH should not have been told to uninstall/reinstall his email applications, and the tech who said that is going to have a "talkin' too"
A supervisor was supposed to call Bill 2 nights ago to explain and apologize for the mis-information. As of yesterday, there'd been no call. I haven't heard yet from Bill today, so I don't know if he's gotten one since.

And they still want me to dump Verizon FiOS and go to Comcast?

[AE1PT]

In many service areas, Komcast routinely moves the outgoing SMTP port to 26. They then block 25, presuming that it will keep complete morons from using independent mail hosting servers from spamming. Actually, they would prefer that you used their Komcast SMTP servers and original email address. Right.

There are a lot of other interesting tricks. They suffer regular outages, lose emails, block entire domains and IP scopes, greylist certain accounts--quite unreliable. Which is why having an email account somewhere else it a good thing...