New info on the Comcast thing

[Mythsaje]

My wife came home fully aware of the controversy that's going on over the afterdowningstreet site and the e-mail issue. She works for comcast and took a complaintant's call herself.

As she told him, this was apparently caused by an automated spam blocking system. It's my thought that perhaps a group of freepers joined afterdowningstreet.com, started receiving their e-mails, then started reporting them for spam. After so many reports came in, the automated system kicked in...it was not a policy decision, except that the original system was created by a policy decision...enough complaints about spamming and the source address is automatically blocked.

This is just a theory, but it makes sense.

[Mojambo]

1. Thanks for the update

It seems to be fixed now.

[skids]

2. Yeah, I never use those corporate servers.

They make the most inane policy decisions.

If you have the technical know-how and a little time, you can set up your own domain and your own email pretty cheap, going directly to your cable modem. Sometimes you have to send outgoing mail through the cable company, because some people won't take email from a cable modem as a matter of (dumb) policy.

For spam filtering I've found "graylisting" to be very effective. It is very easy to maintain, and filters most of the spam out very reliably with no false positives except for a few auto-mailers like ebay that you have to exempt. What little gets through is easily managable.