More on Comcast

[jducoeur]

So just to add insult to injury: for the past five days, we haven't been able to send any email through our Comcast account. No idea why: it just kept refusing our email. At first, I assumed this was just their servers being flaky (which is sadly common), but after a while I started to think there was something genuinely wrong.

Well, now I know what, thanks to dsrtao. Apparently, middle of last week, they abruptly shut off port 25, the standard email-sending port. If you want to send email, you have to do it through the unstandard port 587. And if they gave us any warning or notice, you couldn't prove it by me. I suspect they will claim that they told us -- buried somewhere in one of those spams they shovel at us once or twice a month that are full of services that some third party is trying to sell to us through them.

Enough. These people aren't just bad at customer service, they are unforgivably incompetent. The switch is going to take some time (moving email addresses is always painful at best, and is going to be far worse when I have to assume that there will be no decent forwarding), but I can't take this nonsense any more. These people are so contemptuous of their customers, they don't deserve to have any...

Comments

[cellio]

I never thought highly of them to begin with, but comments from you and others over the last few days have certainly sent my assessment of them into the toilet.

I thought you used your own domain name for email. Wouldn't that forstall forwarding issues?

[jducoeur]

Some, but in practice a lot of people and services wind up using the raw address. (Due to "From" address considerations, in particular.)

So while most of the public connections will be fine, there's still a lot of cleanup that needs to be done. It's entirely possible -- we've been through this before -- but it's painful...

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

Why is your email tied to your ISP? They seem like two very different jobs.

I suppose ISPs are in the email business as a provider of last resort -- everyone with internet access needs it, so if you can't get it elsewhere, you get it there. Or, more cynically, they provide it to make it hard for you to switch away. But why do you use it?

[jducoeur]

Variety of reasons, most of them historical. Remember, we've had essentially this account since the formation of MediaOne -- many, many years. At the time, it was by far the easiest route, and our setup got built around that. So for example, all of "waks.org" still routes to a single physical inbox at the ISP. Aside from the fact that ISPs are untrustworthy, it's actually extremely convenient for us. But we'll probably re-evaluate the approach after we switch...

587 is standard

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Actually, port 587 is standard—or, at least, a standard. See RFC-4409, "Message Submission for Mail". This goes back 10 years (originally RFC-2476); the idea is to segregate message submission (which should require authentication) from message relay (which should not), and to permit firewalls to tell the difference.

Still, it would be nice if they'd provided some way for MUAs to tell when they should be talking to 587 instead of 25. The RFC doesn't even mention transition issues (!), but I suppose a smart MUA could detect that 25 isn't getting through and offer to try 587.

[lecil.livejournal.com]

Give up on them, J. My Dad has been with RCN for quite a while (he was a beta in Brookline) and despite one billing hiccup and the fact that they tried to charge them extra for having only *one* cable box, everything has gone well. Between the problems you and dsrtao have been related, comcast clearly doesn't want to do business with professonals or geeks, or even professional geeks.

[new-man.livejournal.com]

They switched to port 587 about 6 months ago (and I thought had shut off port 25 several months ago, but maybe they just threatened to). I got so many notices about it that I was irritated by the notices, thinking "Sweet Mother of God, who doesn't know about this already?".

Now I know ;-)

[ladyariadne.livejournal.com]

got an offbeat question for you. figured since you were having email problems you might get it this way better.

I read the laws of society and so forth... but it isnt clear. what exactly is the difference in a canton.
it says subordinate to a barony... so is it still part of the barony or completely seperate.. what constitutes who is a member of a canton.

[jducoeur]

Cantons are subordinate groups to Baronies -- if you think of a Canton as being to a Barony as the Barony is to the Kingdom, you're not too far off. They have a partly-separate legal existence, IIRC (they can have a separate bank account and such), but they are absolutely *part* of the Barony, and members of the Canton are members of the Barony.

Basically, there is no way to be inside a Barony but separate from it: SCA rules more or less absolutely forbid "islands" inside of a group. (Which causes its own problems from time to time.) But Cantons provide a way to have a somewhat differentiated identity within the Barony. They make sense if a geographic region of the Barony likes to play together, and feel that they have their own identity to some degree, but don't want the tsurrus of trying to break off a separate Shire...

[ladyariadne.livejournal.com]

that is what I thought. Was having this discussion with someone and the part of just how seperate was a bone of friendly contention...

and I figure you would know. thanks.

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Then what was Mirkwood? There wasn't much about it, but what there was said it was an island...

[jducoeur]

Hmm. I don't know what you read, so I don't know how to interpret it. My understanding had been that Myrkwood was a Barony, but that may be incorrect. And it was back when rocks were soft, and the rules not necessarily the same, so there may have been exceptions. (It took a while for all of this to settle down at the beginning...)

[ladyariadne.livejournal.com]

one other question stemming from this... Does tis mean they are held accountable to the Baronial curias and seneshal or do they run their own and respnsible for their own events and such with no interfearence form Barony if they following all said Kingdom rules..

[jducoeur]

You'd have to check with Kingdom for any kind of serious opinion, but I think that the two had better work reasonably well together.

In general, I believe Cantons can run their own events without the Barony being terribly involved. However, the Kingdom is likely to take a *very* dim view of any apparent conflict between the two levels. In particular, if something happens like the Canton running an event against the Barony's wishes, I think that's the kind of thing likely to produce threats from Edward of flushing the group.

I'm not sure I'm interpreting the question correctly here -- I'm mainly triggering on the word "interference". I'm concerned mostly because Barony-vs-Canton has usually not ended well for anyone involved. (Yes, it's happened from time to time.) The Canton is semi-autonomous, but is expected to play nicely with the Barony...