Comcast forwards to be disabled, and AOL Update

Today we have some good news, and bad news!

We’ve been contacted by someone very helpful at AOL and I think we have that problem squared away, at least for now. There have been no further blocks and the AOL contact has indicated that our thresholds for blocking are much higher now. We’re waiting for a bit to see whether this will solve the problem long-term, and are looking at implementing some suggestions they have made in the meantime to ensure that we can hopefully stay on their good side. We still won’t be allowing new AOL forwards or forwards that have been removed to be re-added, but the existing ones won’t be disabled for the time being. I still recommend setting up a local mailbox rather than forwarding any mail if possible, as forwards of any type add a potential failure point in your email’s path.

Now, for the bad news — Comcast has become an increasing problem in the last two weeks and is now completely denying our unblock requests. As a result:

In 7 days, on Wednesday, September 6th, we will be disabling all forwards to @comcast.net addresses.

As a bit of background:

Comcast blocks are atypical from the others that we’ve been having problems with in that they last indefinitely until unblocked manually. Unlike AOL blocks (which phase out automatically after 24 hours - though may reappear) someone has to flip a switch over there for any future mail to go through. The unfortunate part is that they have zero human availability and all we get from their blacklist email address are auto-responses — either the IP is automatically unblocked, or the unblock is denied and the phone number of their abuse/security department is given. Unfortunately, this phone number is a completely unmanned voicemail drop-box. We’ve left no less than six messages on their voicemail in the last couple months, and despite numerous requests we have never received a phone call back or an email response. We’re not even asking that they remove the blacklist — we’re simply asking for more information on why the IPs were blocked, and for a sampling of the typical spam they are supposedly getting from us! In fact, the only response we can get from them (if we get one at all) is an automated form message saying that “most of the email” received from our IPs is spam, which we know, in fact, is false.

Again we regret that this decision had to be made, but we’re currently wasting a great deal of time answering complaints regarding Comcast blacklists, not to mention calling and emailing Comcast to have those blacklists removed (unsucessfully) — and they are a very small fraction of our total email forwards. For reference, our number of Comcast forwards is 1/12 of our GMail forwards, and GMail gives us zero problems while somehow managing to filter mail very well for its user base.

For the people who have Comcast forwards set up, I recommend that you remove them yourself and set up a local DreamHost user where mail can be downloaded via client software or checked via webmail. You can edit the destination of an email address by going to “Mail” -> “Manage Email” on the left-hand side in the DreamHost control panel, and click on “Edit” next to the email address in question. If you have difficulty with this, please contact support.

Next week, for those addresses that don’t have an alternate recipient other than a Comcast forward, we will create a local email account for mail to be routed to, so that nothing is lost.