Comment Clarification and big picture question (Score 1) 401
I work at The WELL. First, a tiny correction -- we are not an ISP. We were once one of the first commercial ISP sites, but we gave that up in 1996 to focus on being a community site on the internet instead of an onramp to the net. However, we still offer email to some of our users, and we have given our people the choice of forwarding with a classic .forward file if they wish. So from our point of view, it is tempting to say it's your toolset, do what you want with it.
Hard bounces kicked in last Sunday for people trying to reach about two dozen users who are mutual customers, with both well.com and comcast.net address. This was not a case of illicit spam relaying, nor of people mass mailing anything from The WELL (That's a service we do NOT provide in any way). It only involved mail sent to those who forward well.com mail to comcast.net. Turned out though that that includes Howard Rheingold. His initial blog entry at smartmobs and the information that the SJ Mercury news was working on the story got the public relations people at Comcast interested. (We phoned and emailed the PR folks about the situation) They eventually got a conference call set up for us, with one of those temporary bridge number/passcode conference appointments. We sorted out the issues and they have dropped us from the blacklist for now. We are going to request that that small group of users filter for spam on our site -- actively managing their Spam Assassin configurations -- before it goes to Comcast.
You'll note that Comcast wants to deny their own email customers the convenience of managing mail -- including spam that came to their addresses on various sites -- in one place, at Comcast. That isn't ridiculous, it's up to them to define the service they offer. But the weird thing is that Comcast is effectively placing the customer support burden on the sites that provide forwarding by holding those same mutual customers hostage to hard bouncing rather than telling the customers what services they are willing to provide them. I'm willing to communicate with WELL members about how tio make this work -- it's only a couple of dozen people out of 4,000, after all, and they are very communicative sorts.
Email address persistence is like cell phone number portability in a way. We are seeing some of the interesting problems that come from people having the same cherished email address for 21 years. More sites will start seeing these issues, we just have a little more tenure in this area than most. Some of our members are indeed targets of shocking volumes of spam brought on by being out there on the net for years. The volume is scary and expensive, even after we discard a giant chunk of it off the top with RBLs before even accepting it at our site.
It's going to be interesting seeing companies try to figure out what to do about forwarded spam. It's not trivial, it's not resolved yet -- but Comcast needs to be reachable by the management of other ISPs and email providers if they are going to block noraml forwarding services offered by those sites. Bypass their customer service lines, (your mutual customers should be reporting there!) and call their corporate HQ. The other best practice we all need is for Comcast (and other sites) to communicate the terms of using their email addresses to their own customers, rather than holding the customers and their legitimate correspondants hostage by bouncing, and assuming that the rest of us will do the customer support for them. Obviously that's not playing well with others.
Anyway, I do appreciate the time Comcast took to work this out with us. It was a valuable exchange of actual info once we got through all the barriers. I urge them to commit to taking some time with others in the same position, since they are trying to figure out a different understanding than the one we have all had so far.
Wish I could see an easy fix to the big picture issues of spam forwarding. This looks like it's just the beginning of providers trying to make somebody else do more of the heavy lifting. And the spam load is not going to get lighter.
Hard bounces kicked in last Sunday for people trying to reach about two dozen users who are mutual customers, with both well.com and comcast.net address. This was not a case of illicit spam relaying, nor of people mass mailing anything from The WELL (That's a service we do NOT provide in any way). It only involved mail sent to those who forward well.com mail to comcast.net. Turned out though that that includes Howard Rheingold. His initial blog entry at smartmobs and the information that the SJ Mercury news was working on the story got the public relations people at Comcast interested. (We phoned and emailed the PR folks about the situation) They eventually got a conference call set up for us, with one of those temporary bridge number/passcode conference appointments. We sorted out the issues and they have dropped us from the blacklist for now. We are going to request that that small group of users filter for spam on our site -- actively managing their Spam Assassin configurations -- before it goes to Comcast.
You'll note that Comcast wants to deny their own email customers the convenience of managing mail -- including spam that came to their addresses on various sites -- in one place, at Comcast. That isn't ridiculous, it's up to them to define the service they offer. But the weird thing is that Comcast is effectively placing the customer support burden on the sites that provide forwarding by holding those same mutual customers hostage to hard bouncing rather than telling the customers what services they are willing to provide them. I'm willing to communicate with WELL members about how tio make this work -- it's only a couple of dozen people out of 4,000, after all, and they are very communicative sorts.
Email address persistence is like cell phone number portability in a way. We are seeing some of the interesting problems that come from people having the same cherished email address for 21 years. More sites will start seeing these issues, we just have a little more tenure in this area than most. Some of our members are indeed targets of shocking volumes of spam brought on by being out there on the net for years. The volume is scary and expensive, even after we discard a giant chunk of it off the top with RBLs before even accepting it at our site.
It's going to be interesting seeing companies try to figure out what to do about forwarded spam. It's not trivial, it's not resolved yet -- but Comcast needs to be reachable by the management of other ISPs and email providers if they are going to block noraml forwarding services offered by those sites. Bypass their customer service lines, (your mutual customers should be reporting there!) and call their corporate HQ. The other best practice we all need is for Comcast (and other sites) to communicate the terms of using their email addresses to their own customers, rather than holding the customers and their legitimate correspondants hostage by bouncing, and assuming that the rest of us will do the customer support for them. Obviously that's not playing well with others.
Anyway, I do appreciate the time Comcast took to work this out with us. It was a valuable exchange of actual info once we got through all the barriers. I urge them to commit to taking some time with others in the same position, since they are trying to figure out a different understanding than the one we have all had so far.
Wish I could see an easy fix to the big picture issues of spam forwarding. This looks like it's just the beginning of providers trying to make somebody else do more of the heavy lifting. And the spam load is not going to get lighter.
