Over the course of the last two years, Comcast has frequently blocked all emails coming from Escapees mail servers to Comcast customers. Every time this has happened, we have contacted Comcast and requested that they resolve this erroneous situation. However, it appears that Comcast is unable to reliably manage their spam protection, and emails from our mail servers to Comcast customers continue to be blocked or allowed at Comcast’s whim. This is in spite of our best efforts to prove to Comcast representatives that we are not a spam source.

At this time, due to Comcast’s unpredictable blocking (and unblocking) of our servers, we are unable to reliably send emails from the escapees.com email servers to anyone using a Comcast email address. This affects our ability to send mail service confirmation emails, club business emails, Escapees Club News and E-news alerts and may also prevent members who are using their Escapees email account from sending emails to friends who are Comcast customers.

If you are currently a Comcast subscriber, you need to be aware that Comcast has a long history of erroneously blocking valid emails. This issue is not unique to Escapees emails: Most of the major Internet providers are having similar issues with emails being blocked. For your own protection, you should consider changing Internet providers, or establish a second email address with a different provider to ensure that you are able to receive emails from friends, family, and others with whom you wish to communicate. At this time, it appears that even Comcast’s own customers are unable to get Comcast to address and resolve this problem.

We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause our members and wish there was something more that we could do to resolve the situation.

I'd suggest trying G-Mail, it offers both web based e-mail and traditional POP mail that you can download to your computer, they also offer a good SMTP service for sending mail.

I for one don't like having to switch to my gmail account when I want to email my brother. He is not aware of anyone else he corresponds with that has trouble emailing him - in effect, he's not seeing a particular problem with Comcast. I sure can't imagine asking him to change HIS ISP because Comcast and Escapees can't seem to get along. Previous threads on this subject seem to indicate that Comcast uses some sort of pretty basic filtering which doesn't like SKPs addresses and that that is because of some type of forwarding system that SKPs uses which leaves the SKPs system vulnerable to spammers or spoofers. I have no clue what that means, technically, or even if that assertion is correct. But when it has been proffered, it hasn't been disputed.

To those who know, would it be that same vulnerability that allowed someone to use my email address in their spam broadcast such that a couple of weeks ago, in a 12 hour period, my SKPs email inbox was filled with over 3800 postmaster type returns of undeliverable email and when those got emptied out, it filled again?

The Comcast issue was and is caused by Comcast's stupidity, they are looking at forwarded messages and blocking the forwarding server rather than the server that originated the message. Comcast does so many other stupid things that this is no where near the top of the list as far as the importance of getting it fixed.

Escapees could stop the Comcast stupidity from causing a few folks using the Escapees server problems but only by reducing services to all the other Escapees that don't use Comcast. I'm one of the people that brought up the changes that Escapees would have to make to fix the Comcast problem.

After seeing more details of what was happening I have to agree with the Escapees decision not to cut services to the majority of members to accommodate a few that have made a poor choice of ISPs.

The folks that are using Comcast are left with several options.

-- Live with the Comcast stupidity.
-- Call and write Comcast and demand a fix to the problem.
-- Switch or add an e-mail account with a decent provider
-- Be prepared to miss any mail from the Escapees server when Comcast goofs.

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Your second question is a bit off as it is not a "vulnerability" in the Escapees system that is causing the problem, it is a feature that a lot of users like and depend on.

As to getting a spew of bounces to your Escapees account, that is entirely your fault and has nothing to do with Escapees. I'm sure you didn't want to hear that... :-)

What happens is that your e-mail address is collected by spammers from various places and forged onto outgoing spam messages in order to fool folks that are using obsolete spam filtering methods into accepting your message.

Collection methods vary, some you can do something about others you are just stuck with.

Most popular is "web scraping" where a spammer turns a program loose on the web to load every page it can and to "scrape" up anything that looks like an e-mail address.

Next in line is to join forums, mailing lists and social sites and collect e-mail addresses from there.

Then come the professionals, they either write or have written specialized virus programs that go out and infect people's computers. Once they have infected the system they scan the computers for e-mail addresses (and possibly other stuff) and send it back to the spammer. As long as you use Windows or correspond with a Windows user your e-mail address is at risk of getting harvested and there is nothing you can do about it.

There is one more group and I really recommend not joining it unless you use an address that you can walk away from. If you manage to tick off a spammer they will retaliate, usually by putting your address on a big spam run every few days getting you 10,000 or more bounces per day. If this happens to you then you need an automated mail tool like MailWasher from www.firetrust.com that can deal with that flood of mail safely and with just a few clicks after you get it set up.

We had this problem with Comcast from sources other than Escapees. It is a Comcast problem. Fortunately, for us Comcast went away with the sale of our house. We now use gmail.

Linda

S'ok...my ISP is blocked from sending to Microsoft's webmail sources. Now, I still get tons of spam from MSN etc...but, I can't send legitimate messages to them.

Didn't Comcast just lose a court battle? I seem to remember seeing something about the court ordering them to change the way they do things.

If I weren't so lazy I guess I could Google it! <G>

Anyone else hear or read about this?

HamRad

I think the recent decision from the FCC has to do with throttling the P2P services used by Comcast's clients and not with their very poor effort at spam filtering/blocking which Escapees email (among many others) has run afoul of.

Comcast is not alone in the clumsy blocking/blacklisting of other mail servers preventing them from delivering mail destined for Comcast's clients. I recently sent out a large number of quarterly Newsletter notifications where Telus in Canada blocked my ISP, Sympatico the largest Canadian ISP, from sending mail to Telus subscribers. I was told to contact Sympatico and get themselves off the blacklist. Fat chance of that happening, Customer Service is a dirty word at Sympatico...
I ended up sending out 2 copies of the printed version of the newsletter.

I Switched to Google email. It was really easy. I just sent out a message to all my contacts from my new email address and the same message from my old email address. All my contact people/friends (I had over 300 contacts) updated my address and the best part is I heard from so many people that I haven't talked to in a very long time. I go to my old address once a day to see in anyone mistakenly emailed me there.

I recently switched my e-mail address. I was using "hotmail" and "yahoo", but I switched a few weeks ago to "gmail". I am so happy that I did and I am so impressed with it that I had to share what I have learned. There is so much to learn, so I am no pro, but so far what I learned about all of "Google" extras (besides e-mail) is astonishing.

1. e-mail: You get a lot more storage (7080 MBs). As you create, your work is being saved in drafts. Hardly any spam at all gets through (so far, none for me). Each message you send and receive replies are grouped together so you can always see your past conversations. You don't have to spend time searching everywhere for your sent or received messages... you can just do a search. You'll never see pop-ups. Your gmail calendar is in your email, so the same way you attach photos, you can attach event reminders. Click here for a gmail overview: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about.html.


2. Photos: Google photos is Picassa2 and is the easiest way of uploading and making albums. You can add text under each photo, you can share your album with anyone by inviting them with a link or you can make your album "public". All your photos are uploaded on Google's hard drive FOREVER with no cost to you. I like the feature of showing a map of exactly where my photos were taken at. If you would like to see what my albums look like that I created you can take a peek at my website at www.travelingwithbuddy.com and click on "gallery"

3. Documents: Documents, forms, spreadsheets, templates & more. You will never again loose a document (while you are composing or if your computer fails), because google saves your work as you go (every minute or so). Every document, form, etc. gets uploaded on Google's hard drive. So if you get a virus and anything happens to your computer, you can always count on your work being saved FOREVER without using up your hard drive space. You can share your work with multiple people, you can easily insert links in your doc and insert photos, then send it as an e-mail or share it as a web page. I'm just barely touching on what it "google docs" does.

4. Calendar: You can have as many calendars as you want. They will all be color coded. Such as, I have one for my "trips", one for "holidays", one to show me when new movies come out, a calendar that shows me what date a DVD comes out, one for "bills", and many others that are my friends that they have shared with me so I can see their traveling itinerary. All calendars are viewed as one, but each event is in a different color.

I keep a Gmail account around for times when things are being contrary, had to use it the other day to contact some inlaws on a mickey-mouse Internet system since it was bouncing messages from most places.

I also keep it handy for their SMTP server that runs on a non-blocked port and is accessible from anywhere so I don't have to tweak my laptop settings for different places or connection methods.