Thinking With My Mouth

Uhh, how used are they?

guffaw

A sign of the apocalypse: a fart tax.

I found out June 22 that my ISP, cox.net, started blocking outgoing mail for all servers except cox.net servers.

Their Acceptable Use Policy for the residential service prevents me from running my own servers here at home, so I have my sites and email, both commercial and non-commercial, hosted at Rackspace (highly recommended). I also have my various client's POP3 servers, on which I frequently have internal addresses to share calendars and other collaborative functions. If I had a job, it's likely my employer would expect me to use email while travelling and from home. In other words, there are loads of legitimate and important uses for being able to connect to remote email servers, and to send email via those servers.

I started having problems on June 19, the day cox.net servers implemented blocking port 25: sending mail through my immersivenetworks.com server would not connect, but sending mail through cox.net went fine. So, reasonably enough, I went to my email host for support first. I then left town on a vacation (no computer on purpose), and returned home today, to find that Rackspace had informed me about cox.net blocking outgoing mail (SMTP, port 25), that the port was live from their tests and the ticket was closed. (Rackspace really rocks for hosting: their Fanatical Support is exactly that, and extremely helpful. Especially for me--a Microsoft Weenie--trying to work on a hosted Linux server. They're patient and very, very helpful. Their Linux gnomes really know the products and the community, and how to lead you to answers so you figure out how to find them yourself in the future. That's smart service, because they give me the tools to help myself, and in the long term I become less of a service burden. HIGHLY FUCKING RECOMMENDED.)

Some more investigation proved that to be exactly true: my SMTP port was live, and connecting through Ricochet (live and well here in San Diego) let me send mail.

So then I tried cox.net's online chat help. Here's the transcript:

Problem: I can no longer connect to external SMTP servers. The service appears to have been recently blocked. Why? There's nothing I can find in the AUP.

[cox tech support name hidden]> Welcome to Cox High Speed Internet Service Online Technical Support

Keith Langill> Hi ****

cox> hello.

KL> Do you understand my question?

cox> Conventional email uses two ports (25 and 110), and two servers (incoming and outgoing) for email. Port 25, the outgoing port has been blocked, because of spam problems, to any but cox servers.

KL> The problem with that is many ISPs block cox.net email.

cox> the other isps is the reason cox took this step.

KL> This effectively prevents me from communicating with vast swaths of people--Yahoo and Pacbell.net addresses, for example.

KL> It significantly impacts the utility of your service, and will chase me away as a customer.

cox> Sorry.

KL> Is that the only answer?

cox> all isps will come to it.

cox> Is there anything else I can help you with today?

KL> This will totally undermine the utility of email. I need to speak with a supervisor.

cox> please call 1-800-234-3993; they will be happy to assist.


I had to be quick to grab the cut-n-paste of the chat session, because the tech can close the session and conveniently force the page forward to a survey. This expires the chat session, and prevents the user from going back and using info from it. I'd learned this lesson the last time I'd used the online tech support, and they told me to call a number. By the time I'd gotten the phone, the survey was up, and I had no phone number to call. But that's just another in a long string of recent felony stupid acts from cox.net.

Then, I went through three layers of tech support on the phone. The last, a supervisor, fully copped to the new policy (the front line did not know about it, and the second tier had received emails and many, many angry calls), and commiserated with me about the stupidity of the act. He also confirmed the second tier tech's assertions that both RoadRunner and Earthlink are close to doing this as well.

I can't use my email host for incoming and cox.net servers for outgoing, because other ISPs block cox.net email traffic at the IP level. I highly doubt a lot of spammers are using cox.net for mass mailings because residential cox.net upstream is notoriously slow. A lot use cox.net to send email not as subscribers themselves, but through their mailbots and other spyware. The mailbots are pervasive enough that each individual bot doesn't have to send a large amount of mail and generate a lot of traffic per connection, making the abuse harder to track. So the only solution from cox.net's standpoint is to block all SMTP traffic but their own.

(Yes, I could just use my webmail interface, but that forces me out of a centralized mail source, which has its own problems.)

The supervisor offered to quadruple my billing rate and change me to the business service, but he could offer no other help. This is absolutely mendacious, because it means two things: (1) they have the tools at a central control level to change my service between residential (which can't send SMTP) and business (which can) and (2) they chose not to give these tools to techs so they could fix problems on a case by case basis, making an upgrade essential and the only solution. I won't be extorted. If I'm forced to change, I'll take at a look at all vendors, and probably select a new one.

I understand the need to block abuse, but if this is the only line of defense, spammers will just move their service to a business tier and be done with it, if they haven't already been driven to business-class connections for performance reasons. This punishes people following the rules. It would be easy to allow each customer to set up a whitelist of email hosts, which would prevent mailbots from connecting to unlisted email hosts, but that would undermine upgrades to business class. It's decidedly customer hostile, and it's coming Real Soon Now to an ISP near you.

(Note: I secretly love this, because as a fledgling Wireless ISP, it gives me leverage into their residential market. Cox keeps misstepping--two months ago, it was a rate hike. Last month, wildly fluctuating performance problems, which have settled down but are now uniformly half of speeds of two months ago (another common complaint, and a different, equally long story). And now there's this punishment for the paying customer: I'm gonna go eat their install base. Woohoo!)

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