My post this morning about Comcast’s spam filtering policies prompted a call from Comcast’s Jeanne Russo, who heads the company’s PR for online and phone services. My post was spurred by an article in The Mercury News, which dealt with The Well’s complaint that Comcast is blocking its members’ emails. The Well claims that Comcast is unresponsive to the online community’s attempt to resolve the problem.
Russo firmly defended Comcast’s spam filtering activities, claiming that the company has reduced its inbound and outbound spam by 70% this year. “Spammers hide behind mail hosting companies that do not properly filter their spam,” she said, noting that Comcast’s customers are the beneficiaries of the tightened spam filtering efforts.
In contrast to the article’s allegations that Comcast won’t respond to The Well’s call for help, The Well hasn’t been willing to work with Comcast, Russo said, pointing to the company’s practice of helping organizations implement tools, such as SpamAssasin, that shut down spammers. “We work with organizations that are black-listed to help them reduce their spam.”
Despite several invitations by Comcast, The Well is “one of two companies who haven’t been willing to work with us,” Russo said. The Well’s refusal to talk to Comcast about resolving the issue is a surprise given that “of all of the organizations we’ve worked with, most of them are happy to work with us and are happy to alter their filtering policies.”
Moreover, “if they tell us in good faith that they will work on it, we will remove the block,” Russo said. But so far, The Well has shown no sign of addressing its purported spam issues.
Comcast isn’t giving up, though. “We’re continuing trying to reach out to them,” she said.
Comcast is getting more aggressive in stamping out spam, but so is the rest of the ISP industry. The cable operator is an active member of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, a technical organization aimed at combatting spam, virus attacks and other forms of Internet abuse. Its membership is composed of virtually all leading U.S. Internet service and email providers.
As for my own company’s experience with Comcast’s spam filter blocking, Russo said that it’s possible that a third-party email provider that I use strictly for mass marketing emails got temporarily black-listed — that’s not something I would necessarily see in my system. In any event, my sole experience with Comcast’s email blockage is typical of most email filtering incidents, Russo said. It was resolved very quickly.
In keeping with Comcast’s goal of working with companies to combat spam, she offered to put me in touch with one of the company’s abuse engineers to find out why I had a temporary email blockage. Given that my problem came and went within hours, and occurred almost four months ago, I declined — but nonetheless appreciated — this offer.
Cynthia Brumfield at 2:40 PM|Comments(0)
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