Comcast and MailHop Forward

After attempting to work with Comcast to resolve problems regarding their automated blacklisting system, MailHop® Forward aliases will automatically apply spam scanning to comcast.net addresses after November 1, 2008.

The Problem

Over the past year, our DynDNS® MailHop team has been working with Comcast to improve the reliability of mail delivery to comcast.net addresses via our MailHop Forward service. Comcast believes that we are originating and sending comcast.net users large amount of spam; as a result, Comcast's anti-spam measures block or delay connections from the MailHop system, causing our customers problems when trying to promptly receive mail at Comcast addresses.

This is simply not true. When MailHop Forward receives spam, we scan the messages with SpamAssassin, adding a spam score value and tagging or deleting the messages based on customer settings. Depending on customer preferences, some of this tagged mail may still be forwarded to Comcast addresses, as many customers still wish to review the messages for potential false positives. Comcast, unfortunately, chooses to ignore this spam scoring and tagging, believing that we are sending spam intentionally and eventually blocking our MailHop servers.

We have attempted to work with Comcast to come to a reasonable compromise on how to increase the reliability of mail delivery to comcast.net addresses, but we have not yet reached a workable solution. Because of the automated restrictions that Comcast has in place, we are making a change to our MailHop Forward Service which will affect only aliases that forward to a comcast.net e-mail address.

The Change

As of November 1, 2008, any MailHop Forward aliases to comcast.net addresses will be automatically scanned with SpamAssassin: mail with a score of 6 or higher will be tagged with "*SPAM*" in the subject line, and messages with a score of 10 or higher will be automatically discarded. These new settings will only apply to aliases with Comcast e-mail addresses as recipients; you will still be able to customize settings for other aliases. By reducing the amount of forwarded spam, we believe that our reliability of delivery to comcast.net e-mail addresses will significantly increase.

For more information on spam scanning thresholds and SpamAssassin, please see our Knowledge Base article on the topic here. To keep up-to-date with the latest developments at DynDNS.com, please see our Newsletters and System Status announcements. Comcast customers may contact Comcast directly at 1-800-COMCAST to encourage them to reconsider their policies.