ISPs - Comcast Cable
Wednesday, August 6, 2008

 For several years, I have used Comcast Cable for internet access. After a bumpy start in 2002, the service has been pretty good.

Then on Wednesday, August 6, 2008, things went bad.

As of Wednesday, August 6, 2008, Comcast appears to have made a major change to their service. I can't really comment on the DNS problems, except that this is a new problem Wednesday morning, and it was fixed by that night.

Sending email was a major problem. For no particular reason, I send email via my GoDaddy account. This has worked without a problem for over 2 years. At first, I assumed that GoDaddy was the problem ... I even sent them an email describing the problem once I was sure that the connection had been down for over 1 hour. However, after the connection had been down for over 10 hours, I tried to see if something else was wrong.

It turned out that Comcast blocked the standard SMTP port - port 25.

Repeated attempts to find useful information on the Comcast site was a complete waste of time. Many pages actually required me to update my browser before I could read their "help". (I never update working software ... there are many reasons for this.)

According to the excelent GoDaddy notes, some ISP's block port 25 and either 80 or 3535 can be used. They even supply specific instructions on how to change the port in several email clients.

This data is stored in

In all fairness, it is possible that some application changed this setting in Thunderbird, and Comcast did nothing. However, I tend to write down every setting I change, and I had no record of changing this (computer search, not on paper). In addition, the entire web became flakey the same day (the DNS problem). As a result, I am blaming Comcast for the change.

Author: Robert Clemenzi
URL: http:// mc-computing.com / ISPs / Comcast.html