not my blog

The corporate office for the company that I work for recently has been having tons of issues with getting blacklisted by Comcast. Considering I work for an information technology support company that is rather quite pathetic. Considering that Comcast is the largest broadband ISP in the country this happens to be a bit of a problem. A good percentage of our customers have Comcast, so sending any emails out to customers from the corporate office is next to impossible as well as tons of technicians (as all our emails through corporate are just fwds through their Exchange server).

The most likely reasons for our corporate mail server being blacklisted without knowing details are because of the following:

• The rDNS entry for their IP address is flaky as all hell. At least once a week the server hosting their rDNS for that IP comes back as having nothing for that particular IP.
• Zero SPAM filtration for any mail that comes into that server. There are about 30-40 emails caught by SpamAssassin that end up in my junk email box. And that doesn’t count the ones that never make it there as SpamAssassin is set to just dump the most obvious SPAM messages to /dev/null
• No Antivirus filtering. I was able to bounce myself an email through our corporate email server with the Eicar virus attached to the email on more than one occassion. Pathetic really.

So let’s see, several hundred techs with Comcast accounts all receiving hundreds of SPAM and virii infected emails every single day through the corporate mail server. And if a bunch of them start click “Mark as SPAM” in the Comcast webmail, next thing you know, Comcast just isn’t going to accept mail from that server anymore. But you would think being an IT company they could figure that out at our corporate office.

Instead they get blacklisted, they complain, it gets removed. Repeat next day. Just think how good it is for your image as a consultant if your corporate office can’t even keep their IT act together. Makes me wanna cry really…