[From the diaries by susanhu.] Last Saturday, July 16th, two interesting events occurred. First I read on Bradblog that Symantic had, for the past week, been blocking all e-mail that either came from or mentioned in its text “afterdowningstreet.org.” I was skeptical, but shortly thereafter I received my first e-mail from this group in a week, and it had been sent three days earlier. Concerned, I sent e-mails both to Comcast Abuse, and to Comcast customer care seeking confirmation or denial that this had indeed occurred, and if the former, requesting an explanation. I received auto-responses promising that a personal response would follow. It never came.
Afterdowningstreet.org has a fairly thorough accounting of the blocking on their site, and the story has been gaining mileage. Common Dreams reported on it this past Wednesday.
After seeing the Common Dreams piece I phoned Comcast headquarters and asked to speak to someone in the executive offices. I was connected to a person who was clueless about this, and he switched me to Government Affairs, thinking they might know more. I got someone’s voice mail and left a detailed and specific message. No one called me back. Finally yesterday I called back the person I had spoken with on Wednesday and complained vociferously about the run-around I was getting. I made it clear that I thought there were serious constitutional issues involved, and that as a paying Comcast customer I was entitled to some answers.
Finally today I received the following e-mail from an “Executive Support Analyst” in “National Customer Service”:
To help protect our customers from unwanted spam, Comcast works with Symantec and utilizes their best-in-class Brightmail anti-spam system.
According to Symantec, the Web address www.afterdowningstreet.org was submitted directly to the Brightmail system by several thousand users as being a common element in multiple unsolicited (or unwanted) emails. This caused the Symantec Brightmail system to identify these messages as spam and automatically block them from mail systems using Brightmail, including Comcast’s mail system.
In response to customer inquiries, Comcast investigated this situation and determined that some wanted email was being blocked by the Brightmail protective filter. After bringing the situation to Symantec’s attention, Symantec promptly adjusted the Brightmail filter and the email block involving the web address www.afterdowningstreet.org was lifted. Comcast High-Speed Internet subscribers should now be able to send and receive email containing this URL without any difficulty.
I was not satisfied with this response and sent this follow-up e-mail:
I remain deeply troubled by this and request assurances that this is not an ongoing problem. I also would like to know if you have researched the legality of blocking e-mail without the consent or knowledge of your customers.
Lest I be suspected of accusing Comcast of conspiring with the Bush administration to interfere with national protest activity being planned by afterdowningstreet.org and Congressman John Conyers, another explanation comes to mind, albeit a sinister one. What is there to stop a Bush-friendly organization from making mischief by having their members sign up to receive “afterdowningstreet.org” e-mails and then reporting them as un-solicited spam? I am prepared to believe that Comcast and Semantic are not deliberately censoring our mail, but the blocking procedure they describe is very vulnerable to the whims of any group with an agenda. Does any one doubt that there are people and organizations out there capable and willing to engage in this kind of dirty trick?
I think I saw a diary about this last week. Was it yours also?
No. If there was one I did not see it.
Afterdowningstreet may not be involved in this at all.
There is a well-known Internet attack called the “joe job” for reasons that are completely opaque to me. In a joe job, you send out mail forged with someone else’s address in order to give other people a bad impression of the purported sender.
So if for instance someone were to send out mail purportedly from susanhu at her email address, saying that she had a deep and abiding interest in causing pain to cats and would like you to send her pictures of kitty torture, that would be a joe job. And unfortunately this sort of thing is all to easy to do, and the success of “phishing” scams is an indication that people will fall for such things. (Nor am I laying the blame for this one on the common garden variety email user; there are some warped and twisted bastards out there, and not in a good way.)
I am on Comcast’s cable service, but I only use the email addresses they give me for non-critical stuff. For one thing, I’ve had email bounce around in their system for a day or two, just like you did. I have a number of email addresses, including one I’ve had since 1992 that collects far more spam than it should. My solution has been to forward all that email through a gmail address and use gmail’s spam filtering, which in my experience has been pretty good. That has its tradeoffs, though. There are people who are uncomfortable with running their personal mail through a service owned by a search engine company. Me, I learned a long time ago that sending mail on the internet was more or less equivalent to writing it on postcards, and not to expect any kind of privacy unless I took the means to secure it for myself.
Luckily, being charitably described as a computer geek, I know how to do all this stuff. 🙂
I’ve been joe jobbed.
I called it spoofing … it happened when I was opposing the Makah whale hunt. One of the tragic side effects of that was that a very few, very nasty individuals from other states — California, Nevada, etc. — exploited the Makah whale hunt to propagate their hatred of white people and to call them (me) racist. Two of them spoofed my e-mail address, posting items in Usenet and on Web sites and to mailing lists.
There was NO WAY anyone could tell that the e-mail or post did not come from me.
I was very upset, and called the FBI, which was interested enough to call me back twice and collect a lot of information. Since it didn’t involve money, at that time, they couldn’t help but referred me to the FTC, which took my information.
I let it be known I’d contacted law enforcement — including the police departments in the towns in which these clowns lived — and that helped quiet things down.
If I’d have known that I’m not sure I would have used you as an example.
Sometimes it’s possible to track down where a joe-job originated. Unfortunately, though, not always. ISPs throw away logs, people use anonymizers, and sometimes the trouble it would take to track someone down isn’t proportional to the return you would get. There are ways you can protect yourself — using digital signatures to prove a mail came from you, for instance — but again, 99% of Internet users aren’t tech savvy enough to know such things exist, much less use them.
I traced their IP addresses using various tools. And I kept careful records, which I forwarded to the FTC.
I recently mentioned this to members of a small mailing list I’m on, and named the two who’d done it. One of the members Googled them, and found out that the worst offender died two years ago…
It’s very intimidating. Besides being unable to track or erase their spoofs, they posted stuff at Web sites about me. They called me a racist, etc. One time on a whaling mailing list, on which many of us had become buddies, I mentioned something about going to an Ayn Rand meeting once when I was in college. The next thing I knew, there was a Web page saying that I was an Objectivist Society member.
So, if any prospective employer Googled me, they’d have found crap like that. Chilling.
is an obsolete concept on the internet, and perhaps in society at large. It is more like a quantum thing now, where there are probabilities only. Your actual identity as the sender of some email can no more be verified than a vote cast on a paperless DRE, and we know true anonymity is non-trivial to achieve on the internets these days, obscure monikers notwithstanding.
p.s. Objectivists please disregard the above, keep your eyes on that receding 19th century horizon.
Omir makes a very excellent point along with some good advice and that is why I use gmail as well. I never use my paid net service email address for subscriber emails. While afterdowning may not spam, lists do get hacked and there are other groups out there that are not quite so careful in handling of their mail lists.
You should only use your main email for important personal related things like bill paying or family uses.
I hate having to remember to check multiple email locations, so I set up several separate email accounts through Comcast (I think you get up to 7). I have the one below, another one for writing groups I participate in, and my main (personal) box. I’ve also got a ton of rules to direct mail to the proper folders, and my mail program has a fairly decent spam filter (plus anything I don’t automatically recognize goes straight to junk/trash).
Yeah, I could use Gmail or Yahoo or some other source, but then I’d have to go through the hassle of forwarding everything I wanted to keep to my personal mail anyway, just so I could access it offline when necessary. I spend enough time on the computer as is…
SPF records were invented to prevent source forgery of e-mail. In spite of its relatively recent debut (e.g., compared to SMTP), SPF is already supported by all major ISPs.
for what its worth, email from boomantribune.com was being blocked by AOL and Verizon until we added the appropriate SPF record (the block was removed within 72 hours). afterdowningstreet.org has no SPF record.
There are valid arguments against SPF, namely that its a PITA for system administrators (eh, what else is new?) and it prevents legitimate email forwarding in some cases.
e-mail is probably the most misunderstood internet technology. People think its like instant messaging — and it should be — but its not… its a total mess, and many of the spam prevention measures ISPs take only make it worse.
Can you say DSL ?
DSL is available in almost all urban and some not so urban areas, through your local phone company. Usually you can pick your own ISP.
Time to stop supporting the right wing corporations.
Political donations
Comcast has a 54% Republican donation and a 46% Democrat donation breakdown, so I don’t know if that qualifies them as a right wing corporation.
In 2004 it was 50/50
You have to redefine your concept of “right wing.”
The mainstream Republican and Democratic parties are presently just the right and left SUB-wings of the true, corporatist right wing.
Things have channged…
AG
I see both parts of the equation since I work in the e-advertising business and deal repeatedly with BrightMail and other spam blockers.
It literally only takes 3 people to complain that a message is spam before a full blown investigation is started.
ISP’s also have strict rules in place re: number of messages sent per hour by a single source, that is not registered on their (or BrightMail’s) “white list”. If say, 10k emails go out in an hour from this particular sender then the ISP may decide to block all emails from this sender from then on… keep in mind that indeed 10’s of thousands of consumers have complained about the ISP’s and their letting in of spam, so they have become super vigilant. It can ruin a reputation and an entire database to be accused of spamming or letting spam in… it’s not so cut and dried and black and white as “comcast is blocking political messages from democrats”. We really have no idea how many right wing messages have been blocked for the same reasons.
I really think this is another stupid spam issue that needs to be dealt with at the technology level and not some sinister conspiracy to block afterdowningstreet messages.
This is a good post. I didn’t know all that about spam issues, having not worked in the industry for five years. So, it’s incumbent on mailing list owners to be prudent about how much they send out?
absolutely.
It has become quite ridiculous in the email marketing industry with the level of detail required to send an e-marketing communication to your opt-in list.
Anything can trigger the spam filter. Verbiage (i.e. Action required; Act now; etc.), the HTML coding; the number sent per hour, etc. etc. Each list owner must ensure that they are completely “front end” spam filter compliant (i.e. scoring below a “1” on the spam filter… spam assassin is a good aggregate tool) AND they have to go the extra mile to ensure each and every major ISP has them on their “white list”… the list that says ‘these guys are totally privacy compliant and any amount of messages an hour can be automatically distributed to the Inbox of our customers’… or they set up a program to send under 10k emails per hour that are spam-score compliant.
I’m looking at my Inbox in Thunderbird and, per usual, several legit e-mails are marked as “junk” by Thunderbird.
I have not set the option to allow Thunderbird to auto-trash what it thinks is junk. I can’t.
I use Thunderbird on a linux system.. but it’s platform independant so i think it should work the same on yours..
First.. the junk mail controls do work, eventually, but you have to train it by selecting what’s junk and deselecting what’s not. It tries to guess but it gets it wrong til you tell it otherwise. (make sure you have the checkbox under the adaptive filter tab selected)
my version is up to date.. and I go to Tools, Junkmail controls, then under the settings tab I X’d where it says “Move incoming messages determiuned to be junk mail to.. and there’s a check bubble that can click on.. either moving it to the local folders or some other folder of your choosing. It started working very well for me after 3 days..but i have a relatively low volume of email in per day.
I do NOT have the setting for automatically deleting the messages checked.
Anyway, I posted this in the hopes that it would be useful but i suspect it might not be your problem. Oh, well.. just in case ;). If I’m telling you something you already knew just bonk me.
PS.. i really really don’t like the idea of companies blocking “spam” at all Thunderbird works well enough for me. Even if it didn’t I still don’t trust monopoly or duopoly broadband companies to make those sort of “customer services.”
The comments in this diary have been very enlightening and very helpful. Thank you, all of you experts who are up-to-date on Internet issues!
Maybe some of you should post about Internet issues from time to time — educate the rest of us.
Thanks.
I didn’t know about “training” Thunderbird. Thank you … I’ll work that in. I just downloaded it a week ago because the default mail program that came with the Mini Mac didn’t have enough features.
Anytime, Susan! ^_^
It’s good to use for things like RSS and the like as well.
After Downing Street emails with no problems, as far as I can tell; it’s a different Comcast mailbox from my Booman address below but they’ve still been coming through.
Could some right-wing hacker have figured out how to send “spoofing” emails with the After Downing Street domain?