Comcast announced today they’re blocking outbound port 25 for their residential customers. What does this mean for email marketers? Not much, unless your home connectivity is through Comcast and then you’ll just need to follow Comcast’s directions in order to send mail. What does it mean for email receivers? It means a lot of us will be seeing a lot less spam from infected Windows machines.
Yesterday, I talked about e360 filing suit against Comcast. Earlier this week, Comcast responded to the original filing with some filings of their own.
Read Moree360 initially filed suit against Comcast early in 2008. They asserted a number of things, including that Comcast was fraudulently returning “user unknown” notices and that they were certified by ReturnPath. Comcast filed a countersuit alleging violations of CAN SPAM, violations of the computer fraud and abuse act, as well as a number of other things including abuse of process. In April of 2008 the judge ruled in favor of Comcast and dismissed e360’s case, while allowing the countersuit to proceed.
Over the last 18 months, the suit has moved through the courts. There have been significant delays in the case, and e360 seems to have been dragging their feet based on some of the motions filed by Comcast asking the judge to compel e360 to follow through on discovery.
Today, only weeks before the trial date, a settlement agreement was filed. The settlement agreement prohibits the defendants and any group associated with them from transmitting email to any domain owned by Comcast without affirmative consent (as defined by CAN SPAM). All mail sent by the defendants must comply with the Comcast Terms of Use or AUP. The defendants must not attempt to circumvent Comcast’s spam filters, must comply with CAN SPAM and must not help anyone else violate any of the provisions of the agreement.
The agreement also prohibits mail from defendants that:
I updated the Wiki a few weeks ago when I heard, but don’t think I posted anything here. Comcast has changed their delisting form page to http://postmaster.comcast.net/block-removal-request.html. The old form is currently non-functional. You can fill it in, but it’s unconnected to anything on the back end and it won’t result in an IP being delisted from the various Comcast blocklists.
My understanding is that the old form may come back to life at some point, but it’s much safer to use the new form and the new Comcast Postmaster Site.