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Authored by Society president George Meiser IX |
| Posted 01-31-2007
2 EMERGENCY News-Bits =================== =================== 1. Brendan Strasser's First Thursday program for Thursday, Feb. 1, has been postponed; GMMIX will give a slide program instead: "Old-Time Views You've Never Seen." New material! Dr. Strasser's Kutztown program will be rescheduled. Short explanation: All 57 of the slides Brendan planned to use were "spoiled," but not by him. It was in no way his fault. ================== 2- DISASTER! EVERY Society member paying COMCAST to be his/her Internet provider will no longer receive News-Bits, as it was decided by Comcast that News-Bits are SPAM and will no longer be delivered. Consequently, we are unable to email those people to tell them they have been cut off by their provider. If you who are reading this message know people who have been receiving News-Bits through Comcast, it would be good of you to email them informing them of the situation. It is BERKSHISTORY.ORG that has been blocked. If anyone knows an actual human in any kind of position of authority at Comcast, kindly intercede on our behalf. Incidentally, we are but one organization/ entity of many that comcast has bombed. The Internet is full of complaints from other non-spamming groups. =========================================== Those who want to know more about what is happening "out there," read the following tale of woe from a small company, also victimized by Comcast. ====================== Second Week of January We started getting complaints about our customers not being able to send e-mails to anyone with a Comcast account; the error message stated: Server response to MAIL FROM: 550-64.4.207.8 blocked by ldap:ou=rblmx,dc=comcast, dc=net 550 Blocked for abuse. Please send blacklist removal requests to blacklist_comcastnet@cable.comcast.com - Be sure to include your mail server IP ADDRESS. The first thing our support group does in a situation like this is verify if the statement is actually true. Are we blacklisted, and why? We verified we were not on any of the known blacklists and then checked all of the logs pertaining to mail. We found nothing. The next priority was to get off the blacklist, and find out why we are were on it in the first place. We first followed the rules outlined in the mail from Comcast. When you do this, you receive an e-mail back stating that it will be removed in 24 to 48 hrs. We waited... 3 Days Later.... We were still getting complaints about the issue. I then started the process of calling Comcast. After 90 minutes of patiently waiting on hold, communicating with people that are supposed to be their support group, but have no understanding of the issue, we were promised that the problem had been noted and would be resolved. For the first 45 minutes of the conversation, I had to convince 4 support staff that I actually did need support. They would not even work with me yet because I did not have a Comcast account, therefore they could not log the call. 2 More Weeks... That process went on for 2 weeks, back and forth getting promises without results. If you'd like to see what kind of problems I was running into, try a search on the web for "Comcast blacklist", you will be reading for days. The calls still kept coming in, and our response had been Comcast has promised it will be fixed, the standard answer on the web to this issue has been,"Has your client changed their Comcast mail to a real company". The total scope of what had happened was quite amazing. All of this time, our support group had been investing time into this issue, now take that time and multiply it by the number of our customers that had been doing the same thing. They had not contacted us, they thought they were on a blacklist, so they were doing this also. This adds up to hundreds of hours of wasted time. Clients are now thinking their employees had done something wrong. Was their mail server compromised? Are their machines infected? What other clients are not receiving e-mail? Our client base is a mix of small to medium size business so any business deal is important. They were then calling their clients to make sure they received that important proposal. Imagine all of the wasted time. Another Week After the third week of clients not being happy, they were threatening to leave. We start by contacting the corporate offices in PA . They transfered the call to their support group in Florida. This group seemed like they had a better understanding, they promised a call back by the end of the day. Another Day After no calls, we called the executive offices, with our attorney on the phone, they promised a call back. All of this time, we were taking names, employee numbers, letting them know the calls were being recorded. They just did not care. We got a call , the person left no number to return a call, and told us that we were not on a blacklist. We immediately checked, and yes, we were still on the blacklist. During this time, the local city group and the newspaper had been notified. I received a call from the city IT person, he gave me some insight into resolving issues. I drafted the following letter, Good morning, My name is Barry Bourdage, I am the president of TechPro, Inc. I am a small ISP, I do not have an internet account with Comcast, therefore your support group will not talk to me. For the last 3 weeks my clients, about 3,000 of them, have not been able to send e-mail to any address ending with the Comcast. I have followed every rule within your guidelines, I have left numerous messages, and I have called numerous times into your support group. Monday I called your corporate office, this also ended with no result. Yesterday, I had my Attorney on the phone with your corporate office, and I actually received a call this morning, the caller left no way of getting back to him, and the information he left was not helpful, and actually incorrect. If you have any ideas on how to help me resolve this issue please respond, I have invested many hours into resolving this, I have customers threatening to leave because of this, and your company is the not only the cause of the issue, but the only remedy. If you follow the below link, you will see that I am not the only one. I was contacted by the local newspaper today regarding the issue, I have given my side of the story, letting them know I still do not have a remedy. I am sure this will generate interest, considering the topic. Please contact me today. Barry Bourdage The contact at the local newspaper was extremely interested in this type of issue. Comcast has had a monopoly on high speed Internet in our area. Every year our citizens vote on allowing more competition in this area, but Comcast spends a large amount of time and money on Pro-Comcast propaganda. 2 Hours Later... I receive a call from Comcast, his name was Jay. He said that he was the person in charge of anti-spam/abuse for Comcast, that he was not a technical person , but would try to help. He took my info, and promised me he would call back. To my surprise he actually called back and told me that they had in fact found the issue, that it was a glitch, and he could not disclose to me the exact reason that it happened. If he disclosed the reason, then other spammers could learn how to bypass their anti-spam system. I verified and it had been resolved. I asked him what prompted this, was it my calls and e-mails over the last three weeks, was it the call from my attorney? It seemed the e-mail to the Comcast executive regarding the local city issue, and the notion of a newspaper article, initiated all of it. The most disappointing thing here was that the hundreds of hours that went into solving this issue, including our companies support time, and our very valuable client's time, are brushed off by one sentence, one very big lie. Comcast states "Amores said Comcast fixed the problem as soon as the company was aware of it.", They said it was a glitch, that they resolved it as soon as they were notified, even though we have documented all of the calls and e-mails weeks before it was resolved. |
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