Comcast plan to stop Spam

Comcast's users have been one of the largest sources of U.S. originated spam. Other large ISPs (Cox and AOL) have taken to blocking end user access to any mail server other than their own on port 25. While this was annoying at first, there were many workarounds available for most users. As a Cox customer it annoyed me to no end that Comcast customers were protected from Cox spam, but we weren't protected from Comcast spam.

Now, Cox has finally decided to take some action. They feel that blocking outbound 25 to all users would result in too many calls to their call centers, so they are going to be blocking 25 to computers that send out an unusual amount of email. Since a user is breaking the terms of service, I think this is an acceptable action. It doesn't paint all uses with a broad brush the way the Cox action did.

I tend to say lets wait and see. It seems to me that this policy by definition will allow spam out before the computer is blocked. This is still a great improvement over what they were doing.