I am NOT a spammer!

When I opened up Mozilla Thunderbird, my e-mail program of choice, I saw an e-mail purporting to be from Comcast that Thunderbird routed into my Trash folder as if it were spam. The e-mail said, in part: "In an effort to help prevent spam and ensure the security of our network and customers, Comcast has modified your modem’s settings to prevent the sending of email on port 25. That is the default port email programs such as Outlook Express use to send email. We’ve taken this action because we may have detected virus-like activity from your modem or received reports from other email providers that mail from your modem generated complaints from their users."

It went on to provide links for instructions to change the port setting to 587: "Port 587 uses authentication and is an industry-recommended alternative to port 25." I figured it was probably some sort of phishing e-mail and ignored it...until I tried sending an e-mail and got an error message saying "The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP server failed..."

I changed the port setting in Thunderbird and tried sending my e-mail again, and got the "sent successfully" message. However, as I learned later, my mail wasn't received (hi, Kurt). I tried sending test messages to my Yahoo e-mail, and none of them were received. I called Comcast, and spoke to a woman who didn't really sound like she knew what to do. After explaining what was going on multiple times, she finally told me I'd have to send an e-mail to the abuse at Comcast.net address, and I couldn't call because the people in that department aren't available 24-7. At this point I lost my temper, but only a little. I raised my voice some but didn't curse her out or anything, and asked to speak to a supervisor.

She came back on the line and said the supervisor gave her another phone number that she didn't have, for Comcast Customer Security Assurance. I called that number and the tech guy had me send him a test e-mail, using the port 587 setting. He received it -- in his spam folder. He then said the problem is that I put a link to this blog in my signature. Since it doesn't have the same domain as my e-mail, it's considered spam. So I removed the link from the sig file, and now my e-mails are being received again (hi again, Kurt).

I asked him why port 25 was blocked and he said that someone flagged an e-mail I sent as spam. I explained that I did not send out any spam and I use the McAfee Security programs that Comcast provides free for their customers, which updates daily, so I shouldn't have any virus or malware or whatever. The tech guy said he wasn't allowed to tell me who flagged my e-mail, but he did tell me when the message was sent and which message it was. It was an e-mail I sent to members of my softball team forwarding information on the 7th Annual Gay Community Night at the Phillies.

I really hope that whoever did this did it by accident, or that their e-mail program did it automatically, because otherwise I am really, really pissed -- at all the trouble I had to go through, and because now I can't put a link in a sig file.