I Award Comcast “Worst Spam Control”

I would like to take this time to award Comcast “Worst Spam Control” ever. Thank you. They suck.

This all started when I asked my wife to send me an email last night. She’s off at grad school and I needed some information. She sent it, but I didn’t receive it. I had her send it again. I still didn’t receive it. Eventually, I figured Yahoo was having issues sending and went to bed. However, in the morning, I still had nothing.

I checked my spam folder on my Comcast account. There was nothing in my spam folder. I delved into the email settings and found that it defaulted to not saving copies of email marked as spam. That meant they were deleting anything they thought was spam and I never saw it, never had the chance to tell them it wasn’t spam and fix their filter settings.

Mind you, I’ve still been getting spam.

I delved around a little more and found a safe list. It said that emails on this list would be delivered. I added my wife’s email address. Then I got no email all day. In fact, I didn’t get the message I sent to myself containing a file I needed at home. I tried from my work address as well, but didn’t get that either.

After an online chat with a very cryptic help person (my only guess is that English was not her first language), I managed to interpret that if you used the safe list, you ONLY got email from the people on the safe list.

What a dumb feature. There was nothing on the page for setting that option that indicated that it was such a draconian setting (the help person suggested I copy my entire contact list into the safe list, but I need to get email from people I don’t already know and don’t keep an extensive contact list because that just helps out spammers when they manage to get into an account). Besides, they used the term “safe list” which is already a known term in email filtering for a list that will override the spam filter, but not block anyone not on the list. There was nothing on the page for the setting to indicate that they were using the term in anything other than the normal manner, or any warning that anyone not on the safe list would be blocked.

Of course, I turned off the safe list. Then the help person explained that all the emails I should have gotten today that were blocked because of the “safe list” setting were irretrievable. Because they’d been mistakenly blocked, there was no way to ever get them again. There could have been a bill in there, a story acceptance, or anything. I just have no idea.

Hold on though, it gets better. I had my wife email again once I had the safe list turned off. Still nothing. I checked the spam folder, but there was nothing there. Mind you, I had checked the setting earlier in the day telling Comcast to retain messages marked as spam, but still nothing.

Finally, I turned off all spam filtering and had my wife resend. Finally, the email came through.

So, thanks Comcast. Thanks for still delivering me spam while blocking my legitimate mail with no apparent way for me to tune or even find out what the hell you are blocking. Thanks for using a term that already exists to mean a different thing and block all my mail for a day. Thanks for making sure that I could never get that email that you mistakenly blocked back. Thanks for having semi-helpful tech support. Thanks for wasting a great deal of my time and making my use of your service extremely more frustrating than it needed to be. Thanks for having spam controls that are so poorly designed and explained that I’d rather just shut them off entirely than try to use them. Thanks, you suck.