If you're a Comcast e-mail user and noticed a lot more spam lately through its normally clean system, it's not your imagination. Comcast confirmed the chatter we were hearing that its e-mail filtering system suffered a hiccup yesterday for about an hour around midday EST and let a load of blathering muck spill through to an undetermined proportion of its 12.4 million subscribers. Spokesman Charlie Douglas said at first he had not heard about the problem, then he got back to us pretty promptly with this statement:
"Comcast has taken an industry-leading position to fight spam and has successfully reduced inbound and outbound spam by nearly 70% in the past 18 months. Earlier today, some customers experienced a higher than normal amount of spam due to a filtering issue that we were able to fix in less than an hour. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Nice. However, we note that some of the complaints we received mentioned the muck upsurge over recent days, if not weeks, not just yesterday. Here are a few missives:
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From: [Redacted]
Sent: Tue 10/9/2007 1:52 PM
To: Ginsberg, Tom
Subject: RE: Comcast Spam Filter Has Gone BustHere's something to consider looking into. Comcast's trusty spam filter has gone AWOL during the past week or so (perhaps connected to the Atlantic City mayor's disappearance.) Customers in this region (confirmed on Comcast's online forums) are getting slammed with spam that was previously captured. I'm getting about 500 spams a day that I previously did not make it past Comcast's filter. ...
In any event, the spam getting through to me, my kids, etc. is all the usual (and easily filtered) stuff about anatomy size, performance enhancing drugs for men, etc. I've been a Comcast internet customer for about 8 years and have never experienced anything like this.
And this one slightly more graphic:
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From: [Redacted]
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 3:24 PM
To: [Forwarded]
Subject: RE: is your comcast account getting a lot more spam lately
I'm glad you asked me that, because I was about to blame my husband and/or son-in-law for visiting untoward sites on my machine.
YES. Don't they know that my penis is just the size I want it? That I don’t shop at Walmart except under duress (Utica)? That I don’t need a new laptop? Oh, so many things that I didn't want before and REALLY don’t want now.
So, knowing that you've got the same problem, I shall prrrrrrotest.
Dunno what to make of all this. And don't know how often this happens. E-mail spam is an irreversible hazard of modern digital life. When we asked Douglas about these supposedly longer-term bogeys, he welcomed folks to call customer service and said Comcast would run them down. Comcast certainly appears to take spam seriously.
