16 December 2009

Mediacom Mail Fail

Posted by Connor under: Clinton; Technology .

Starting last Friday, Mediacom, the nation’s 8th largest Internet service provider changed their mail servers. For a long time, Mediacom had hosted their mail servers with AT&T. Last week, Mediacom transitioned to Zimbra.com as their mail hosting company. And everything fell apart from there. Most customers report that receiving mail works fine but sending mail is either not working at all, or mail is sent but huge delays are experience in delivery if mail is delivered at all.

Mediacom officially blames an influx of spam on the outage. And some customers report that in the mail they are receiving there is lots of spam. However, this does not fully explain why inbound mail — which is where one would see traffic related to spam the most –seems to work okay and outbound is so bad. Unless Mediacom’s customers’ computers are just congested with malware that relays spam. Which isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

The other problem is that although Mediacom says that they announced the changes some time ago via e-mail to their customers, I have yet to talk to one who acknowledges ever having seen such a thing.

Here is Mediacom’s official FAQ on the mail situation and the officially supported settings.

The mail server setting must be changed. The old mail servers at mail.mchsi.com are no longer valid. The new, officially supported servers and settings are:

Outgoing SMTP Server: mail.mediacombb.net. Port 465 Require SSL ON
Incoming POP3 Server: mail.mediacombb.net. Port 995 SSL ON

Check the FAQ linked to above if you don’t know what these settings mean. It has pictures and arrows and stuff. Or just call Riverfront Technology and we’ll walk you through it.

A Mediacom technician who I spoke with on the phone this afternoon said that the problems are ongoing and those settings may not work. The mail servers will be the same but he said some people are having success with

POP3 on the standard port, 110 with no encryption;
SMTP on the standard port, 25 with no encryption.

For the time being, he said, just play with the settings and see what works. The server-side settings are changing hour-by-hour as they work through their problems.

Regardless, this is the biggest major ISP fail in as long as I can remember. My experience and thoughts regarding Mediacom Internet services over the years range between outright contempt and very grudging acceptance. They treat their business customers like cattle despite charging more for the same level of service as they provide to everyone else. Their overall quality and reliability has always been substandard at best. Outages are frequent and configuration changes that wreck service settings happen in the middle of the night with very little or no advanced notice.

I have had very good luck and good experiences overall with their technicians on the business side of things. Although they are often a beleaguered lot, they are pretty helpful and give the right advice. There appears to be a call center in Des Moines, so many of the techs are Iowans or at least midwestern-based.

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