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Communications The Internet

A Cox Internet Email Outage? 52

Posted by Cliff from the if-they-won't-tell-you dept.
notthere asks: "In Florida, Cox High Speed Internet (the home service) has been having problems with out-of-network emails for almost a week, since that is the date on the latest piece of email in my Inbox. I contacted Cox tech support this morning. The first responder read a statement to the effect that 'there were some problems, and they do not know when the problems will be fixed.' When I complained and demanded some clear explanation of what the problem was and when the service would resume, she said 'Cox HSI is an entertainment service, so we do not guarantee service. If you want to talk to our people in the business division, I'll be glad to give you their phone number.' I then asked to talk to a manager, who was certainly nicer (he apologized), but offered no answer or projection as to what the problem is and when it will be fixed. Interestingly, the Cox support web page reports no outages." If you use Cox's Internet service, have you recently had trouble connecting to your mail servers?
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A Cox Internet Email Outage? More

A Cox Internet Email Outage?

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  • Normal Service (Score:2, Informative)

    by sithkhan ( 536425 )
    I've experienced normal service today. In fact, I received an email as I read this very piece! I am in Arkansas though, so it may be a regional issue. Best of luck to you! At least your spam influx has ceased ...

  • No problems in central (Score:5, Informative)

    by XBL ( 305578 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @06:54PM (#9242634)
    I am on central.cox.net servers. Working fine for me. Try using pop.central.cox.net instead of east and see what happens.
    • I am on east, haven't been able to send email for two days. TG for webmail on my vps!

      The port 25 blocking really makes me mad. Cox cable internet is the only broadband I can get (well, other than satellite, hmmm... or SDSL @ $150/m ) and after having a business class DSL at my last residence being told how I can send traffic really bothers me. This is like giving everyone a speeding ticket as soon as they try to pull out of their driveway.

  • WTF? (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Kizzle ( 555439 )
    What a useless Slashdot story. So your email was down for a day or so. DEAL WITH IT. This is not news, services do go down. My internet connection has been down several times. So has my eletricty. Where is my front page slashdot article?
    • I agree completely. But i want to add that Slashdot is going to hell. The past 2 Ask Slashdots have been about stupid ISP issues and really arent news.
      • "The past 2 Ask Slashdots have been about stupid ISP issues and really arent news."

        It falls under 'stuff that matters'. If you're using Cox, or you're trying to get mail to somebody using Cox, then it's "news that matters". The nerd part is up to you.

        Quitcherbitchen.
    • " What a useless Slashdot story."

      It's not useless to Cox subscribers.

      "So has my eletricty. Where is my front page slashdot article?"

      I seem to recall a headline story about the massive power outage in the North-eastern edge of the USA. Why? Because a significant chunk of Slashdotters out there were affected.

      So, really, pipe down. Or, as you suggested, DEAL WITH IT.

      • Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Kizzle ( 555439 )
        He is not saying he knows of anyone else out of his local coverage area that is having problem. This is not dealing with anything close to the whole North-eastern edge of the USA. If it was then this would be an interesting article. Instead it's ONE guy bitching about his lack of mail for a week. Boohoo.
        • "So your email was down for a day or so. DEAL WITH IT.... Instead it's ONE guy bitching about his lack of mail for a week. Boohoo."

          Deal with it.

          • Re:WTF? (Score:2, Funny)

            by Kizzle ( 555439 )
            Deal with it.
            Yeah you said that already. Very clever. What next, questioning of my sexual preference?
            • "What next, questioning of my sexual preference?"

              Must be pretty embarrasing that you can't follow your own advice. Is that why you are trying to be all diversionary here?

      • Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 )
        I seem to recall a headline story about the massive power outage in the North-eastern edge of the USA. Why? Because a significant chunk of Slashdotters out there were affected.

        50 million people losing power is significant. A guy not able to get his e-mail through a cable provider in Florida is not. I also recall tons of front page articles during the California rolling blackouts. If e-mail is that important to you then register your own domain and setup your own mail system.. or just use hotmail or ya

        • 50 million people losing power is significant. A guy not able to get his e-mail through a cable provider in Florida is not. I also recall tons of front page articles during the California rolling blackouts.

          One guy in Florida who can't get his mail isn't news. One of the largest cable ISPs in the US having e-mail delays of one week is news.

  • They admitted it now (Score:5, Informative)

    by samjam ( 256347 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:07PM (#9242726) Homepage Journal
    pop3 problems [cox.net] it seems with no time to repair.

    Looks like they use InterMail pop3 server (telnet pop.east.cox.net 110) and
    smtp server
    (telnet smtp.east.cox.net 25): 220 lakermmtao11.cox.net ESMTP server (InterMail vM.6.01.03.02 201-2131-111-104-
    20040324) ready Mon, 24 May 2004 19:00:55 -0400
    (was 4xx too busy a minute ago)

    Intermail is/was produced/sold by Openwave
    Intermail [openwave.com] is no longer available and support has been discontinued. For Openwave email products please visit our Email Mx page.

    So, no support.
    Indications [winnetmag.com] are that it runs on windows servers.

    Draw your own conclusions

    Sam

    • Interesting research (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Zule_Boy ( 45951 )
      You did some really interesting, yet wildy inaccurate research. Let me take a minute to explain this confusing tale...

      Intermail was a software.com product. There were 2 versions: Intermail KX and Intermail MX. Post.Office was a totally different product, aimed at the "Exchange" market.

      There was another company named phone.com that seriously mangled wireless applications such as a WAP proxy, MMS-C and other things that ended up being called MAG - Mobile Application Gateway.

      The 2 companies merged (or bette
  • Charter has great ads on TV saying how great their internet service is but the exact same attitude when support is talking about their services.

    They tout a 2meg (down only) connection, but you are luckey to see 1/4th of that.
    They only provide mail service as an "extra."
    Forget having any sort of Perl script, PHP, etc. on your web pages.

    Their attitude seems to be that you pay for the bandwidth and bow at their feet for anything else they provide. Like Usenet, Mail, IRC, Web pages, etc.

    Connections drop all
    • Reading messages like yours makes me happy I went with Speakeasy ADSL (6Mbps/768kbps), 4 static IP addresses, no blocked ports, servers welcome, etc. :-)
    • They tout a 2meg (down only) connection, but you are luckey to see 1/4th of that.

      I'm using Charter. I just downloaded a 27 MB file at 1.85 Mbs and I've seen faster downloads. It sounds like it's your local boneheads and not Charter as a whole. And no, I don't work for them.
    • Connections drop all the time

      I had Verizon DSL and my DSLAM was hopelessly oversubscribed -- to make capacity it would drop individual TCP connections (seemingly chosen by round robin). So every once in awhile -- an image on a web page woudln't load or something. No big deal -- right? wrong... The longer you had a connection open the greater the chance it would be dropped. So if you played an online game for a few hours during the day the probability of being dropped converges on 100%.

      Believe it or no

  • A(lan) Cox [wikipedia.org] may be slow responding to email due to the fact that he is busy getting his MBA. I think the term is near completion, so he may be writing papers and whatnot. In the mean time you may wish to try this processor [alancoxonachip.com].

  • Taking a hit for the team. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ayanami Rei ( 621112 ) * <rayanami AT gmail DOT com> on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:30PM (#9242903) Journal
    Attention shadfc!

    The site you were looking for was NOT ask.slashdot.org, but DSL Reports [dslreports.com] (Cox HSI forums)

    Thank you for your cooperation.

  • Cox is rarely honest (Score:3, Informative)

    by bobthemuse ( 574400 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:55PM (#9243044)
    I was a Cox business customer for the last several years, purchased this for their supposed better availability and better support.

    Their support "engineers" are typical of many minimum-wage call centers, absolutely useless beyond resetting the modem and verifing TCP/IP settings. When I found that I switched from Cox Business to Cox Residential simply by switching from my assigned static IP to DHCP, I was rather annoyed. How can they guarantee greater uptime for their business network if it all runs over the same hardware? I'm now a Cox Residential customer (I dislike the company, but DSL is not available in my area) and strongly advise against the business service.
    • When I found that I switched from Cox Business to Cox Residential simply by switching from my assigned static IP to DHCP, I was rather annoyed. How can they guarantee greater uptime for their business network if it all runs over the same hardware?

      That's not really a good indication. While the connection to your house is (obviously) the same, the connection(s) your network traffic is going over once it gets past the first router could be very different - simply by changing the IP your machine has.

      • Possibly true, however a traceroute shows the traffic taking the exact same path through their network and out via the same gateway to their provider. While they could offer a different service, they don't.
  • I sent my mother an Amazon gift cert for Mother's Day and she never got it.

    I asked for them to reissue (and they did after 3 emails, Amazon's CS is getting poorer, too) a week later and she still didn't get it.

    My parents have been using Cox for a couple of years (Norman, OK) and I've been able to send them Amazon certs before.

    When they checked their SPAM folder they didn't have anything from Amazon at all, but Amazon thinks it went both times.

    When she called, my mother was told that they had a problem b
  • I have Cox HSI ... or so they tell me. We're getting 1Mbit cable, but that's not mentioned anywhere on the Cox.com website. But our cable TV provider is Cox! Hmm...

    Okay ... now back to the email subject. My email is perfectly fine, but I have a cox-internet.com email address, not cox.net. (Another reason I think I'm only getting pseudo-Cox internet.) That could have something to do with it.

    -MrM
  • I live in California and the problem has existed for over a week on both their east and west email servers. email outbound for their servers has been delayed and in some cases has never arrived.

    This affects a SIGNIFICANT amount of Cox's customers.
  • in cox.internet.discussion.email for a few weeks (months?) now. The spam filter and virus filter were tolerable though they would silently throw away mail that was a hit, even a false one (incoming and outgoing). Now the mail servers just randomly throw away mail, again both incoming and outgoing, with no apparent rhyme or reason. If Cox didn't block outgoing port 25 it would be less of a problem. As it stands they've basically funneled all outgoing mail through their servers, and then refuse to run the
    • at this point, I'd say blame the suits. they are much more interested in their bottom line and don't have the time or inclination to deal with the network/email/news admin types.

      Thats the basic problem of having a bottom line mentality, as opposed to a QOS mentality.

      Technomage Hawke
  • well,
    actually, the current spate of problems dates back to 31 march of this year when they initiated 2 new "features":
    1. anti-spam
    2. anti-virus.

    I have received some credit for my time in having to deal with this (to the tune of 1/3rd of my monthly internet services for the reason: poor QOS).

    The biggest problem in all of this: I cannot use anyone elses smtp server based e-mail because cox (in their infinite wisdom) has blocked all access to port 25 except for that which is directed to their e-mail servers.
    • there are apparently some third party email providers around who can do other than port 25 for mail...that should solve your problem, although fwiw it's bound to be in contravention of their rules somehow. However Cox should fix their servers, easy to do as you point out, it's not brain surgery!
  • Keep getting a "server too busy" error on send -- usually if I try about 5-15 times it will go through. Plus their virus scanning "service" is deleting a good portion of my incoming mail from my family (which is scanned on the transmitting side -- so I know it's virus free). I'm done with cox -- as soon as I can get dsl installed they're gone.
  • I don't remember there being any outage. I use the same email server as FL. The closest I came to that was the outage of a third-party NNTP server.
  • Working just fine for me. Just asks me for my password every once in a while, which tells me that the server probably got rebooted or its tokens flushed. I have had a few problems sending mail to cox.net from outside the domain, but the mail gets delivered in about a day. I have been getting the standard 421 Server Busy messages.
  • Outgoing SMTP is broken here in RI, and the bastards block outgoing SMTP to everything except their SMTP servers, which are broken, so I essentially can't send mail right now. Fucking Cox.

  • Lots of people out there seem to have had connectivity issues with them, but I have to say I've been very impressed with the speed/reliability here in San Diego. I've had Cox now at four different locations (two apartments and two houses) since 1997 (@Home) and haven't had any major problems.

    I'm currently peaking at around 3Mbps downstream (256k up -- boo) and haven't had any downtime at all in the last year (that I've been aware of). My last apartment had about 3 days of downtime in 15 months.

    Their email

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