COX Email makes the news

[McNevin]

May 27, 2004

Cox Communications said yesterday that e-mail service to its high-speed Internet subscribers in San Diego and across the country has returned to normal after several days of problems.

The company said customers experienced delays in sending and receiving e-mails because of a new anti-virus and junk e-mail filtering system.

"We had an unprecedented volume of spam targeted at our customers," said Ryland Madison, the company's director of broadband marketing in San Diego. "Our e-mail filters were working extra hard going through all of the e-mail. As a result, some of our customers experienced delays."

The company's Web site said the problem was caused by anti-virus software, and that Cox has temporarily stopped scanning e-mail for viruses.

No e-mails have been lost, just delayed, the company said.

A few customers, in e-mail interviews, said the messaging delays ranged from hours to more than a day.

The problem began Friday and was resolved late Tuesday night, Madison said.

Last month, Cox contracted with San Francisco-based Brightmail to remove spam and viruses from incoming e-mail. Brightmail's servers were overloaded by the spam attack, Madison said.

Technicians from the two companies are still working to understand precisely what happened, he added.

Madison said the problem may have affected customers who normally receive a high volume of spam.

Legitimate e-mail may have been delayed as Brightmail's filters scanned the spam addressed to customer accounts, he said.

Cox has an estimated 125,000 subscribers in San Diego County who pay between $29.95 and $49.95 a month for high-speed Internet service delivered via cable modems.

The company does not know how many customers had problems, Madison said, but based on the number of calls to support staff, it did not appear to be a widespread problem.

"The majority of our customers were not affected," he said. "Everything is back to normal. Customers are no longer reporting problems."

[R3C]

Yes... but did you read the second part of my Hey McNevin thread??

[McNevin]

No... this is the first time ive had internet for awile.

will read...

[enderzero]

Been too busy battling the Cocks email problem?

[McNevin]

Actually yes and no.

When I have been at work I have been to busy with the email prob.

At home is a different story, because I am not fortunate enough to live in a cox area. I have another cable company, adelphia.

I added digital cable, and the douche that hooked me up unhooked the room with the cable modem, to add tv in the bedroom.

Jennifer fought the cable co, like a woman scorned (or a techie without internet), and she won.

We got our stuff back on the next day, 60+ in credit, and one of the new faster channel changing cable boxes.

[R3C]

You bastard. I want a new faster channel changing box. I wonder what they have in the old ones. It's something slower than a 1 MHz 6510 though I can tell you that. Unless they developed a C compiler for really old 8 bit processors.

[McNevin]

Oh I forgot to mention, it has dolby optical out

The cable guy that came out to fix my stuff was like

"how did you get ahold of one of those"

I told him that i went throuh alot to get that, and no one would be taking it away from me.

Its quite fast, you should get one. I guess they are really rare, the tech said they only had 200 of them. but maybe they have more at comcast?

[McNevin]

Nifty Specs, it even tells the CPU.

http://broadband.motorola.com/catalog/p ... ductID=185

[dirtyprettylittlething]

You tell the story wrong boy. you're missing key details i.e. the witty lines, the 5 hour phone calls with adelphia, me chewing those adelphia workers a new one.

and you forgot to mention that they cut off the bedroom cable the next day and can't fix it until tuesday. there go my plans of having skinimax weekend