Email security settings

Hey, Marc. I accept your invitation. :) For whatever help it might be to others I'll give you the full story. And hopefully it will help Cox understand better the needs (and the frustrations) of their customers.

But my advice remains the same. If your circumstances are like mine (after reading this, you'll know), elevate to Tier II, and even ask them to elevate to Tier III (where I believe the actual solution lies).

First, allow me to introduce myself. I am the Baby. You know, the one that has been thrown out with the anti-spam Bath Water.

I live in a small community. We have a Community Center. I love to dance. I love to share my love of dance through teaching people how to dance. I start a 'Social Dance Club' in the community to teach dance at the local Community Center (for *free* -- this is not a commercial enterprise -- I do this as a *volunteer* as a service to the community). I ask people if they would like to be on the Club email list so I can send them reminders about upcoming lessons, dance events, links to instructional dance videos, and so on. They say 'yes', AND PROVIDE ME THEIR EMAIL ADDRESS. That's important. In the Great Anti-Spam War, that is what is known as an "opt-in". Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets on my list without asking to be there. (And, of course, I know every spammer on the planet will say the same thing. I get it. Except in my case it is ACTUALLY TRUE.)

OK, a dilemma. I do not want to share people's email addresses with other members. People have a right to as much privacy as they can get nowadays. So I determine to use 'bcc' (blind carbon copy) for the newsletters. Send to myself, 'bcc' to everybody else. Except I know that in the Great Anti-Spam War many email transporters (Yahoo, Cox, AOL, you name it) will flag as spam an email with a bunch of 'bcc' recipients. I determine the magic number (at the time) to be 25. I chop up my Outlook distribution lists for the Dance Club into under 25 person groups (the overall list grows and fluctuates around 250 members -- hence, 10 distribution groups). Works for years. Literally. Until this last year. Cox changes THEIR rules (unannounced) to "under 20". How do I find this out? I send a newsletter and the bounces plug up my Inbox, all with "--SPAM--" subject appendages. I also learn that hyperlinks, according the Cox anti-spam robots, look "spammy".

OK, OK, so I reconstitute my groups into groups of 19 or less, and I quit sending hyperlinks (even to the Club's OWN SITE, for cryin' out loud). This works for like, 3 months. Right up until last weekend, when suddenly I can't send any more email. Neither can my wife (from a different computer). Hmmmmm, . . . this smells like our IP address is getting blocked.

Enter, Cox Tier II. The CSR says, "let me check your IP address". (Nobody at Tier I offered to do this.) "Oh, it looks like you are on a list. Let me check on that." Tick, tick, tick . . . "It looks like your IP address is being blocked. It is an automated block, and will last 48 hours. It is due to your spam 'reputation' score."

"OK, thank you. I appreciate your honesty."

I wait the 48 hours. Outbound is working again.

Except the Social Dance Club newsletter is dead. It has been killed. By Cox. Because robots (algorithms) can't reason. They don't see gray, only black and white. Since the Bath Water is all warm and soapy and what not, why is that Baby whining so?

And please, no posts back about MailChimp and Constant Contact and Joe's mass mailing service. I mentioned I do this as a volunteer, right? I'm not interested. I just want to run my goofy, dopey Dance Club, which will now be newsletterless. Thank you very little, Cox. I wish your robots were smarter.

Have you tried Gmail?

My PC and my wife's PC have not been able to send mail via Outlook 2016 or Thunderbird or Windows Mail off an on since October, continuously since mid-December.

All settings are confirmed over and over on both machines.

Have spoken with both Tier I and Tier II technicians who all said the same things: check settings, re-new passwords, delete and re-establish accounts. None of these solutions work. Forum mods told us to write to Cox and Cox techs exchanged emails with us with the same tired advice. Nothing works.

Outlook, both 2003 and 2016 worked fine until Cox started changing email systems.

Now all we can do is receive mail on our web clients. We cannot send mail. And Cox keeps peppering us with emails threatening to stop all sending and receiving from our accounts "until they are corrected." The accounts are set up exactly according to Cox specs.

This is a Cox problem. I refuse to use the webmail system as I have 20+ years of Outlook files that I constantly refer to and re-use as tutorials and seminars for our club members. So we do send a lot of repeat mail but we are not spammers and we have a limited number of members, perhaps 20-30.

I've had Cox for 22 years. Thanks to cable industry lobbying in Congress, our alternative sources for high speed internet are extremely limited. Cox has a virtual monopoly in some areas of San Diego and no doubt in other cities as well. As soon as I can find a viable alternative, I will switch. Until then I will curse Cox every day that I sit down and struggle with email that used to be an effortless process until they started monkeying with the system.

$225 A month for this? Rubbish. I'll never recommend Cox to anyone, ever again.

I am having these same issues...I have changed everything

according to instructions & still cant send emails...

@gunnergoz I feel your pain, man. And I totally agree -- this problem cropped up only last Fall-ish. So it suggests to me there was either a system change or a sysadmin change or both. If it was sysadmin, I fear we may have all fallen prey to an idiot.

One other quick tidbit from my Tier II call that I left out of my earlier post. OK, actually two. First, the CSR firmly told us to use port 465 and SSL/TLS outbound and specifically NOT 587 STARTTLS, "because it has been my experience that port 465 works better with Outlook." No kidding? How about you update your online help to reflect that and we might not be having this call here. Second, during our support call we had to "reactivate" our primary Cox account. Why is that? "Because you have not logged in for 180 days -- it then automatically deactivates." Really? Apparently you have a lot of robots running around your networks here -- how about you write one to see if any of your services are being USED before you auto-deactivate? Yeah, how about that?

At the risk of hijacking the underlying subject of this thread, here's today's "Robot Report". My wife writes 15 of our neighbors to organize a social outing together. No 'bcc', just 15 regular ol' email addresses in the "To:" box in Outlook. Yeah, all 15 bounce with a "552 5.2.0 . . . internal error". Know what a "552 5.2.0" is? No? Google it. Some (smart, non-robot) sysadmins take the time to translate "internal error" into "automated process detected unsolicited content". Yeah, robots again. (In the jargon, "unsolicited content" is another way of saying "spam", and "automated process" is another way of saying "robot" (algorithm).) And they just blocked an email to 15 friends.

Where in the Terms of Service does it say you can't have 15 friends? This is what is called USING EMAIL you [fill-in-the-blank] morons!

This is bad. Really bad. Thankfully I DO have a choice of high-speed ISPs. Remember my cable subscription, Cox? Go ahead, keep annoying me. Last time I checked I have A LOT of choices for TV viewing over a non-Cox Internet connection. Go ahead. Just keep it up.

so if we are using 2016 Outlook we are basically SOL?  up a creek without a paddle??  and if so why the heck isn't this stated ANYWHERE on the page for the update issue??   

by the way,shouldn't the POS on the live chat have asked that basic question?  instead of highly offending the customer?

@arliepooh.  Yeah, and there are probably only a couple hundred MILLION Outlook users, so a user base entirely worth ignoring.  Another example of a powerful intellect in play.

@OMAQman that is assinine!  so far i've found their support absolutely useless.