Recently, a national coalition of technical-support geeks came trolling to the defense of Cincinnati Bell when I wrote this article about their bad email service.  A huge percentage of Cincinnati Bell’s Fuse emails were being bounced back to the senders—sometimes taking several days before senders knew their messages were not being received.  Cincinnati Bell says they’ve been blacklisted due to Fuse users having easy-to-guess passwords whose accounts were infiltrated by SPAMMERS.  Is that a likely story, or complete and total bullshit?  Let’s take a closer look at the scenario—affecting thousands of Cincinnati internet users.

First, take a look at the “official” statements Cincinnati Bell gave to WCPO several days ago:

So, according to Cincinnati Bell, some hackers have targeted Fuse emails, and guessed at a bunch of individual’s passwords so they could send SPAM emails.  This has allegedly caused Fuse to be blacklisted.  One problem:  the whole time of this alleged “crisis,” some Fuse users have been able to send emails to AOL or Yahoo!  Could Fuse be blacklisted, while Fuse is still getting messages through?

This sounds like something called “rate limiting.” Let’s say AOL notices that some no-name website is sending an unusually large number of emails.  From the perspective of AOL, what is “Fuse”?  Suspecting that this no name website is just sending too many messages, they could “rate limit” Fuse.  That would mean that only a finite number of emails from that source would be accepted daily.

Let’s just logically deduce some outcomes based on these two possibilities:  (A) that Fuse email has been blacklisted as SPAM, and (B) that Fuse has been rate limited because the national players have never heard of them.  Both of these are totally unacceptable.

Consider possibility (A).  Now remember that Cincinnati Bell presents itself as a reliable and professional service provider.  Therefore, they should take a proactive stance towards keeping their service operable.  They should monitor the blacklists, following procedure for removal, and they should also monitor the usage of their clients.  If someone’s email got infiltrated by a SPAMMER due to an easy-to-guess password, then perhaps the jump from ten emails a day to several thousand from one user should have risen a red flag.  Usage filters should be in place to monitor such increases.

Consider possibility (B).  What if little Cincinnati Bell is unrecognizable on the national scene?  What if AOL and Yahoo! have no idea who “Fuse” is, and so they decided to limit their messages as a general policy.  Does Cincinnati Bell have any kind of business relationship with these national providers?  Should a service provider in a City our size be expected to maintain such professional relationships?

If such a relationship were in place and properly maintained, would any of this be happening?

I still think one way to insure such an outcome is to make sure Cincinnati Bell hears your concerns and complaints, and not the third party they contracted to deal with calls.  I still stand by my earlier article.

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