[[!meta  title="Comcast rediculousness"]]
[[!meta  date="2008-09-02 16:19:43"]]
I recently paid a phone bill online for Comcast, and in order to do so
I needed to set up a comcast email account.  While browsing through
their documentation trying to locate an imap server, I ran across [this
priceless gem](http://www.comcast.com/customers/faq/FaqDetails.ashx?Id=4394):

    Error #1 - Port 25. Secure (SSL); no Socket Error: 10053.  Error Number 0x800CC0F.

    This error indicates that your port 25 has been blocked.  Comcast has
    determined that your computer has been infected with a virus and has
    been used to send out spam, liekly without your knowledge.  By closing
    this port, we've taken steps to protect your computer from being used
    to send spam.

    How can I send email again?

    If you would like to send emai lthrough Outlook Express, you can click
    here to access a simple to use, one-click fix, which will upgrade
    Outlook Express to send email through alternate port 587.

Your computer has a virus spewing junk to port 25?  No problem, simply
move your activities somewhere else :p.  You would have though maybe
links to anti-virus software, since I suppose linking
[here](https://help.ubuntu.com/6.10/ubuntu/installation-guide/i386/index.html)
is probably to complicated for Comcast to handle ;).

Sadly Comcast doesn't support IMAPS:

    William_(Tue Sep 02 2008 11:03:01 GMT-0400 (EDT))>
    I was wondering if there is an IMAPS server

    Romeo.25655(Tue Sep 02 2008 11:03:39 GMT-0400 (EDT))>
    William, Comcast supports POP server only.

    William_(Tue Sep 02 2008 11:03:54 GMT-0400 (EDT))>
    are there IMAP plans for the future?

    Romeo.25655(Tue Sep 02 2008 11:04:33 GMT-0400 (EDT))>
    I am not certain about that, William.

    William_(Tue Sep 02 2008 11:04:52 GMT-0400 (EDT))>
    Is there someone else I should ask?

    Romeo.25655(Tue Sep 02 2008 11:06:25 GMT-0400 (EDT))>
    At this time, the only server that we sure for our email is POP. There
    is no plans to use IMAP.

After some googling about, I found out how to setup mutt to not delete
messages it downloads from a POP server, and got Comcast working
through Mutt.  I was uncertain about the encryption, since Mutt fails
on its first few authentication attempts, so I tcpdumped the connection with

    # tcpdump -A > /tmp/dump

and grepped through the output for my username and password.  No
matches, so apparently `pops` in the server name is sufficient for
hiding the authentication.

You can see my mutt configuration at the [Drexel liki](http://www.physics.drexel.edu/liki/index.php/Mutt).

[[!tag tags/linux]]