SmartZone Service Restored - Update 2

A thermal shutdown has nothing to do with Comcast....just a coincidence.

You computer shut down due to being to hot.

At best it just needs cleaned out, by someone that knows what they ar doing.
At worst, you cooked something inside of it by it getting to hot, usuasly a fan quit working or ports plugged with dirt.

I just love how Comcast operates, or fails to operate.

Issue 1: as other have pointed out before, Comcast Claims Email is a free service and you cannot be compensated for something you dont pay for.....has anyone ever had a Comcast email address without paying for it? I think not!

Issue 2: My OnDemand went out the other day, on 3 different DVR's; they said must be a problem on my end, and would send someone out 2 days later to look at my equipment. Come on now, all 3 DVR's went out at the same time.......very unlikely.....it was more like they had an issue that they don't want to own up to.......funny thing was about 6 hours later, all 3 DVR's have OnDemand again, but it was suppossedly on my end.

Wish there was some competition around here, maybe some of the Comcast strong arming would stop.

I could talk about all the "bad" the email outage caused, but I think it has been discussed enough. Some of us view situations like the email outage as a great learning experience. I hope all the technicians realize the vast amount of knowledge they gained from this seemingly bad experience.

I just found out this morning about the power disruption on April 4, 2009. Since that day I haven't been able to use my home computer, I get an Alert! that reads about a Thermal Shutdown. Every time I try to start my computer it shuts off and shows that Alert. Computer was working fine until Saturday, April 4th. Please help!.

Sonia Ramos
Comcast Customer

I was out of town during the outage and was unable to give and receive information to my tax accountant.

I have a lead for you on how you can pay for UPS so that we do not suffer an "outage" again.....

http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/04/06/comcast-ceo-roberts-makes-the-top-15-on-pay/

An apology from Comcast are empty words as far as I am concernd. I have been with comcast long before they were comcast. For the money that we all pay for this service There should be some sort of compensation for Comcast not being able to compinsate EVERYONE for the trouble. Not even a mention of such. I can only promise one thing the Minute FIOS is available or even DSL It is bye Bye Comcast on all level TV AND INTERNET.

Yes, I did suffer a loss of e-mail service. I did call and was flat out told that they would not issue me a credit of any kind because the e-mail is through a "private" company and ot actually comcast.
I was waiting on details of a very important financial transaction and coul dnot get the information.
Not happy at all with comcast.
It always seems liek something is going wrong, the voicemail isn't working, the internet has become slower, cable goes down.
It seems to me that you certainly charge comcast customers an arm and a leg, yet you don't want to take care of us to keep us as customers

Sorry to hear you had No loss on your Day OFF sorta speak cuase it was a weekend..BUT...
What about the person or persons stranded waiting for a confirmation number to pick money or airline tickets or something to the more Urgent Matter.. sorry but if the provider cant even consider some sort of help or discount or coupon or something other then an Apology,, then its "Hail the Almighty Dollar" to them.. This "mail Provided Service" you can only access if your a Comcast Customer.. after all,, if it wasnt part of comcasts service, then it would be accessable anywhere without an account like AIM.. Comcast you just do not pre-empt a service and come up at the last moment with a cluase your not responsible..your getting away with murder and i truly hope some attorney does a class action suit on the basis,, more then the .72cents as was mentioned earlier.
Wish you all luck with thier service in the future..after all they built this system for us..but we didnt pay them to do it ? guess im trying to say..you ARE PAYING for a service...ok im done ranting...
and to all those of you who suck-up havent got a clue on IT TECHNICAL ...Ive been a long time customer of yours and dealt with your problems in the past.. and your beginning to look more and more like an ms os system. things dont work..wait for an update while we take the money in full for a systems that holds no preserve..its broken when you released it and still doesnt work with super large security risks everywhere ,,so large you cant even take care of the smaller issues due to the larger nature of the problem. released to soon with lots of promises and true let downs. Please stop and tell me if im wrong.. but almost all the complaints here are 100% legit.
Make It Simple.. Do The Right Thing by The Ones Who Keep You in Bussiness.

Dear Scott,
Stuff happens. Just keep asking "why?" 5 times in a row to get to the root cause. I am sure you all are doing your best. That is all I can ask for on this side. I look forward to reading the final resolution.
The apology appeared open and honest. Thank you for the communication.
MAB

I think some kind of rebate should be given to us customers who lost the ability to use our e-mail.

I see a lot of comments here asking for some sort of reimbursement from Comcast for one day of lost e-mail service. That would be a nice gesture, given what Comcast broadband costs (not cheap!), but I think we have to remember that (a) it was only for one day, and a Saturday at that (when I'm not relying on Comcast for my business e-mails), and (b) the Internet connection was not affected. So what should Comcast reimburse us? At my $42.95/mo rate, one day costs $1.43. If you consider that e-mail is only 1/2 of the service, then they should reimburse us $0.72??!! I don't think so.

We should also remember the infamous bumper sticker: Sh** happens(!), and when you're dealing with computers and the Internet, it happens a lot. Comcast has been my ISP for about 6 years. During that time, they have been more reliable than MSN, Hotmail, AOL, CompuServe, and at least in my neck of the woods, Verizon. I know because I have friends that have these, and their e-mail goes down many more times than Comcast. And I've never heard any of them say they got an apology from their ISP. So while there is certainly room for improvement in the quality of Comcast's tech support and installation staffs, overall I think the company does pretty well.

I have had no incoming email since Saturday night Apr4 @7:25pm in Seattle; Apple Mac OS X Leopard computer, Mac mail Version 3.5 (929.4/929.2)
Waited & waited for all to return to normal - finally contacted Comcast today via their website mail and received advice to change settings to:
Outgoing: smtp.comcast.net, port# 25 or 587
Incoming: sz-pop.mail.comcast.net, port 995 or 110
Logout of mail and restart.
No joy - still not working after several attempts and re-configurations.
I guess the next step is to try Live Chat.
Don't understand what when wrong, since it was working perfectly before the big outage - why do I have to make any changes to my original settings? Is this just a Mac Mail problem? My husband (joint account) has a PC laptop and hasn't had any problem. Any helpful advice?.

The servers may be up and the e-mail problem fixed,but I sure don't have MY e-mail yet...what's up??
It's gone on for three days now! Loss ofbusiness!

Comcast Cares?? News to me.

First: Any reports that the POP problem has been solved are wrong, wrong, wrong. I *still* have to enter a password even after several logins, even mere minutes apart. Sigh. (It's about noon EDT on Sunday, April 6)

Ahem. Some of us are not tweet-heads. Nor do we plan to be. So the value of Twitter in this case (all cases?) is null. This is almost as good an idea as the Massachusetts State Police sending out tweets about traffic problems -- which I would need to squint at and decipher while driving???

And let me see if I understand this: If I want to get word about e-mail failures on Comcast I can subscribe to an e-mail notice? Anyone else see something wrong with this picture? Yeah, I *could* get the messages at another, more reliable, non-Comcast account, but still...

In addition, based on my limited experience, Smart whatever ain't so smart. It still takes a long time to load the pages on Comcast broadband. That's why I depend mostly on POP mail, even though Comcast has shown me that that could be a problem.

Finally, what bonehead has decided that Comcast will not/does not support Mozilla products? You won't even accept messages from me unless I lie and choose "Other" as my mail software! Folks, even if every Mac user relied on Safari (and a ton of PC users used that version) there are *still* more people using Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird than there will ever be Safari users and yet you support that one. Folks, we're in the 21st century and there are excellent browsers/mail programs that do not come from Redmond or Cupertino.

I still cannot get my comcast emails via my Blackberry!!!! How do I fix this issue cuased by comcast's outage

July 6 3:18am CST. Still no emails for 2 days.

Oh, how we wish the "fix" for Ken would work for us! We have the business class service and have not been able to get our POP e-mail here in Colorado since the outage on Saturday morning. We can log into the Comcast.net Web site and retrieve most of it (there are indeed several messages completely missing in cyberspace, unfortunately), but still no luck with POP. We've rebooted, reset, unplugged - you name it. Any more tips we can try?

The major issue at hand is being ignored/dodged here:
We are STILL missing email from the outage.

It is almost Monday and we will start to look bad for not replying! We cannot even inform others to re-send emails because we don't know who to inform (besides those who told us already). This is quite a sticky situation for Comcast customers.

The article above states "no customer emails were lost." But we have proven that emails ARE missing. This is not speculation; this is fact. The article is a misrepresentation and needs to be edited, unless it can be validated.

I STILL HAVE NOT received emails that I sent yesterday morning as a test from my AOL account to three different Comcast accounts, nor did I receive any emails that fell between 6:36 a.m. and 5:27 p.m. Generally I receive between 20-30 emails on a Saturday. I recieved only 3 time stamped out side of the hours of the outage. I want my missing emails!

I was told by a higher up in Comcast that these emails will not be retrieved. I even told Frank Eliason who this person was and he refuses to acknowledge what he said to me. Any emails sent during this outage will not be found.

By the way if this post makes it to the forum it will be the first one Comcast has approved in my last three tries.

"no customer data was lost ": Actually I know of one message that was lost, for certain. The friend who sent it to me at 11 am on Saturday (gmail) checked later in the evening, and resent it. The original still has not come in (at Sun, 6:30 pm). Of course that leaves me wondering how many other messages were lost that I will never know about.

I wanted to share what just worked for Ken. He was able to log into Comcast.net but was not receiving emails via his pop client (Outlook). We rebooted the computer and when the error popped up we re-entered the password and mail starting coming through again.

Hope this helps!

Frank Eliason

4:45 in East Tennessee and I still cannot get POP mail. The last email from the POP server was from Saturday morning.

Also, when I try to access the Comcast outage board at help.comcast.net, I get a page load error.

I have been a Comcast Internet subscriber since the day it was available here and the service has been great until the last year or so. Unpredictable days of slow service have become more and more the norm, and now this.

We have forwarded information regarding missing emails to the right departments to review and update. This has not been common but we do want to investigate any such reports. If anyone else would like to share information please feel free to email my team We_can_help@cable.comcast.com.

Richard,
Yesterday we posted on the Smartzone page, Comcast.net, our help forums, the outage board on http://help.Comcast.net, Broadband Reports, Twitter, as well as on our IVR and other Customer contact channels. We did this to take a proactive approach to speaking with our Customers and striving to keep them informed. We will continue to review what worked and what didn't so we can find further ways to communicate with our Customers.

Thank you everyone for the great discussions!

Frank Eliason
Comcast
@ComcastCares on Twitter

22 hours after restoration of the service and I have not received a single e-mail from the outage (aside from a very few - and not all of them - between 13:00 and 14:30 EDT 4/4). Are they lost forever, despite your statement that no e-mails were lost? If not, what can possibly be taking this long?

How about providing better status on your home page of major outages ("if your e-mail isn't working, please try again later" just doesn't cut it) - how about a link to important forum messages or Twitter posts, neither of which I found until today (in an e-mail from PC World).

I think a one day credit on the bill of affected customers is in order, assuming the missing e-mails do arrive. If they were lost, I think a month's credit is in order. I know where I can get $150 to switch ISPs.

I can say with 100% certainty that there are emails that have been lost. I sent a test email to my comcast email address at 9:52 AM on saturday from my work email in an effort to see if emails would in fact be retrievable and I have yet to see that email. Some did come through, but I have no way of know what may have been lost which is incredibly frustrating. What I find very troubling is that an email came in last night which was 4/4 and when I opened it, the sent date was 4/2/2009. Was there a problem with email on 4/2/2009? Why would it ever take 2 days for me to receive an email? I am very concerned by this and will seek alternate email service if I cannot be reassured that all my emails are recoverable.

Things *seem* to be back to normal now, but I can tell you, for some of us it wasn't until about 10:30am PDT April 5 (Portland, OR)...and it wasn't just email that was the problem, it was equally as bad trying to access the 'net. Repeated repairs by Windows Local Area Connection and Desktop Doctor came up with answers ranging from no connection, errors on POP3 connection or no DNS connection...and other times the connections were fine, yet still everything, email and web access, was glacial or froze after initiating. This included virus and firewall updates. A modem reset didn't do anything, of course - but I couldn't access Comcast to find out about the outage, and didn't know that it wasn't a hardware problem on my end. (I couldn't *get* to any Comcast webpages to find out what the heck was going on. They'd try to load, and either nothing or only a few things would come up, then they'd sit there, frozen, until after 5-10 minutes I gave up; or one time, got a data transfer interrupt error message. And I couldn't get through via phone. Eventually, after I got some minimal web access back, I only found out what was going on via Cnet's news article from *yesterday.* Which only mentioned email.) Windows Event Viewer was logging errors such as "The IP address lease...has been denied by the DHCP server 0.0.0.0 (The DHCP Server sent a DHCPNACK message)."; "Not able to renew the lease...The semaphore timeout period has expired"; "The server could not bind to the transport \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{blahblahsomenumbers}..."

I'm no real geek, but that sounds - and was, to me - a wee bit more serious than only a SmartZone outage. It most definitely did, indeed, affect my ability to access the internet. And I'm not the only one. A friend in Kansas had the same experience. I don't know if she's gotten her web access back yet; she was getting email back slowly at about the same rate I was.

It is 12:30pm EST, 05-Apr, and all emails from the outage are still missing. Comcast is claiming no emails were lost, but only here...

Why is this the only place Comcast has posted anything about this major outage? (I am not counting the useless, disjointed one-liners on "Twitter")

This hiding by Comcast is by far the worst part of this ordeal.

How would anybody find "comcastvoices.net," besides stumbling upon it? This should be a national press release, not hidden from the public as if it never happened. Can Comcast AT LEAST post on comcast.net or comcast.com (in an obvious location people can find)?

It is 12:30pm EST, 05-Apr, and all emails from the outage are still missing. Comcast is claiming no emails were lost, but only here...

Why is this the only place Comcast has posted anything about this major outage? (I am not counting the useless, disjointed one-liners on "Twitter")

This hiding by Comcast is by far the worst part of this ordeal.

How would anybody find "comcastvoices.net," besides stumbling upon it? This should be a national press release, not hidden from the public as if it never happened. Can Comcast AT LEAST post on comcast.net or comcast.com (in an obvious location people can see)?

We cannot send or receive Incredimails. Incredimail states that the problem is a "Comcast" system problem. When will this be resolved? Thanks.

I still am waiting for old emails from yesterday morning and here it is more than 24 hours later. Is it safe to assume at this point that those emails are lost forever? Completely unacceptable Comcast!

Perhaps this fiasco brought to light a larger problem: SmartZone was a mistake from the start, and it was foisted upon Comcast customers who did not ask for it, and did not want it.
Typically for a change this fundamental, a service provider should for many months (if not indefinitely) provide dual paths, and allow those who were quite happy with the old system to stay with it.

Thanks Scott for the more detailed explanation. I hope that you will also post a detailed summary of the root cause analysis.
While I appreciate the recent attempts at communicating with your consumer base, Comcast has a rightly deserved horrible reputation on quality of service, on customer service levels and on communication. These are good attempts but there is along way to go.
While standards should always have been higher, you now have a more sophisticated user base, you are not just a commodity cable provider, and internet and online services are now much more a part of our lives and expectations of uninterrupted service for something like email are normal.

I have two commercial sites ( Retail stores ) and over one thousand customers using Mac systems and comcast email in Ma. As of this morning all systems are still down.
Can we expect a billing credit? What is the latest etr?

ever since the last "national outage" i have been unable to use REPLY or FORWARD functions. i have not had any satisfactory help with this issue.
i contacted comcast during yesterday's fiasco, and 4 different techs gave me 4 different stories. this was not the first time we have been burdened with this 'inconvenience'. but i am stuck, comcast has a monopoly where i live.

I have received no emails from the time the servers were down. Will I receive them or are my emails lost forever?