My battle with Comcast

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 josephc at etards.net wrote:

> Basically, I don't want to cancel my Comcast service. Verizon is the
> only alternative, and it's not a great one. I was hoping people had
> suggestions for me.
>
> Thanks for any help you can give.

Have you considered a POBox account? They're not an ISP, they're a
forwarding service: sign up for an account (they're cheap -- fifteen
bucks a year for basic service) and you get up two three forwarding
addresses, each of which also gets URL forwarding, spam forwarding,
vacation replies, SMTP relaying, etc.

But the nice bit is that, because all they do is forwarding (it's assumed
that you have an ISP, or a work or school email address, etc), your
friends are immune from changes on your end.

In this case, if your friend switched from Comcast to Verizon or another
ISP, all he would have had to do would be to change his mail forwarding
target from the old ISP to the new one, and possibly reconfigure his mail
client to munge the From & Reply-To headers. That's it. Mail will keep
coming in as normal, and his friends won't know the difference.

In spite of my email address, I don't have any affiliation with them, and
won't get any kind of kickback if you or your friend signs up. I just
think the service is a good idea, and a good deal. Situations like the one
you describe are *exactly* the problem this service aims to correct.


Let me know if you have any questions, or feel free to poke around on
<http://pobox.com/forwarding.html>. A 30 day trial account is free --
being happy with that earlier this year was what convinced me to sign up.

Good luck! :)


-- 
Chris Devers