Thanks Comcast - Port 25 Blocked

Gawd sometimes I just hate the day I signed up for Comcast.  Yea, they had better prices than the ISP I used in the past, but the games they play are enough to drive a sane person raving mad.

What they've done is sent a command to the users modem that blocks all traffic on port 25.  This is the SMTP port (simple mail transfer protocol) that's used for e-mail between servers.  So people like me that run servers in their basement wake up in the morning to find their mail services aren't working anymore.  No warning - no notice, just a simple WHAP and the evil is done.  The first thing I did, was call Comcast support and ask if something was wrong - specifically with port 25.  The help-desk person had no idea what my problem could be, and I tried telling him what port 25 was, but per Comcast support requirements for a Help-Desk Technician he didn't have a clue what I was talking about, and told me there was nothing at the Comcast end that happened.  So something happened overnight with my mail server??  Well I guess I've stranger things happen to these beasts, so into the basement I went - checking services, checking cables, hubs and routers... I came up with nothing.  This took me all day Sunday before I admitted defeat and called Comcast again and specifically asked if port 25 was blocked.  Again, the Help-Desk told me that it wasn't - and so the argument commenced.  "Wait a minute!" the technician said.  "I made a mistake - port 25 is blocked" he told me.  Then he told me a story of why Comcast would do such a thing, and all I could do was sit at my workstation and chew my fingers to the bone, wishing I could be chewing on the guy that made the decision to cut my lifeline without even a warning.  (In the above image, just imagine the firewall being the cable modem and the thick blue line that makes it through is severed).  Thank goodness I don't have a few thousand users that rely on my email line, but the few I do have (including myself) I need to find an alternate method of getting and sending e-mail.  Yes, I could use my Comcast account, but since I run a professional service, I don't need an email address of username@comcast.net indicating that I don't know how to set up an e-mail server.  It's standard to use username@yourdomain.xxx and it looks a hell of a lot more professional.

Thanks for allowing me to work overtime Comcast - I'll never forget you.