My Comcast/Charter email is unreliable

As an IEEE member, I have an IEEE email account. (the IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a professional org for engineers). The provided IEEE email address is primarily a forwarding service. We can publicly give out that address and point it to an ISP address. I am forwarding my IEEE email to my Comcast address.

As I said, I am unable to send charter ==> comcast. The mail does not appear in my Comcast account, and I receive no error message. But I can send charter ==> IEEE, which is auto forwarded ==> comcast. If I send mail from Charter to my IEEE account, I do see that mail in my Comcast account.

Again, I am not using an email client (there is no 3rd party app involved, although I do see the same behavior when I use a 3rd party app such as Outlook). If in Outlook I forward mail in my Charter account to my Comcast account, I see the mail enter my Charter Outbox, then leave my Charter Outbox, but never appear in my Comcast Inbox. The mail acts as if it is actually going somewhere.

I was on the phone again this morning with Comcast support (Level 2, I think the person said). As expected, the response I got was that Comcast has no problem and the issue must be with Charter. My response is that I really don't know where the problem lies but I am working with both providers as best I can to resolve the issue.

@markc3 Thank you for providing this information. I can see how this would be alarming, and I want to be sure to get this resolved for you, and get you some peace of mind with your account and services. Here is our Customer Security Assurance Team contact information, along with their hours of operation. This is the best group to handle this type of concern. Is this something you would have time to call on today? I would like to follow up with you, and make sure you were able to get in the right direction with this team.

CSA 1-888-565-4329, this team is available from 6 AM to -2 AM ET/ seven days a week. 

I have reached out to PLUG (the Portland Linux Users Group). I do not really understand the response I got. Please allow me to include it here.

"I do not believe that it matters if your home IP is blacklisted or not. That is because the sender is Charter with their IP, not yours. Charter needs to make sure that their IP is not blacklisted, and they like do (sic). Why rolling the boulder up hill like Sisyphus? This is waste of your time. The wise thing to do is not to use ISP email at all and use third party such as fastmail/protonmail/gmail/outlook/... anything, but the ISP - as suggested here by number of people. If you still have a problem, that would be worth debugging and resolving. If you switch the email provider, make sure to update your email with your ISPs, so that they can reach you."

Conclusion ... mail addesses provided by ISPs are notoriously unreliable.

Charter (Spectrum) says

Charter mail works with all providers except one.    Charter is unable to send to only one provider. Hence it is that provider’s (Comcast’s) problem. Using webmail, no error messages.

Comcast (Xfinity says)

Comcast mail works with all providers except one. Comcast is able to receive from all providers except one. Hence, it is that provider’s (Charter’s) problem.    Using webmail, no error messages.

I see an unfortunate similarity between those two arguments? With the consumer (me) in the middle without a resolution.

I received the following reply when I posted this issue on the PLUG (Portland Users Group) forum. Portland Oregon

"I've had similar experiences with Comcast dropping emails. My church uses a third party company to send bulk email announcements
 to all of its members. Comcast drops these on the floor with no error reply. I set up a gmail account to receive my church emai
l that automatically forwards to my Comcast account. So my situation is:

<church email> -> Comcast = dropped with no error

<church email> -> gmail -> Comcast = Successfully received

I can only conclude that Comcast drops email from certain sources without telling us what it is doing.

Steve"

Sorry to bear bad news.  First off, this:

https://superuser.com/questions/897153/can-an-email-delivery-silently-fail

In summary yes email delivery can silently fail. 

I have some background with this issue having experienced it myself but with a different email domain.  A COUPLE YEARS AGO, I was doing some contract work with a local lab.  I was working from home and planning to use my comcast.net email address for email communication.  The project lead told me via chat they would send some documents to me at my email address.  After an hour they asked me if I had read the documents, but I had not received the email so I checked spam folder, refreshed email, etc., and still no email.  We went around a couple times with them sending and me not receiving before we both decided to contact our respective ISPs.

On this call Comcast CSA told me that they do in fact black-list individual email addresses and sometimes entire domains, and when this happens, they might simply and silently not forward the email to the destination address.  The Comcast email system filters the email and no one knows except for Comcast.  If this is happening to you, you must figure it out on your own.  This is not something that was willingly shared, we had to spend hours of lost business time proving to them that this was a problem they were causing.  In the end Comcast's solution was to tell us to use a non-Comcast email address for our email communications.  I.E.  no one there was willing to address the issue.

Thank you for sharing. This is what a lot of people are telling me. I have heard many stories like yours.

Although having been a Comcast customer for many years, it unfortunately may be time to seek another provider. This requires a lot of work and research on my part, but I have some friends who can help me. There is a fibre optic company in my area that is highly recommended. What an unfortunate occurrence.

Here is something very interesting.  If I send from charter to comcast (webmail, but same behavior with an email client) and send repeatedly (like every second or so, by hand, not a script), some of my mail gets thru. For example, I did a test with 80 mails from charter to comcast. I saw 9 get thru. 81 never arrive and there is no error message. If I continue to test (usually in blocks of 10 or 20 mails), I notice that what develops is that about 10% of mails from charter to comcast actually arrive. The other 90% do not arrive. They are not in SPAM or JUNK and there is no error message.

I have a similar, but slightly different problem with my Comcast email.
I've been notified by Schwab and TD Ameritrade that my emails FROM them are returned as Undeliverable.  Therefore they have resorted to mailing me too much paperwork.

Help!