Comcast heals itself. A Plainfield miracle?

My Comcast email appears to have healed itself. Is this a Plainfield miracle, or something else?

As a child growing up not far from the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, I recall the hubbub when one of the mediums reported an image of the Virgin Mary had miraculously appeared on the tile wall of a bathtub surround.

My mother, profoundly skeptical of such goings-on, was scathing towards her best girlfriend Ruth's gullibility. Ruth was Lily Dale's phone operator, with the switchboard located in her upstairs bedroom, and she was on call 24 hours a day. Mother thought Ruth, though no Spiritualist, was influenced by her medium neighbors, whom Mother regarded as crackpots.

I wonder what Mother would think of my recent experiences with Comcast and my emails.

On April 28, just as Plainfield's Democratic primary campaign was going into full swing, my daily outgoing CLIPS emails disappeared into the ether. Maybe it was into the ectoplasm. At any rate, they were gone.

Though I got no indication they weren't sent, I began to get inquiries from readers asking why they hadn't received their emails.

I have had problems with Comcast on and off over the daily volume, which bumped along near the max they allow for any one customer. Traffic was usually restored within 24 hours after I emailed their spam management center that I was not sending spam, but emails requested by subscribers.

Not so this time.

The emails were simply gone, though they showed up in my 'Sent' folder.

Comcast service people assured me that they were not blocking my emails, and suggested it must be my email program (Mozilla's Thunderbird).

This is an old customer service technique perfected by Microsoft (the problem is not with us, it's with you), but I wasn't buying it. The Mozilla software had run impeccably for years and there had been no recent updates or reason to believe anything had changed with the software.

The experience was a kick in the butt to finally get everything moved off Comcast, which I had threatened before to do but had always forgotten about once the issue eased.

Not so this time.

I moved to my Gmail account and began moving the subscriptions over to Google's automated email delivery. (Gentle nudge: Some of you need to complete the second step in the process.)

But at the same time (belt-and-suspenders guy that I am), I kept sending a daily email to myself in the hopes that Comcast would self-heal. Which is exactly what happened day before yesterday.

On Sunday, my email to myself went through and showed up in my Inbox.

Tempting the Fates, I tested by sending to some of the email groups manually yesterday and asking for confirmation of receipt. Nearly 50 readers confirmed -- thank you! -- and I believed I had witnessed a miracle.

Then I remembered my mother and the bathtub Madonna, and I could just hear her voice in my head: 'You dope! Your email is back because the election is over. Forget about this miracle stuff!'

Mother always was good with advice.

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-- Dan Damon

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