Cox: no more new email addresses

A few days ago Cox disabled email address account creation for their domain.

image of a tombstone with a crow and the letters R I P on it.
In recent years, fewer customers have taken advantage of a Cox Email account, so we decided to modify our email service to better serve our customers. As of August 15, 2019, Cox no longer offers the ability for new and existing Cox Internet customers to create new Cox Email accounts.

Customers with Cox Email accounts created prior to August 15, 2019, will continue to receive support for those email accounts. Cox Email Creation Policy

This doesn’t surprise me. In the work I do for clients I’m seeing fewer and fewer @cox.net email addresses in their lists.

Let’s face it, consumer email is hard and expensive to do well. Filters are tough to get right and the incoming threats are always changing. The free mailbox providers spend a lot of resources developing and maintaining services.

On the consumer end, there’s not a lot to like about an email address tied to your broadband provider. Move out of the providers’ area, and you lose access to that email address. Having an email address that is independent of your internet access means you can move across the country or across the world and still have the same address.

For senders, this shouldn’t change much about how you’re managing email address. It does mean that you can expect the number of cox.net addresses to slowly decrease over time, probably eventually falling to zero.

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Earlier today, Tom Bartel, from Return Path tweeted: “We pinged them – likely error -they are on it – keep an eye on the FCC listing for an update.”
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Everyone can stop panicking now.
Yes, Cox did stop accepting new applications for their FBL. They were swamped and overwhelmed with applications and had quite a significant backlog. One of my clients got caught in this backlog. I applied for them back in mid-October and they were just approved last week.
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554 IMP a.b.c.d blocked.  IPBL100 – Refer to Error Codes section at http://postmaster.cox.net for more information.
I spoke with one of the folks at Cox and they said there was an error in the implementation causing non-listed IPs to be rejected erroneously between about 4am to 8am (Eastern) this morning.  The problem has been resolved as of 8am, and all traffic is flowing  normally.  The also stated that attempts to resend any blocked messages will succeed. They do apologize for any problems this may have caused.
For those of you with aggressive bounce handling, removing addresses after a single 550 bounce, you will also want to re-enable any cox.net subscribers that bounced off during this configuration problem.

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