IT tweets its way off of spam blacklist

After five days of being “blacklisted” from Comcast e-mail users, one thing helped restore the cmich.edu e-mail accounts – Twitter.

“Someone’s account got compromised, they sent out a bunch of spam e-mail to a bunch of places, Comcast wound up blocking CMU,” said Jeff McDowell, Information Technology Help Desk manager.

On April 4, a Central Michigan University student’s e-mail account was hacked into and after the spam was sent out, Comcast, a Michigan-based television and Internet provider, blocked all cmich.edu e-mail accounts.

The tweet that solved the problem was sent out by Information Technology Communications Manager Duane Kleinhardt on April 8 at 3:20 p.m. It stated “Cmich.edu e-mail is being blocked by Comcast. Call (989) 774-3662 for more info.”

“(Kleinhardt) posted something on Twitter, and within an hour they were calling us to get the problem fixed,” McDowell said.

Usually, IT would just explain to the company that they had a compromised account, McDowell said. Five days after contacting Comcast, the traditional communication methods had not yielded any results, so IT tried a different means of communication.

Kleinhardt said all universities have been affected by this glitch and many times it can be difficult to get providers to respond in a timely fashion to the blacklisting. Because most students are not Comcast customers, finding a solution to the problem is not high priority.

“It’s just a matter of getting a hold of the right person at the company,” McDowell said.

“The real takeaway from the Twitter story is that the issue was resolved very quickly through the social networking,” Kleinhardt said.

Mary Beth Halprin, vice president of public relations and community affairs for Comcast for the Michigan sales area, said they regularly monitor the social network Web sites for people’s opinions of Comcast.

“We do this to check in with customers that are reaching out through these networks,” she said.

university@cm-life.com