Sorry, no virtual ribbon, but here's a Stupid Award for Comcast, for their recent mishandling of my email account.

About a week ago they changed how I needed to connect to their outgoing mail server, without bothering to let me know in advance (stupid #1).
When I first asked about why I couldn't send any mail, their first response was that I must have a virus - apparently they didn't both to read my message (stupid #2).
After (finally) learning what they changed, and changing my settings to match, I noticed some odd non-fatal error messages in my mail logs, so I asked about them. This got the strangest response yet, including “With regard to your concern, this issue is very delicate and requires a security verification process” (stupid #3). As I said to them, “Huh? Being able to send email without incurring errors is a delicate issue?”

So for that, Comcast gets a Stupid Award.

In case anyone else has similar problems, here's some detail about my setup: I'm running all of my outgoing email through Exim 4, running on PLD Linux, routing all outgoing mail through smtp.comcast.net. The original change that broke my previous Exim configuration was Comcast switching to submit on port 587 with authentication (a good change, but they should have announced it). After changing my exim.conf for that, I was getting errors 421 Too many sessions opened. These seems to be Comcast's rules about sending email:

1. use smtp.comcast.net:587 with authentication (TLS is optional, at least for now)
2. don't send more than 1,000 messages per day
3. don't send more than 10 messages per connection
4. don't make multiple simultaneous connections

Having made everything work, these are the relevant parts of my exim.conf:

• Routers:

  send_to_gateway:
        driver = manualroute
        domains = !+local_domains
        headers_add = X-routed-by: send_to_gateway router on $primary_hostname ($local_part@$domain)
        transport = remote_smtp
        route_list = * smtp.comcast.net::587 byname
        cannot_route_message = Local Domain or Gateway Rejected ($local_part@$domain)

• Gateways:

  remote_smtp:
        driver = smtp
        hosts_require_auth = smtp.comcast.net
        serialize_hosts = smtp.comcast.net
        connection_max_messages = 10

• Authenticators:

  comcast:
        driver = plaintext
        public_name = LOGIN
        client_send = : $username : $password