Comcast disabled port 25 mail on our business account

We have a business account at home. I work enough from home that I can easily justify it. Fixed IP, and I run services, mostly to back up my office services. One of those services is SMTP. I’ve been running an SMTP server, complete with antispam/antivirus/… for years. Handles backup for some domains, but is also primary for this site. This is allowable on business accounts. Or it was allowable. 3 days ago, they seem to have turned that off. My wife noted that mail had … stopped. So I started looking into it. Checked the firewall, checked the server. Tried telneting into the mail port. Nothing. Tried the same thing within the firewall. Worked. Tried with a machine outside of the firewall, but before the cable modem. Worked. At this stage in the story, gentle reader, you will have to imagine me shaking my head in disbelief. Again. ISPs, as a general rule, are evil, with rare exceptions. I want a wire, a dumb stinking wire. I don’t need any other security outside of my perimeter, I handle that stuff just fine. I need speed, I need reliability. I just need a damned wire. I don’t need a nanny ISP telling me what ports I can and cannot have open. Thankfully, there is an easy solution for this, and I’ve been slowly working in that direction for a while. Move our dns and mail service into a cloud machine. So I spent time, between walking the dog, making coffee, making breakfast, doing just that. I had forgotten how wonderful setting up postfix is (it isn’t), especially our deep spam/virus filtering pipeline (not fun at all). Still have a few minor issues to iron out, but now the mail system is back, and its coupled with the dns system I wanted to setup anyway. And I used SSLmate to get some new certs for the email while I was at it. I can easily see Comcast doing the same thing on port 80 or 443 in the future. So we are likely going to have to disaggregate more of our infrastructure and move it external to our site. All I want is a dumb fast wire. Too bad Google Fibre won’t be showing up around here. But I bet I couldn’t use that for business either. One would think, that with the advent of the cloud universe, that there would be demand for dumb fast wires.