Slashdot Mirror
UK ISP PlusNet Accidentally Deletes 700GB of Email
steste writes "A tale of email woe for PlusNET ISP. According to this announcement they have spent the last month attempting to recover 700GB of accidentally deleted emails. By their estimates, up to 12GB of these had yet to be read by their recipients. Despite the efforts of a data recovery specialist, they have now given up on recovering any of the deleted data.
Well that's one way to deal with spam." Spam is one thing; I just wonder how inevitable losses like this one square with the EU-wide data retention laws.
Yeah, right!
On the plus side, that's 699GB of spams nobody will have to worry about now.
Where were you when the voynix came?
My inbox will say, nothing to see here. Move along.
and got
404: The requested URL (hardware/06/08/03/1319220.shtml) was not found.
Looks like PlusNet aren't the only ones losing things!
I'm here all night, try the veal.
Summation 2
This happened a while ago now.
As a Plus.net customer I'm lucky that my e-mails and/or support tickets weren't affected. It was a silly error that I'm surprised a disaster recovery protocol didn't manage to resurect. It seemed that they went straight to the HDD recovery people instead of a cabinet of tapes.
Sounds like they should be handing out monthly credits to accounts left right and centre.
...
1. Call
2. Claim they lost an important email (True? Irrelevent, they don't have any record! But for the sake of arguement...)
3. Get free month(s) of service...
4.
5. Profits (unless you did have some valuable email that costs you more than the $40 of internet credit you just got)
I'd be pissed if, say, Google possibly deleted some unread mail, and I'd never know if I was missing out.
Grrrrrrr.
What?
"oops" is spelled "t-h-a-n-k g-o-d f-o-r u-n-e-m-p-l-o-y-m-e-n-t b-e-n-e-f-i-t-s"
If you haven't foed me yet, what are you waiting for?
I imagine that if this sort of thing were to happen in the U.S., the government would get involved real quick. Not, you know, because some subscribers got hurt, but because all of those precious, precious terrorist communications that were lost forever, dooming the Fort Worth Convention Center to premature destruction at the hands of an angry Palestian truck driver.
Or maybe this can't happen in the U.S. at all. Maybe there's some quiet deal where large ISPs can simply back their data up on blade servers in Langley...
This is the final update, they have NOT been able to recover the data.
If you read you post, they were calling in the recovery speciallists to try and get it back.
They failed, its game over for recovering anything.
liqbase
Data retention laws do not facilitate or even mandate data retention, nor are they designed to. All they say is that when (not even if) you lose, misplace or destroy data, the government will come and kick your butt into next Sunday. Which is what shall now unfold.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
But I know people who use email accounts as a repository for their online lives. Gmail is encouraging this attitude, of course. Now I think Google is probably a little more responsible, but it does give one pause.
Now, for that unread email, that just sucks eggs for those poor people...
Dark Reflection
. . . for all the pr0n that didn't get seen from that!
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
This is another reason why PlusNet sucks. The main reason being they suck. Seriously, since they bought out Metronet the quality of service (on Metronet) has degraded incredibly. Time to switch.
If the files were only accidentaly deleted and this was noticed in a timely manner, why would it be so damn diffacult to recover the files. I've seen data recovered from a hard drive that was on fire! (not while they were recovering the data :P )
Shh! You insensitive clod! Some of us need that spam...how else are we supposed to maintain powerful erections with that "s3xy b@by"!
Deleted emails? It obviously didn't run linux...ah no wait, hang on.
>>>Scanning for I.D.I.O.T.S. >>>
>>>I.D.I.O.T.S. FOUND! >>>
I'm glad I forced my family to switch to Gmail *strokes Gmail* because we just happen to be on PlusNet...
"My bad."
ISP Accidentally Deletes 700GB of Email
I just wonder how inevitable losses like this one square with the EU-wide data retention laws.
Well, since it was an accident... wait, or was it?
I administer an Exchange email server for a small company. On average 60% of all our mail is spam and it adds up to several MB of spam per user per week. If users don't make a daily effort to delete spam, it does fill the email storage. Spam is more than annoying, it costs money in storage and processing. You may laugh at the ISP's problem but I have had to manually delete email from user's accounts when they would process their spam. Yes, we have a professional server spam filter, and it works for 99.8% of the time.
Here's the break down:
Summation 2
According to this posting at ADSLGuide (which might be the text found at one of the links in the announcement linked to above), the initial problem was exacerbated by the technician trying to create a new volume of the same size as the one he had just deleted. This left a load of orphaned i-nodes on the second and third volumes. http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=& Board=plusnet&Number=2600008
The company I work for offers email services to our clients. We've had hardware failures of course, but then we also have our backups so that in the worst case you're going to lose a day (or whatever it is) of mail. So where were the backups in this case? Sure, it costs money to backup mail... but having seen the reaction from businesses when a day of mail is lost, I'd hate to be in the firing line if we lost more than that.
Or am I missing the point and actually 700gb of mail was just one day?
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
I've been with PlusNet for years, and they were a pretty good ISP until a few months ago. Since then, we've had a string of problems, of which this is only the latest.
I've had my broadband connection out more than on for weeks at a time, for a start. This in itself is inexcusable. What's even more inexcusable is telling me I had to accept a significant penalty charge if they escalated the fault to my telephone service provider (BT) and they found no fault -- which doesn't sound unreasonable, until you know that the fault was evident using nothing but PlusNet-supplied hardware plugged into a BT-installed phone socket, with no complications whatsoever, and that PlusNet had already indicated that they themselves couldn't diagnose a fault. This was a total loss of service for hours at a time, several days a week, remember.
On top of that, they decided to forcibly upgrade everyone to "up to 8MB" broadband recently. The ethics of using that term are dubious at best: it's only for downloading; the highest recorded speeds off-peak are more like 5-6; and at peak times you'll be lucky to get more than 1-2. Moreover, they acknowledged ahead of time that there would be significant disruption (for weeks, not hours) to each customer after the upgrade, they said they wouldn't confirm when any given customer was being upgraded (so no idea whether the problems I had were to do with this or some more general issue, then) and they said some customers' performance would actually drop but they wouldn't revert the change if this happened. They had so many problems with this that they have now suspended/abandoned the process, and sent a grovelling e-mail message to their customers.
Their tech support people have also been completely over-run, partly due to inadequate resources and partly due to their own incompetence (e.g., they totally failed to read a note I'd helpfully left on their system for them clarifying a question they always ask, and asked the question in boilerplate form anyway). To add insult to injury, they've changed their phone system in ways that have repeatedly broken, and now mean you go through several layers of automated menus before talking to a real person. Yes, they really did tell me at one stage that if I was experiencing broadband connectivity faults, I could find more information on their web site.
And now, of course, we have the e-mail fiasco. It's not the first big e-mail problem: I've recently had legitimate and important messages from the sysadmins of another service I use being bounced because they "contained a virus". (Not according to the other service, whose admins I know and trust, nor according to one well-respected intermediate service that was involved in forwarding the mail.) Moreover, this occurred even when I disabled virus checking for incoming e-mail; they were blocking incoming messages to me against my explicit instructions. Oh, and their new webmail system is poor in functionality and so bug-ridden that you can actually lose data. Some of this, in particular an arbitrary time-out for composing mails using webmail, was regarded as a feature when I asked the support staff about it!
I don't know what's happened to PlusNet. Perhaps they have simply been victims of their own success, after getting very positive comments for years (they were widely regarded as one of the best ISPs in the UK for a while) and a consequent boost in custom? In any case, the mighty have well and truly fallen, and I (along with many other people I know) am currently investigating alternatives as a matter of urgency.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I feel sorry for the guy who accidentally erased the array, and equally sorry for the people whose data was lost, but these things will happen. Just a couple of months ago, I myself had to dig through a few years worth of backups, because when I transferred abpout 100GB of files from one array to another under Mac OS X Server, I forgot to use the "ditto -rsrc" command, rather than "cp -Rp". Oops. All of the metadata for the files was lost. Not an unrecoverable situation, but it still cost me thousands of dollars in unbillable hours to correct the problem. You can be sure I won't be making the same mistake again, as I am sure the person who fracked the PlusNet system will more than likely never make an equivalent error.
It just goes to show, for PlusNet's customers, that electronic systems cannot be fully trusted, even when and if multiple instances of the data exist. We can approach an approximation of 100% reliability, but we can't ever fully eliminate the possibility of data loss, especially when human error is involved.
Another time in an incident that is mostly unrelated to the topic at hand but makes for a good story, I had a customer who lost their array in a PC server. The machine had an array of full height HDDs that would get so hot within five minutes of power up that you couldn't touch them without gloves. To top it off, the tape drive mechanism that was supposedly backing up the system was sitting directly above the arrary, with a backup job that had been running over and over nightly on the same cartridge for over two years (so you can be certain the tape was useless).
It took about three weeks, but I was eventually able to recover all the data on the array (so far as we were able to determine at the time).
They should just ask the NSA to send their copies of the emails to PlusNet.
Heck, the NSA could turn this into a side business. If they spin it right, maybe they can convince the general public that they're not spying, they're just providing a cutting-edge data backup service!
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
As a BOFH I regularly delete 5-10 gigs of mail a day when users ask me for more space. After all... they DID ask me for more space, so I gave it to them. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Besides, it always mystifies me that people who feel that their time is wasted by duplicate or outdated stories have no problem wasting more of their time, not to mention server space and the time of all the readers, posting "this has already been covered." Do you get karmic cool points for ranting (again) about (another) dupe? What's the payoff? Does it make you happy? I'm not the most fanatically efficient person out there, but it seems petty and, well, stupid to not only dwell on, but to go to the point to complain in writing about the dupe or outdated story, which actually raises the net energy and time spent on this problem that you ostensibly found so vexing. No, I'm not complaining about you, only wondering what the hell you find so moving about the whole issue. Is it just the principle? A matter of pride? Does it bode ill for humanity? What gives?
But I know people who use email accounts as a repository for their online lives. Gmail is encouraging this attitude, of course. Now I think Google is probably a little more responsible, but it does give one pause.
I store every "insecure" e-mail I get on GMail and I'm happy to delete it from my server and my mobile device knowing that it's likely going to be available via the web.
For "secure" and/or "important" e-mails, they get stored locally or on my mobile device and possibly even printed out and locked away for later retrieval. "Important" e-mails will be archived on GMail but "secure" ones never are.
I've been a PlusNet user for several years now and have nothing but praise for them. Reliable service, competitive pricing and excellent support. However, I've always used Yahoo for my email...
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Eh? Using it as a file cabinet is how it should be used!
I have every e-mail I have ever sent or received except for spam. I can't count how many times this has been useful. I don't want to waste time trying to figure out what I should keep or not, I keep it all. I do keep all of them local on my own hardware though. This allows me to protect and backup my own data.
This is just a case of a poor backup strategy causing data loss that should not have happened.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
"Hey what's this big red *Press ONLY in case of federal investigation!* button for?"
*click*
(I'm so nervous seeing that on my screen I'm afraid to hit the "Submit" button)
This is not my sandwich.
My response is 'if you don't like a thing, make a better one'. Can the complainers make a better slashdot? Hmm, let me see.
Do the abilities required for such a venture require
a) A willingness to try and realise there will be the odd piece of news that is repeated.
b)Being a Whining Biatch.
Well, if it's (b), then the whiners are for teh win. Somehow I have my doubts...
From the article:
Anyone who has inadvertently typed an 'rm -rf' should now feel a bit better.
I do wonder whether this will cause people (and companies) to re-evaluate the growing popularity and hence reliance on web-based email. Myself, I don't go near it. Leaving the reliability concerns, and ignoring the historically bad reputation of services such as Hotmail, the spammy footers and similarly badly formatted garbage that users of web-based email end up sending everyone else, I can't fathom why it's so difficult for someone simply to log in remotely to a server that their company manages, or their own box at home. I hear you can even use those same tubes to do it.
This incident makes for a good argument, but my guess is that people will want to continue use their browsers for everything and similarly continue to rely on companies they think they know.
The story should properly reflect that. It currently is phrases as a "just happened" event.
"what does this button do?"
-NOOOOOO!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If they've got the e-mails why not just re-queue it? Surely the "To" field is a bit of a give-away.
Spam Filter
Filter with 0% Tolerance
Are you absolutely sure?
[ok] [cancel]
Here's what PlusNet has to say about the incident. Pretty nonchalant about the whole thing if you ask me. I wonder if they are crediting individual users who claim serious loss?
...I don't recall working for PlusNet.
What do you mean by "secure"? Surely you wouldn't trust anything that is a security concern with SMTP and possibly also POP3, two protocols where everything is sent plaintext.
They had all their eggs in one basket? Where's the live replica machine? Where are the redundant copies? Oh wait, this is a for-profit business. Never mind.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I guess some Nigerians will have trouble making the rent this month now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
but would it be so hard to have a "backup to CD" button on any/all email clients? I mean, all it's gotta do is store all of the data from every email in every folder in the user's inbox (be it imap or pop3) into an easy-to-read file structure of some sort (XML?), right? This isn't off-topic; the biggest reason this is "that big of a deal" is because of how incredibly un-intuitive (or, in some cases, down right near impossible) the method of email backup is. Would it really be that difficult to create a universal standard for email?
/rant
Never screw with the prodution system. Use a copy, when it works, swap it in.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I'd love to hear a podcast interview with the guy to see what he was thinking, to see if he got fired, to see if he feels sorry, etc. It would be interesting to see how such a public screwup affects a sysadmin.
Is this you?
What does the terms of service say? My guess is that they do not guarantee email storage and/or delivery.
For the 300 ISPs we do email for, we only guarantee the configuration--not the email messages themselves. Frankly, I am shocked they worked THAT hard to recover any of it. Personally, it should not be so much to ask, since these days the amount of resources we spend just trying to defend our system resources due to spam and virii.
They have gone over and above what most would do by even announcing that they were trying to recover the lost mail.
02
"Would it really be that difficult to create a universal standard..."
Yes.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Deleted emails?
Instead of "PlusNet," they should probably go for "MinusNet."
*Sigh* sometimes you've got to roll your own.
they're in the UK...if they were here in the US, they could just ask the FBI to recover the data vor them.
Pete Forsyth
Why don't they just undelete it? They could use forensic software to restore the files. I have done this for an individual who lost their wedding pics on their home PC.
Well good old Plusnet lost my website twice - first through some shoddy security and a few weeks later during a routine upgrade they lost the lot again. From their posts at the time it was clear they had taken no precautions to protect the data but they promised to learn lessons from the mistakes. I now host my website on my own hardware ( and take regular backups - including extra ones when I am performing maintenance/patching). They still need to learn about proper change control and proper backout plans instead of just winging it on they day.
But on balance there are more positives than negatives with Plusnet. They have a very good set of products and are, IMO, considerably more open and honest than most ISPs.
Fortunately, I never leave email on their servers.
Ask yourself, how long would it take to 'delete' 700GB from a RAID array? Got a number in your head? Well times it by 7 (7 passes needed to overwrite the data so its not recoverable) and you've got several days on the clock (and thats with nothing else happening on the box)
;)
So I don't believe for a second these files were deleted, its much more likly an engineer didn't get the Air Conditioning setting right and had a bonfire in a datacentre. While all the time some caring soul routinly destroying offsite backups
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
POP??? This would royally piss me off.
Erroneous email sent to 3,500 customers.
I'm a PlusNet customer, and fortunately I haven't been affected by either event.
In plusnet's explanation of the problem at http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=& Board=plusnet&Number=2600008 is a little sign that plusnet have not been quite as customer caring as they should be...
"... So, here we are, it is almost a month since the 700GB of email and mailing lists were lost and we still have no recovered data to return to you. This is of course upsetting for us, and even more so for the customers whose data has been affected. The longer we wait for the equipment to be returned to us the greater the risk we run of hitting other capacity issues that we know are ahead of us, and we do not feel that we can justify any longer a wait, and still be taking the appropriate action for our customers... "
If I had deleted 700 GB of customer email, I'd keep trying to recover it and buy replacement equipment to meet the capacity needs of the business. There shouldn't need to be a trade-off. Plusnet should keep trying to recover, and buy some more kit to look after their customers.
Why in the hell would an ISP be required to credit its users for missing e-mail? As an ISP, it irritates me that users use our mail servers as permanent file and email storage anyway. And for those who claim serious loss, PlusNet's response should be--why are you using your provider's email server as your gateway for critical information. While it has been a joke, the truth of the matter is, most of the lost email was probably spam and/or messages that was days, weeks or months old. Customers will try to demand credit, but in my most humble opinion, they don't serve it. These are the same bitching customers that will demand credit because the spam filtering process blocked a chain letter from their Auntie Sue but complain when their behavior of populating every e-mail field on every signup page for every pr0n site they visit comes back to bite them with some spam that makes it through. I can't speak for PlusNet's services, but I personally know how difficult it is to keep every Internet user happy--and when we learn that we aren't infallible I know what its like to hear the continuous stream of bitches, complaints, and demands for credit.
I currently use PlusNet, as it's the only dialup ISP I know of that lets you connect to a free (as in no phone bill) 0808 access number while not having a connection timeout - most ISPs will boot you after 1 or 2 hours. I recently received an e-mail telling me I need to sort something on the online portal, or phone the helpline. The portal directs you to the phone lines, and the phone lines disconnect you. If I knew of an alternative, I'd switch.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Hi,
Well i use plusnet as an isp. I would never however use a homebased isp for running my mail off because typically their antispam sucks (except in this case) and they charge a £50 release fee for the domain if you leave.
Currently i am however 7 weeks into tracking a ADSL fault with plusnet. Plusnet says its BT's fault. BT now say its plusnets fault. Though neither of the 2 parties involved have asked me what the fault is other than i get disconnected from the internet between 10 - 30 times a day.
When i say disconnected i meant he ADSL looses sync with the kit in the local BT exchange. So i already know its not plusnets fault. But the way its being handled by plusnet customer support is pathetic and i am unable to communicate with BT about the fault. Plusnet always have to be there in the middle.
ADSL in the uk really SUCKS !!!
Bet they wish they had Windows Vista with its default undelete feature turned on
Anyone who has inadvertently typed an 'rm -rf' should now feel a bit better.
It happens. That's why I now alias rm to echo 'rm disabled' on machines that I log into remotely. That way if I forget that I'm in an ssh window and an removing the wrong thing, nothing bad happens.
At the time of making this change the engineer had two management console sessions open - one to the backup storage system and one to live storage
This brings up the need for correct configuration. I am assuming that this is a GUI OS. If it were not, this operation would almost certainly have failed because the disk would have still been mounted. If you have multiple computers with a point-and-click OS, the name of the machine should be part of your desktop background. If you are on a text console and this sort of insanity is still possible to do accidentally without anyone noticing, you should consider a better KVM that superimposes the host name.
Another nice trick is to change the default background color of the console and xterm windows. When I maintained more than one box, on my live production machine, the console was white on red. A little hard on the eyes, but it was IMPOSSIBLE to not know that you were on a critical machine. :-) Maybe do black on a hot pink or something for more contrast. Whatever. Just so it is something that jumps out at you as "Hey, I shouldn't touch this machine unless I am extremely careful."
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Most of the e-mail in my plusnet accounts is usually the bills and annoncements from plusnet. Think most poeple like me would use their hotmail or gmail accounts . But they are a good isp. They gave me free upgrade to 8mps last month!! Sweet!!
Could someone repost http://usergroup.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,27 53.0.html. I would like to see the technical details without going through the process of registering.
Kudos to them for being open, hones, and forthcoming with the information. Not often you see someone doing that. I would love to see the after action report to see what changes they are making. Learning from a mistake like this can prevent it from happening to someone else.
uhh... my subject said it all... move along now
I do wonder whether this will cause people (and companies) to re-evaluate the growing popularity and hence reliance on web-based email. Myself, I don't go near it.
I wouldn't rely on a webmail much if it's from some random local ISP, but if it's about a company having a major part as its company profile to provide webmail, like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo!, I think you'd be pretty safe. I can't imagine these lacking some healthy amounts of redundancy as it would be devastating if e.g. Gmail suddenly crashed and Google couldn't do anything.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"But I know people who use email accounts as a repository for their online lives."
I guess it was just a simpler time, but somehow I kept a pretty prolific archive for about 7 years in my 2MB Hotmail quota. Microsoft had bought the service not long before they performed a bunch of maintenance, added features, and imposed downtimes every so often. On one occasion they were performing an upgrade but provided limited functionality in the interim. I took the opportunity to do a little housecleaning, deleting unneeded archived email and contacts.
When Hotmail returned to full functionality all my old mail and contacts were gone. Kaput. I emailed their customer service department who replied surprisingly quickly, saying that because I had modified content in my account during maintenance they were not able to recover any of my data. Even my filtering and sorting preferences had been lost.
What else could I do? I shrugged it off and got on with my life. It really sucked losing that nice email from happy hardcore DJ Anabolic Frolic though.
The PlusNet site explains why it has taken so long to (not) sort things out. The screw-up involved a Sun NAS device which runs on StorageTek's proprietary operating system which meant data recovery experts had to alter the tools they usually use. Other than the weird operating system it said the biggest problem was caused by the unfortunate engineer's first attempt to fix the original mistake. The engineer tried to recover the data by creating a volume of the same size, and in the same place, as the first volume - "an old sysadmin trick", PlusNet tells us. But the system uses the first volume to create a master inode - essentially a map of where all the other data is kept. Because this was deleted, finding the rest of the data in the second and third volumes is very difficult. They did get some information back from these other volumes but without the master inode it is all but impossible to tell which emails belong to who. Within three hours the Sun NAS was on its way to data recovery specialists. A statement on the PlusNet website claims that half of the email was spam and that 48 per cent of it had already been read - leaving just one or two per cent of actual deleted unread email.
Given PN's current and recent problems all I can say is a number of people have left PN recently (a number? more like a flood...)
Hotmail, on the other hand, purposely deleted the contents of everybody's sent mail folders a few years back, and I do not recall any apology or attempt to recover data....
Prolog rules
And in Risks Digest on July 20!
As a former PlusNet customer, this news makes me feel quite Schadenfreude.
During my subscription they decided that "unlimited" meant bandwidth-throttling during peak hours which completely crippled some network applications including bittorrent.
When one of their competitors (Carphone Warehouse) announced they would offer free ADSL Broadband with cell phone contracts, PlusNet's share price plummeted http://uk.ichart.yahoo.com/z?s=PNT.L&t=1y&q=l&l=of f&z=m&a=v&p=s, which brought a smile to my face.
PlusNet have had been doing badly for the last year. They announced a fair use policy, cancelled it because the monitoring software wasn't ready and reinstated it months later. Their monitoring software invented a 56 day month a few weeks ago that caused many people, myself included, to go overquota and have usage restrictions imposed. Fortunately, it took only a few days to resolve.
I'd rather that PN had come clean and said the data centre melted rather than some ID10T did rm -rf / on the mailsever ;)
:) (I did luckly and only lost a couple of minor edits to one or two scripts).
And as for backups when the cgi server melted down PN firmly and squarely put the responsiblity for backups on the user not themselves... then when the new server zapped itself as well same again - sorry everyone has lost everything but you'll have backups
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
80% of the Norwegian banks went offline for a week when a technitian did the exact same thing.
I think it took them two weeks to recover everything, but they managed to eventually.
I'm inclined to wonder if the guy lost his job and left the country...
Everyone makes mistakes - I'm a generous guy, so this is what I figured when they deleted all my mail (I'm a Force9 customer. PlusNet took them over a few years ago, and have kept the brand alive to trade on Force9's once-great reputation).
A few weeks after, though, they sent me an email containing the personal information of 20,000 of their customers, myself included. The data had been accidentally sent to 3,499 other folks, too. Not bank account data, but email addresses. So I don't know about data retention laws, but they certainly have a pretty lax attitude to data protection laws.
It's times like this that I'm glad that I use offlineimap:
* http://freshmeat.net/projects/offlineimap/
This is an excellent script for syncing your computer with an external imap account. Works incredibly well with Mutt.
Also, email readers like Thunderbird have an offline setting that allows you to create a copy of your mail on your dekstop.
I agree with you in principle (not fully in practice in that I do clean up old cruft after X years, except for folders containing data with a special financial or emotional importance, but that's another issue).
But the parent poster has a valid point "in disguise". Because a normal human being has no control over what happens to his/her data stored at an ISP or, worse, the ISP as a whole, they should not use it as their filing cabinet. My e-mail filing cabinet sits here right in front of me, on my own disk where only I can read it. My daily level 1 backup is within reach - but on purpose unconnected - for emergencies, and my level 2 backup is stored at my father's house on a monthly basis.
We ordinary users get told all the time that we need to make backups like the pros do, but this incident is a perfectly good example of the pros not having proper backup procedures. And even if they do have them, imagine asking a typical ISP helpdesk for a restore of a single 1 year old message that you deleted by accident at unspecified moment more than 8 weeks ago... I've once had a sysadmin at work give me weird looks because of something similar, and he didn't anywhere near get to manage the amount of data that any semi-serious ISP does. Eventually he did satisfy the request, but partly because I happened to be in a postion of power and could have make life rather difficult for him.
Linux user since early January 1992.
There are both POP3-ssl and SMTP-ssl protocols, though they aren't commonly used it's possible the PDA+ISP might be using them. Many ISP's also use webmail, which if served on an https page generally only uses IMAP as the backend (loopback port) and is fairly secure as far as https goes...
Problem exists between keyboard and chair?
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
This is why, after changing settings server-side and rebooting a client (and several times the server by accident) I moved my reboot/shutdown commands and put a stub in that required you to type:
:-)
"shutdown NAMEOFMACHINE"
A little more typing, but a lot less accidental reboots
I'm the same way. I've had to import it and move it between several clients, and it's all sorted into archived folders by year, but my email file goes back to 1997, and contains every email that I've sent or received since then. I have backup jobs that periodically compress that data and upload it to my webspace, and even more frequently copy it to a different drive in the computer (as the most likely method of failure will be an actual drive, not some catastrophe that wipes out my whole physical machine).
It is really nice to be able use the tools inside the email program to search for something based on subject, sender, recipient, etc. I end up using it far more often than I'd expect just digging out old information.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Well, 90+% can be probably be recovered by just copying all the spam that their other users got.
I would like to lodge a complaint about the people who complain about the people complaining about dupes. Dupes will never stop. People complaining about dupes will never stop. People complaining about people complaining about dupes will never stop. And as of today, people complaining about people complaining about people complaining about dupes will never stop.
So stop wasting my valuable time!!
The bad news is, we lost 700GB of email. The good news is, all but 40K of it was spam.
Can you hear me now? Hello?
Well, that serves me right for relying on IMAP. My logic at the time was this:
The charity I work for are too tight to buy an external backup hard drive no matter how much I stress to the management team that ALL of their crucual data could be lost in the blink of an eye. I'm not going to buy one myself, as I've already donated my old PC as a server. So I'd rather rely on the ISP to back up all the emails. After all, they're a service provider right? All service providers have the sense to make backups?
Fair to say I'll be switching to another provider as soon as humanly possible. Plus.net are a disgrace. I'd sooner be on AOL.
It's just that the Girlfriend (62 elite) doesn't allow more than 1 computer sitting in her painstakingly decorated living-room/museum, and still I think she allows it because it's a Mac ;)
I used to live in a geek-den with some friends, server room, dedicated SAN array, yadda yadda... great geek environment, but not very female-friendly, alas!
A couple of my work colleagues are plusnet customers and I actually remember them talking about this when it first happened. Apparently Plusnet conducted some sort of upgrade allowing their techies to log in to two different sessions at the same time which before they never allowed. Anyway, one techie got confused, thought he closed the session to the live server. Then clicked to log into the backup.
Then went and browsed the web or somthing, then came back and clicked on what he thought was the backup and deleted everything. The announcement said he realised his mistake almost immediately but by then their raid array was bussily emptying itself and this fuckup was instantly being duped across all disks.
I have made similar mistakes and the moral seems to be:
Only use a root account when you absolutely NEED it and nothing else will do, the rest of the time just have a few different accounts with different priviledge levels.
I dont read
You are right, although I omitted a part, in fear of being modded down by the Mac zealots roaming here but..
I used to do my backups through scp from the server to my powerbook and the powerbook fried two weeks prior to the pc...
Are you happy now, there goes my karma!
$500 is a lot cheaper than telling my wife that her iPhoto album is gone forever.
But I'm still young, and as they say Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
They lost just about everything a few years back but this was down to general ineptitude on behalf of Sun's engineers.
However - I don't think they back anything up - and the contract absolves them of the need to do so. They lost the cotents of the web server (crofters.plusnet.co.uk) a few months ago too. Happily for me, the actual content of my web site was in their MySQL server on a seperate box (humbug.plusnet.net).
I wouldn't trust them (or any ISP) to store anything important for me - retrieve your email to a local server.
PlusNET are more geek friendly than most ISPs though - they were perhaps the first ISP in the UK to just let you telnet (now SSH) to the web server, upload binaries (it's a Linux server) and generally just "do it yourself". No support or fancy control panels - just "here's the server, and here's your bit of it - do your stuff". They do have the fancy control panel thingies now, but you can still just SSH to the box. This why I still use them - I can build all my stuff on my own LAMP environemnt and then replicate it to theirs.
Of course these days there's no shortage of hosting outfits that will rent you a server (or virtual server) but PlusNET do this for little more than the price of the connection. Just don't expect any backups!
echo "alias rm=\"echo Your fired\!\"" >> /etc/skel/.bashrc
10,000 USD could provide triple-redundant backup for 700GB of data. Come on now.
A lot of users don't care how big their e-mail boxes grow; they can grow 1gig, 2gigs and even more if you don't cap them. Not only that but these same users subscribe to all their IMAP folders which means they will always pull down all these folders down to their personal computer.
...
If you got users who don't watch their own mailbox it will grow till it'll burst or get very very VERY slow. Go imagine; a company of 10-15 users having mailboxes at our server; all of them having growing mailboxes. It'll be slow, unhandy and unhappy too.
Capping is the only way; 250-500Mb is a normal limit; 750 is already over and 1 to 2gig is for most users suicide. You expect more? Well do that 100x and then talk again. Google might be doing the good way but they got their own infrastructure based for e-mail; they got the servers and they got the booze
There is still a lot of responsibility; if you don't empty your snailmail box it will get full and no other mail will be able to be put in that mailbox; same thing for e-mail; users need to get responsible for what they want to keep and what they need to throw away; which will make the e-mail world already a better place.
Add spam to this; which can be 20-25% of the overhead and the picture is complete.
I've just had my mailbox totally inaccessible because I had 2 weeks an eye infection; I was free on doctors recommendation; didn't check my mailbox; after 3 weeks I had continuesly problems accessing my INBOX because it was just too full. And yes; I've got mailscanner + razor + spamassassin installed on my servers.
E-mail is NOT a storage space or a file cabinet; if you want to store e-mail you better back-it-up or store it locally in local folders; because e-mail is not made for such big boxes.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Well I wasn't hosted by FN, but thats just gravy!
"Sorry, we've deleted all your e-mails and CGI, we didn't keep backups, if you havn't either, then you've lost all your stuff"
Then the next server came up and went down and you guys are left with:
"Well, again no backups, you really should have learnt from the last time guys!"
The only thing i'd learn is to change providers asap.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Alot of us did learn and did leave.
Sad: PN used to be a very good isp.
Oh well, nothing remains the same good companies go bad and die.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.