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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.
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.
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.
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
No, they specifically say that 50% of the 700 GB is spam and 48% is read mail. Which leaves 2% for unread non-spam mail (14 GB).
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I haven't had any problem with plus.net in the past three years - connection speed has always been good, tech support reasonably helpful (not just reading from a script) and I've had maybe 12 hours downtime total in those three years, mostly late at night back when they did a round of network upgrades.
They give you a static IP and don't mind if you run a mail/web server on it - my local website was Slashdotted, maxing out my upstream bandwidth for a couple of days and they didn't complain.
But then, I was with Demon before them, so maybe I've just had my standards permanently lowered.
Who would people suggest as an alternative UK ISP if Plus.net's quality is dropping?
The 'To' field in the header has nothing to do with who the email is actually sent to.
sad, but true.
Ok; yes, 99% of the time the To header is correct, but it doesn't actually have to be and many types of email don't populate it with the user information.
Are you sure you want to trust that email ment for you doesn't get sent to other users?