Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

UK ISP PlusNet Accidentally Deletes 700GB of Email

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the reality-is-no-excuse-dammit dept.

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.

4 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Welcome to three weeks ago by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 :: faster than paper
  2. That's not what the laws are for by Yurka · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  3. Spam is heavy by andrewzx1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Technical details by alanxyzzy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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