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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.
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
Indeed. Plusnet never accept any responsibility for their screw-ups (at least not if it will cost them anything). They're currently refusing to accept responsibility for their subcontractors' incompetience cauign lots of their customers to lose broadband for over a month.
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.
That's why I like to run my OWN email server...I can make sure my backups work, and if it fails, I have only myself to blame.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I lost about a thousand emails (I had read most of them, thankfully, only really lost-lost about 20-30, many non-critical) a few months ago because back-ups also failed. I guess that's what I get for doing webmail instead of downloading to an actual client. Oh well, wasn't really my fault. And to be honest I'm not sure I trust the report about back-ups failing. I suspect they didn't have any. At least now I'm back to using a client, where I can do my own back-ups locally.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
I ran my own local imap store + fetchmail from my ISP + a very nice backup scheme (scp=>powerbook)
Then one day, I lost several hard drives in one go (storm). Last week backups were corrupted, had to roll back to 2 weeks backups. I lost 400 mails, my gf lost about 10 mails.
It's been six months, now I forward everything to several gmail/yahoo accounts, do a local backup of thunderbird's mboxes, and scp the backups to two different machines.
To this day, I still can hear the screams from my One And Deareast Female User when I cry myself to sleep.
Bottom line:
- If you are single, yeah, host your server, it's fun, you learn a lot of stuff.
- If you are not, paranoïa should be part of your base skillset.