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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.
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
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
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 )
"My bad."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
(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.
"what does this button do?"
-NOOOOOO!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
...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.