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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!
My inbox will say, nothing to see here. Move along.
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
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
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.
...I don't recall working for PlusNet.