Slashdot Mirror
EarthLink Is Losing a Lot of Email
LandGator writes "Robert X. Cringely, doyen compu-columnist for PBS, reports on a hidden e-mail problem at Earthlink: They're losing up to 9 messages out of 10, found as a result of a friend's testing." From the article: "He sent messages from other accounts to his Earthlink address, to his aliased Blackberry address, and to his Gmail account. For every 10 messages sent, 1-2 arrived in his Earthlink mailbox, 1-2 (not necessarily the SAME 1-2) on his Blackberry, and all 10 arrived with Gmail. Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink's mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn't bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn't mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain."
However, it was via email.
Is earthlink hosting slashdot?!
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Less spam. Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
This sort of thing is the reason I host my own e-mail. At least this way I usually know when it's broken, and I have the opportunity to fix it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
E-mail should never be lost! We had an issue where I work with e-mail BACKING UP for a few months while we implimented new mail servers... but no mail was ever lost.. it either got bounced back (not usually) or would arrive several hours after it was sent. To actually LOOSE e-mail indicates that Earthlink is ACCEPTING the mail and then DUMPING it!!!! When our servers were overloaded, we just rejected the connection, until the mail server could handle more mail.. and then we accepted it.
Except those that send emails to a verizon account, the email simply disappears. It has to do with certain servers sending the email. Is there some kind of blocking going on there?
I checked their mailservers (what the MX record reports anyway), and they have a very generic ESMTP banner, not really apparent which MTA they use. I want to know which MTA can lose mail because of overload. So I can avoid it like the plague. I do know for a fact that Sendmail and Postfix send a 4xx error if mail cannot be spooled for delivery (for whatever reason), allowing the sending MX to retry at a later time. There is absolutely NO excuse for a mailserver dropping mail like that.
This isn't a free webmail account, this is something customers pay for. Some people could have lost a lot of business. And what if someone has been searching for a job for the last 6 months and their monster.com etc contact info has only this email address?
Well if Earthlink subscribers only recieve 2 out of every 10 emails, does that mean they only get one for V1AGRA!! and another for C1AL1S!!, or is it slightly more diverse than that?
This is my signature. There are many like it but this one is mine.
My luck, the one email this chick got from me, was the one with me telling her off for not answering the other 9.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
2) I didn't know Cringely was still around.
If it hadn't been for the reference to GMail, I'd be wondering if this story had been sitting in the queue since 1998. Now, off to buy some LNUX shares, and one of those Tommy Hilfiger straps to hang my keys around my neck!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Maybe we should let Earthlink handle the worlds' email, at least it would put a dent in the recent uptick in spam.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
I run an online retail business, and non-tech savy customers using earthlink don't get a lot of our email.
Biggest problem is that Earthlink uses a white-list spam blocking setup that sends back a time-limited challenge to the sender ("Please go to this link and fill in this form so that this user can receive your mail").
We get these challenges when our automated system sends messages to customers
- Roach
Latest dropped message:
I'd sign up for it in a minute.
... an Earthlink representative said that he had received no notice of any email problems. Next question please.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
My guess is that they're getting pummelled by spam, and weren't keeping up fast enough with new hardware. From anecdotal evidence, it appears that the recent increase in spam has been hell on many ISPs, which is why you're seeing ever more pervasive measures to bounce or absorb the stuff before it starts hitting their actual mail servers. "Buy more mail servers" isn't always a great solution, and it's sure as hell a more expensive one than trying to just decrease that spam before it hits your mail servers by filtering.
(All my remarks are personal opinion, and are not representative of my employer in any way, shape, or form.)
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
...their tubes are clogged!
I used to work for a hosting company (a pretty shitey one at that). They refused to update their mail systems so all customers had email issues. They used an old customized version of SendMail on the Linux box's. The problem, the queues were getting full and either locking the mail up or raising the machine's processes up so it could no longer do anything. The solution, delete the mail off the server and kill all processes. This was a temporary solution that turned into a permanent one because "It worked." The problem was, the mail was gone when it happened so all the tech support guys had to hear the poo poo mad customers.
I would wager thats whats going on here and they don't want to admit it. There is some admin there (or it could be company policy) that see's alot of mail getting queued up but not being delivered but instead of fixing the problem he just deletes the mail and everything's fine.
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
I have a vanity domain, and I run a mail server on a VPS. I have things set up to forward my email to both a POP3 account provided by my ISP and to gmail. Every now and then, I'll have an email that makes it to gmail but never shows up in my POP3 account. The ratio isn't anything close to what's reported in the article, though -- I think it happens once in several thousand emails.
I'm not posting my ISP here because I haven't done a rigourous test, and don't want to accuse anyone unfairly with estimated numbers. It's a big cable provider, and it's not Earthlink.
and he just piped the e-mail to /dev/null. All that e-mail was taking up too much disk space, anyways.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
...a precipitous drop in the amount of spam they have received.
Loading...
Except in the summary is actually said 1-2 messages got through in some cases. 1 in 10 is 9/10 missing. So at least in one case it was literally 9 out of 10 times. Stop being a douche.
Stop sending email! The tubes are clogged!
Its a self fulfilling profacy.
The email isn't working so you test it by sending 10 at a time?
Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice, thats like noticing google is fucked and opening 10 browser windows at once.
So of fucking course they are having problems because all these "researchers" are hammering their systems 24/7.
liqbase
The url for the blog entry is: http://kiloseven.blogspot.com/2006/12/got-earthlin k-got-mail-no-they-lost-it.html
Generally when you're stating statistics like "up to 9 out of 10", that means that in at least one your test runs, whatever it was you were testing hit 9 out of 10 times, in this case the fact that Earthlink lost e-mails. You say "up to 9 out 10," because in other runs it may have been 1 out of 10, 3 out of 10, or 7 out of 10. You're trying to show that how bad it gets. When stating the statistic for useful statistical purposes, however, one should definitely also give averages, like: "overall Earthlink lost 50%". Now, in this case, Cringely actually states that his friend tried several times to send messages a block of 10 messages to Earthlink account, to an aliased Blackberry account, and to his Gmail account. Each time, Only 1-2 made it to the Earthlink and to the Blackberry (aliased off the Earthlink account), and all 10 made it to Gmail.
My blog
Parent is +4 insightful? Wtf? The quote specifically says the average was 8-9 lost. Parent is implying that maybe only 1 was lost for the most part, or something similar.
C'mon, can people not even be bothered to read the article SUMMARY any more?
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Statisticly, 9 out of 10 emails I get I don't want anyway. I'm signing up for Earthlink right now.
The internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday.
Except in the summary is actually said 1-2 messages got through in some cases. 1 in 10 is 9/10 missing. So at least in one case it was literally 9 out of 10 times. Stop being a douche.
If 1-2 out of 10 are getting through it would be more accurate to say "as many as 9 and as few 8 as out of 10" or "80-90%". "literally 9 out of 10 times" is completely different than up to 9 out of 10. If they meant 9 out of 10 they could have excluded the "up to"
Ok, what if one person looses 9 out of 10, and the other looses 0 out of 10. If you then leave out the "up to" you woul be screaming "But not EVERYBODY"...
For some people, every glass is just half full, and no matter what you do, they complain. Too bad not up to 9 out of 10 of their complaints just get lost somehow!
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
Last month or so, yahoo started bouncing email from earthlink. 100% of the time. Calls to support eventually indicated it was a known problem (didn't admit it until pressed), and then indicated multi-day wait for it to be fixed. It was easier to fix on my wife's side; reroute her mail through my hosting server. Though the advice from our 13 year old son was probably the best: "why aren't you using gmail?"
... Get your own domain and host your own e-mail. I use SquirrelMail (http://www.squirrelmail.org/) with SpamAssassin (http://www.squirrelmail.org/plugin_view.php?id=16 7) running on a PIII with Red Hat on it. The net result? Minimal SPAM and reliable e-mail that *I* control.
Problem solved IMHO.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I turn green up to 9 out of 10 times I take a shower
Can I watch?
"As many as" and "up to" are the same thing. Anyway, saying "up to" still shows the depth of the problem. Perhaps they can't say "literally" because it doesn't happen every time.
My kids didn't get much if any of the email I sent them to theit hotmail addresses. With their help I tested this and sure enough, my logs indicate mail is being passed off to hotmail and then just goes into a black hole never to be delivered.
I use the phone a lot more now. Email is such a crapshoot these days.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Have you seen the commercials? They've off-shored half their jobs to magic-fairytale land. They've probably got some under trained ogre for an email admin who stands around the water cooler all day chatting with the fairies. Sure, it's a lot cheaper when you can pay your staff in pixie dust, but you end up getting bitten by poor customer service (I had to call them the other day, and the customer service rep had such a thick elven accent I could barely understand him). Outsourcing just doesn't work...
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
If you can't send mail to an Earthlink user because of whitelists it's because the whitelist has been set by the user to do that. It's an option that all Earthlink customers get. In fact there's a setting where you can reject all inbound email unless it's from an entry that's already in your own addressbook. So if Earthlink is losing mail to a given customer it's probably unsolicited garbage. Because as far as I can tell, every single piece of email I ever needed to see or expected to see has been delivered to me & I've been on earthlink for years and years. The biggest problem with Earthlink email is that it occasionally just stops running at all. I only use web mail and maybe once every few days, access to it slows to a crawl or stops. Then when it comes back everything I expected to see, at any rate is there.
Lets remember way back when this happened all the time shall we.....and we used to say to the users.....
"there is no guarantee of email delivery" (and optionally "Get over it")
Remember this folks, no where in the RFC's is there anything that states email will get delivered....
Just because all us sys-admins do such a great job, most of the time it does get there, people forget the dark ages of the internet when this would happen all the time.
OK 90% email loss is really really bad, and it use to be more like 5% loss (at worst), but people need to remember email isn't guaranteed.
The difference between your bullshit and TFA is that they actually have data to back "up to 9". Even if 9/10 only happened 1/100000 times, it is a valid claim. You, on the other hand, are full of shit because neither of your claims _ever_ happen. So, keep your stupid, uninformed criticisms to your self (:
Just pointing out how completely redundant the "up to" is. Either its completely useless or FUD. If you lose 90% that is what you say...
Read the whole quote. If they only give an upper limit my natural thought is the lower limit would be negative infiniti. Hence, my suggestion has a complete range.
Bow down to the great god Postini. Where is your baracuda device getting you now...
Thanks for the link.
It wasn't an average 8-9 were lost. It's just 8-9 out of 10 were lost. They only sent 10 to Earthlink, there's no average. Over a larger sample the loss rate could have been considerably lower.
C'mon, can people not even be bothered to read the article SUMMARY any more?
What? Reading the summary? Come on, be serious. This is Slashdot.
Be grateful to the few who read the title.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Usually the phrase "up to" is used to make the data sound like it says more than it does. It literally means "possibly as much as but no more than", but people read it as "on average". Using "up to" to make a claim that sounds broader than it really is is, as you imply, dishonest.
In this case what they have is an estimate of the average. But it's not based on much data or systematic testing. By saying "up to" they are actually encouraging the reader to interpret their results narrowlly. They could have said "9 out of 10 times", but by saying "up to 9 out of ten", they imply (a) they have no evidence that the system performs worse than this and (b) the system may at times perform better than this.
Overall, I think this is an example of honesty.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Jesus, man, what are you on ?
Some time back a friend had an Earthlink Web host account with email, web pages, the works. At her request I set up her email with 'catch-all' forewarding so that any email received on that account with an unknown 'To' address was forwarded to her on her personal internet account hosted at a non-Earthlink provider. She sold her business and turn over the Earthlink account, passwords, and logins to the new owner. Since then the business has been sold twice and we have no idea who has it now.
About two months ago my friend started receiving hundreds of emails per day forwarded to her from the old Earthlink account. They all had bogus 'To' addresses on the old Earthlink account. They all are for penny stock pump and dump scams. Obviously, the 'catch-all' forwarding the I put on her old Earthlink account is still in place. Some pump and dump crooks found the Earthlink account, probably thru trolling, and are spamming the crap out of it hoping to hit real email addresses and get some sucker to fall for there scam.
The point is, that this was a very small account with just a few real addresses, receiving hundreds of pump and dump emails a day. Multiply that by all of Earthlinks email hosted accounts, and I don't see how any network could stand the impact. I think some Polonium 210 therapy would be in order for these pump and dump scammers.
Powweb has new owners, and now email sometimes is not forwarded. Posting anonymously to prevent retribution.
Can anyone recommend a reliable web hosting provider?
My old ISP was bot by Earthlink, first thing they did was tell all the DSL customers they didn't want them.
Strictly dialup for Earthlink.
Nothing like a clear view of the future.
NB: in an excellent move, a local ISP contacted all of the DSL people being dumped
and offered to take over the service. Seamless switch, no activation hassle or fees.
DING DING DING!!! We have a winner.
I've been using Earthlink for ten years now and with a very few exceptions where they specifically stated that they were having issues (web acces, email, etc), I have never had a single email which was sent to me get lost.
My original email account is the one I use for people to contact me if they stumble upon my web page (hosted by Earthlink also) and it got overrun with spam, even with max filtering, so I added a new email address just for parents and friends and it has never received one piece of spam. As the OP suggested, I have whitelisting turned on on my original email address so if someone really wants to contact me at that particular address, they will get a bounce message telling them they have to request that I allow them access.
A third email address I added has no spam filtering and it also has received no spam but every email sent to it goes through.
Like the OP, I only use Earthlink's web email.
Very satisfied Earthlink customer speaking from experience.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I often read about these "widespread" issues and take them with a grain of salt. Why? Well, for one, I've been using Macs my entire life, so viruses and trojans have never affected me... Seriously, though, I've been an EarthLink customer for TEN years and have not had ANY issues with my email (and, no, I don't use them as an ISP, but I did for dial-up and my mother still uses them for DSL, so I've had that EarthLink email address for a decade). How do I know this? Because the only thing I use my EarthLink account for are e-commerce sites and newsletters that I long ago signed up using it. And never once have not received a password reset when I requested it, an invoice or shipping info when I ordered it, or an issue of a newsletter (they're numbered, making tracking easy). My EarthLink account receives an insane amount of spam that I have EarthLink auto-delete for me ("medium" Earthlink server-side spam settings and no, I do not have an email white list or anything) and it has never mis-directed any legit email nor has legit email ever been lost in their server chasm.
I loved his story of how service tags automatically time out.
Reminds me of the time Verizon DSL switched my DSL service from fixed IP address to PPoE _without notifying me._ Since they hadn't notified me, effectively I completely lost internet connectivity. Unfortunately, this happened at about the same time there was a major worm or virus attack.
When I called them, the first checked the electronic connection from my house to the telco office (approximately 1000 feet away), and said it was perfect and therefore there couldn't be a problem. When I persisted, they said they wouldn't talk to me until I had run a virus scan on my computer. I objected that the official description of the virus said it did not affect Macs, but they insisted, so I did it. They issued a trouble ticket and said they'd look into it.
Three days my connection still appeared to be dead. I called them with the trouble ticket number and they said they had no record of that trouble ticket.
Eventually someone acknowledged that they had simply discarded every trouble tickets that had come in during the virus attack.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Thank you for your reply.
We understand that your computer loses data through pipes.
Unfortunately, the issue you are having is related to your system rather than the Internet connection via EarthLink. Your best resource for a correct solution to this issue would be your computer vendor.
I liked his description of how his Megapath service "guarantee" didn't mean what anyone would have thought it meant. For reasons I don't understand, this sort of nonsense has been rife in IT circles for a long time.
Back, back through the wayback machine to the 1970s, when I was trying to conduct a class exercise at a major state university that shall remain nameless.
The university's computing center published a newsletter every month and every month near the top was the uptime for the month, typically 99.4% or thereabouts.
This was a course that did not involve computers, but for a special lab exercise the professor wanted every student to run a computer simulation. At considerable expense, extra telephone lines had been brought into the lab and Execuport high-speed (20 characters per second) terminals rented and everything.
The week of the exercise, nobody could log on. This continued for the whole week. I called the computing center. They said, "Yeah, we locked out all the terminals." I said "Why? Why?" They said "because everytime we let them in, the system crashes." I said, "So I should tell the professor the system is down until further notice?" They said "No, the system is not down." I said, "Well, if we need to access it via terminals and we can't, then it's down as far as we're concerned." "Oh, no," they said, "you can just come into the computing center and run it as a batch job."
So, total loss, waste of money, waste of a week's lab time.
Sure enough, next month the newsletter came out and reported "99.6% uptime," with no mention of any problems.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"...leaves a good impression."
*wince*
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The guy was sending emails to himself. 9/10 emails from himself lost indicates that either there's a problem with lost mail or there's a problem with his whitelist.
how am I supposed to get first post if I read the summary article?
Technically, we do not know that the email was *lost*, nor can we ever know.
All we know is that is has not arrived... yet...
It could be that they have a really really long timeout, and that the 4xx error will at some point be sent... or that they have it, and have not yet delievered.
Seeing a black sheep in the field does not prove that every sheep is black, nor that there is at least one black sheep. All you can prove is that there is at least one sheep that is black on at least one side...
If they just lost the right 9/10, then I would get only about 100 spams a day.
--
make install -not war
Any self respecting computer nerd uses SPEAKEASY
pffft. EarthLink - you might as well be on AOL.
I'm a 2000 man.
Something stinks here. This article does not have a lot to stand on. "A friend's testing"?! How scientific is that? And anyway, Earthlink is not exactly a fly-by-night operation. Don't you think more people would have noticed if 9 out of 10 of their emails were disapearing since June!? No way. This is crap. I have two earthlink accounts and I haven't noticed anything. Maybe his "friend" is just an idiot. Maybe Cringely is just an idiot I have nothing for or against Earthlink, I just hate bad information.
But if they started losing 9 out of every 10 letters you mailed, how long would you keep using them?
I have no problems. Plenty of spam and the good stuff comes through for me and my wife.
Believe it or not, they've been very good. The one issue I've had they resolved quickly once I was escalated above first-level tech support.
Maybe it's a location-specific issue?
I can qualify another post that talked about the new email sender verification thing. I get it sending mail from the web email interface. But none of my friends or the emails I send myself from work require sender verification.
I don't know what the motivation behind these complaints may be. It certainly isn't bothering me or my wife. Maybe it will..
(shrugs)
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
So Earthlink is losing 9 out of every 10 e-mails....wasn't there an article recently that said 9 out of 10 e-mails were spam? I look forward to getting (or not getting) my 1 e-mail out of 10...it's kinda like playing a game with 1 in 10 odds.... I'm sure you'll see this game on right after Texas Hold 'em on ESPN...
This same problem appears to be happening with Symaptico.
Though, my initial suspicion was that certain IP ranges were being summarily dropped (ie: from Comcast, which I'm using).
It's a big problem.
They broke DNS, now they're screwing up email. Are they even allowed to call themselves an "internet service provider" any more? It seems that, whatever they're providing, it ain't internet access.
This is something we have used on one account. It works fine most of the time. The FAQ for the whitelist = address book mentions that if you add a person from a certain domain (ex: juan@mycustomersURL.com) all email from mycustomersURL.com will be allowed through. This is where the flakeyness comes in; this works for awhile and seems to forget; even though the contact's info is still in the address book.
This whitelist system is a pain to support since it resides on the IMAP email system; maybe it is available if you use Earthlink's software, which we do not, I'm not sure.
I sent several messages to myself (30+ with attachments total ~500Kb) from my yahoo account and to my gmail account. The message arrived at yahoo & gmail immediately however I have yet to see them through my Earthlink account. I used the dhdhd+1@url.com, dhdhd+2@url.com method to recieve them all at the same account. I also totally shut off the spam filter for my account; we'll see how long it takes.
~~~~~~
Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired. - Jules Renard
#include ".signature"
They certainly wouldn't be doing anything fishy with DNS over there at Earthlink, right?
Sounds like they really need to tighten up their email service.
Finding other idiots on
To be losing mail, Earthlink servers must be accepting mail and then throwing it away, or at the very least, not continuing to forward it to the destination, which is just as bad. This goes completely against how the system is supposed to work. If they can't handle the load, there's a specific set of return codes to give (RFC821, section 4.2): I understand your perspective -- email is a loosely connected system, with lots of points of failure. However, in the vast majority of cases, a failure at one point will cause either delays or errors, not dropped mail.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
I write Earthling, EarthLink's blog. I spoke to Stephen Currie from our email team this morning and published some more information from him on the issue over on Earthling.
I use EarthLink for dial-up, and did not notice any lost e-mails that I wasn't expecting. I do get many spams as well.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Earthlink disavowed itself of such things years, and years ago.
..
And anyway its like, who doesn't know a Scientologist in SoCal, yo
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Considering as I've been told that they're firing sysops and the NOC in Atlanta at least and outsourcing the departments. They didn't want to pay for their experienced personnel, I suppose.
Earthlink's spamblocker has two settings, (three if you count off) The medium blocks what earthlink knows as spam and anything in the user's 'blocked' list. The high only lets through those in the user's address book. The fun part is there is an option to delete anything that hits the spam bucket automagically! So if your user doesn't have you in his address book, spamblocker on high, and auto-delete - he will never know you sent them anything. (in most cases the sender does get a bounce message from what I understand of the system.)
I was the Manager of the Web Services Department at Earthlink many years ago (close to 1998). With the exception of some great people that I knew there, and a CEO that I met and admired, it was a lunatic aylym run by the inmates.
Some of my friends there, and my wife, had PhD's and yet were routinely underpaid and denied annual job reviews.
Two virulent vice presidents punished the productive and rewarded their pets. Eventually, the Board fired those VPs, but not before permanent damage was done. Damage included pervasive age-discrimination, sexual harassment, forcing changes of subscriber's systems, premature product launches, and theft of intellectual property (later adjudicated against earthLink).
One VP said in front of eyewitnesses (including me): "Those customer supprt people only get $10 per hour. You get what you pay for." Customer service was abused and disparaged. The VPs boasted at company Christmas parties how their own stock and stock options were each worth over $100,000,000. Then they thanked Customer Support, and said they'd give them a great reward. The reward was a single cateredlunch. I thought the VPs would be strung up by their necks at the Christmas party. No such luck.
I was a dual-report as manager, reporting both to the Department Director and that VP (initials VM). My written job description including my speaking routinely to all the VPs in the company, and sometimes to the higher executives and Board. The VP to whom I reported increasingly limited my activities, eventually banning me from talking to any VPs. Once I was canned, and denied my stock options, I was also denied by that VP my unemployment compensation. In the Unemployment Appeal, the VP asserted that I was violating my job description, and asserted (under oath) that I had no written job description. My lawyer had obtained that by subpoena. We lay it in front of the VP. The VP swore never to have seen it before. The administrative law judge broke for lunch. I told my lawyer that we had won, since the VP had either lied and been caught, or had fired me for doing what I was required by writing to do. When we got back from lunch, the judge apologized. He'd "accidently" erased the audiocassette of the morning's hearing. I lost my chance to get unemployment compensation, to prove the VP a liar on the record. In a separate suit, I tried to get the many thousands of dollars of stock options, but lost in court when the same attorney misplaced the key precedent on why the terms of employment at time of job offer could not be rescinded subssequently and unilaterally (as they'd done with my stock options). That case was Romano v Rockwell, by the way.
After the EarthLink crisis, I went to work as VP of R&D at a start-up, which was acquired by LNUX, whose shares I still own. Ironic, gieven the comment to which I respond.
I've worked in Fortune 100 companies, medium companies, tiny companies, high-tech start ups, government agencies, and universities. Earthlink, hands down, was the most dysfunctional place I ever worked.
The problem goes much deeper than email. It is corporate culture.
-- Professor Jonathan Vos Post
Thats not good. Now those lost emails are floating around aimlessly in cyber-spaces. Any computer hacker with a set of cyber-virtual-reality-gloves and visor who happens upon these emails in the cyber-spaces can just grab them for his own. This is going to be a big issue for identity theft.
Earthlink should form a cyber-sweep-team to travel through cyber-space to try and find all these emails. If they can find where they broke free from the earthlink cyber-pipe, hopefully they can find most of the lost emails... if they havent drifted too far yet. I guess that depends on the pressure in Earthlink's cyber-piping. If the pressure is high the exit velocity of the data would be high as well and as such, the emails would be flying through cyber-space at an incredible rate of speed towards cyber-infinity.
system..
..based on NFS of all things.
http://www.jetcafe.org/npc/doc/mail_arch.html
But having worked on proprietary scalable email systems myself I was highly doubtful of their NFS-based solution. It's hard to get it right and be fast enough, especially when you have as much email(most of it spam) to contend with. At the MTA level we made it so it first tries to send the message to the storage server in memory then returned a response back to the SMTP client. If that took too long or memory was running short, it saved it to disk and tried to deliver, in that case it would return a response back to the SMTP client. Then there were the dedicated queueing servers which could run in memory in the mta or on another server. Little things like these made a difference and it's still in use today, never ever mysteriously losing mail while working on a considerable amount of email. Some pretty smart people worked on it. The protocol used was proprietary and relied on acknowledgements.
Using NFS just begs for pain and suffering. Maybe they moved on from NFS but obviously something's not right, you shouldn't lose 1 email. Gmail has shown it is possible to create such a beast with open source software which is commendable.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Congratulations on your latest success. Your next mission is to rid the world of another stupid phrase: "Up a creek without a paddle."
Remember, if you're up the creek, you don't need a paddle -- the flow of water will move you.
As a recent "former Earthlink employee", I worked directly on the mail systems. Some of the problems with email are related to the lack of adoption of common anti-spam practices. For example, on reader pointed out the white-list blocking with challenge response emails, those challenge emails are numerous that the IP's that generate are often times blacklisted by large email sites like Yahoo! and AOL. At the time I worked there Yahoo! was suggesting we use domain keys on our inbound mail to verify that it truely originated from Yahoo!, instead of blindly sending millions of Challenge-Response email to their users that would be labled as spam on their end. Another piece of the 'missing-mail' puzzle is the inbound anti-spam methods employed. One piece, is a script that counts the number of connections from remote MTA's, and if they reach a certain threshold, instructs all the MX'ers to null route them. This particular system seems to work well to combat spam, but when it fails, the entire inbound mail farm is brought to it's knees. This may account for some non-scientific research to claim 90% mail loss, but these emails are typically temp-fails. But, I've moved on to bigger and better shops, and they may have changed this since I last saw it.
I was about to make the same post before seeing this lurking down at Score:0. SMTP does guarantee delivery or notification of failure! It provides a clear statement of whose responsibility each message is at each point, and how notification works when delivery fails or is refused. This excuse is wrong.
Recently, my company had spent significant time troubleshooting our email servers because the management noticed that a number of customers had complained about not receiving a receipt for their order after checkout.
So, after getting a list of these customers, I found it interesting that a significant percentage of them had Earthlink email accounts. This spawned a panicked response from management when they found out, and they assumed our mail servers were to blame. We checked and re-checked MX records, SPF settings, and outgoing email queues, and found that it simply was NOT our problem. This will help clear up the issue!
Also, you are to be commended for spending the hours required to get through Earthlink's customer support system. I can honestly say it had been the worst troubleshooting experience I had ever come across.
Go get 'em Cringely! You show those ISPs who's Mr. Smart Guy. Don't forget to tell them you have a PhD. oops! Forgot... you don't really have a PhD.
What a tool...
Just guessing but I bet it is because of some radical SPAM filtering going on in their servers. IMHO the ISP/email companies should not be filtering anything. Let the end users take care of their own filtering. If the ISP filters, then some good email WILL get lost. Filters are a bad solution. Lately, there are some insanely radical filtering techniques being used by some of them that simply are doomed to failure.
That would explain why he's not getting his emails. Earthlink's tubes are clogged!
Ditto everythink you said. I've been using Earthlink email for a decade as well. Important emails get through. Spam seems to be dropping off slightly.
That solution may work for some but I wonder how all those dial up earthlink accounts will run thier own mail server.
and how would you use another service.....most national based Post Offices have no available competition to the public...businesses maybe, Joe Public very rare.
Like I said gotta try hard to loose 90% of email, but there is nothing in the RFC's about guarantees, just you must try hard!
All this time I thought people just wanted to stop talking to me, including all those mailing lists I'm on. Wow, it's great to know that it's not, but rather my Earthlink email account.
I personally haven't lost email through my earthlink account yet. I have noticed that their spam filters occasionally throw them in the wrong place. I had to turn off spam filtering, re-enable it, and then rebuild my allowed Senders list all over. Seems the issue may be with the number of emails you have in your allowed senders list. They used to limit that list at one point, but I haven't seen that limit lately, so it may be the cause of the issues. Also their test of the new webmail built off openlaszlo was pulled and ran rather slow once they actually tried to implement it.
Keep in mind this is the same company that I spent hours on the phone with trying to get them to bill my CC instead of a closed sprint DSL account for just the email address. After I got frustrated, I called the cancelation department and got it resolved by them. I'd say skip calling tech support these days, call the cancelation department, tell them you have had it with lost emails and let them pressure the lazy techs there to fix the issue. Either that or just drop them if you can stand having to re-subscribe to all sorts of junk, change your billing notices, contact info for all your friends in email, etc... After a while I decided dealing with them was less of a headache than trying to find out where to change my email addy at on some of the lists I get mail from.
I'd keep using them as long as they were the only way to get (even some) mail to my address.
If I had a way to transfer mail services for the address I've been using for the past 12 years to another provider, I certainly would do so.
It's a different beast really, because there is more than one package courier that can deliver things to your postal address, but there's only one email carrier that can deliver mails to your @earthlink.net address (or in my case @jps.net, a domain acquired by OneMain, then acquired by Mindspring, and eventually acquired by Earthlink) and that carrier is Shitlink--er, Earthlink.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I'm unsure where Cringley is going with this. I moved back to Earthlink a couple weeks ago, and have lost zero e-mails. The problem is that the spam filters don't catch all of the spam, and I don't want to use whitelisting agains.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I left them in 2002 because of this exact same problem. Emails, just were gone, never got to me. Which was really bad because I was looking for work, and I had a lot of electrontic resumes. I wonder how many leads I actually had but the email never got to me.
So how long have you been an Earthlink employee?
Then != than you morons.
Excluding all the spam false-positives happening around the world, I've been at both ends of delayed or black-holed email for at least months, or possibly years depending on what people think has been wrong with Hotmail since around '03. Email is simply collapsing under the strain of spam. We can point fingers at Earthlink all we want, the fact of the matter is that email over the Internet has its days numbered. I've been switching to instant messaging where possible, though I suspect that there's a growing "darknet" of private networks where email only amongst known parties still works and will replace the free-for-all on the 'Net. A sort of uber-whitelist that's not just about addresses, but individual computers. I'm thinking of setting up a virtual WAN using VPN with friends, but things aren't quite bad enoough for that, yet.
I had Earthlink since they were a local SCal company and not part of the Mindspring Morass.
At least twice a year i would get an influx of email, all of it past due, yet all of it picked up by me via POP3 with instructions to "delete from server on pickup." I spent a month and a half trying to get info from Earthlink as to why my supposedly deleted mail was being stored on some ELN server somewhere and then vomited up to me somewhere in Nov or Dec of each year.
I also performed several iterations of a similar trace-mail routine, sending duplicate messages to three accounts; most often, maybe 10% of those emails ended up in the Earthlink mailbox. Needless to say, i chose to use a company who managed to get all of my emails to me.
I recommend to all my clients that they do NOT use Earthlink if they really need their email.
heh... I'd never work for Earthlink, some friends did before they outsourced all their support to India... it's a stupid company... as I said, I only still even have EarthLink because I transferred the account to my mom's house for DSL... I've been FiOS for the last couple year. Verion's a far better ISP (I don't work for them, either).
Yes, but the saying is "up *shit* creek without a paddle."
Shit creeks don't flow very fast, and every additional second of delay is unpleasant.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
My email often doesn't get through because I made the mistake of setting up a mailbox under my domain for my dad, and I forward his email to his hotmail account. When spam comes into the box I set up for him under my domain, and it's forwarded to his hotmail account, Hotmail thinks the spam is coming from MY domain. Then Hotmail associated the spam with my static IP address, and now no matter what email account I use, my IP address sets off Hotmail's spam filter. What's worse and is inexcusable is that Hotmail just drops my messages before even checking to see if the recipient has put my domain on their white-list. LET ALL WHO HAVE HOTMAIL ACCOUNTS BE WARNED THAT HOTMAIL HAS BEEN TRASHING SOME OF YOUR MAIL EVEN IF THE SENDER IS ON YOUR WHITE-LIST. And let all who have their own domain names be warned not to forward email lest you slander your own domain name.
Can't be bothered to find the appropriate link, but suffice to say the two people are not the same.
I get lots of important personal emails bounced without informing me and just plain lost every week by Comcast. They used to be reliable, but they must have changed or maybe outsourced their email server administrators in the last 6 months. They are now hopelessly inept at getting me my email. I have to run my important email through Google now in order to get it. The bad part is most of the email I missed, I think I wasn't even aware of at the time. Mondays mornings are the worst, I used to miss all emails mailed before 11AM on Mondays.
They are too brainwashed, clearly they can't run a farm of mail servers.
As usual, it is not the whole email - problem only affects hosted domains. May not even all of them. I used to work there and know all of the problems with email inside out. Consumer platform is stable but hosting platform is really old and it was migrated around last summer - as far as I can judge from the version strings. Email team is small comparing to other companies but decisions are made there by managers who pretend to understand software and systems. It is just wasting company resources - these folks care about their own job security. Eventually all the blame for the screw ups caused by managers decisions is on developers who did the most difficult things. Managers also use an excuse like "there were not enough testing performed to catch these" - you can't just blame developers all the time. Politics is all around, no one wants to criticize in risk of being blamed and fired. Communication between the groups of different branches is broken - since any piece of information is used as a weapon between them. Developers are leaving, managers are getting promotions. I'm really sorry for the good folks who remain there - integrity is retaliated there.
Your idealism is right out of the 1970s, back when this stuff was getting designed. Back in the day it was considered rude to refuse to relay an email.
Now it's like this: drop spam as cheaply as possible (and lose half the legit email) or just give up on email entirely. One does have less-spammy alternatives: fax, phone, postal mail, FedEx, courier, personal face-to-face meeting...
Modern email is an extremely unreliable communication method. Get used to it.