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."
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.
ObGrammarNazi: "Loose" is spelled with one 'o'.
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
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.
Technically that is against the ToS for regular Earthlink accounts.
Secondly they like to block a lot of traffic on email-esque ports.
Either way... As a former employee, I'm not surprised.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Custom, hands-free Linux installs. Instalinux
This is absolutely correct, so any policy checks that occur during the SMTP handshake (who are you? where are you coming from? who do you want to send to? how much data do you have? Oh, do you now? REJECT). However, anti-spam and anti-virus checks happen after the message is accepted. If the result of the check is X, and policy rules say drop mail on the floor when X, then bye-bye e-mail and sorry Bond, the government will not ackowledge its involvement.
Otherwise, the only way to loose mail is to shutdown a machine with a heavy queue and throw out the disk. SMTP is impervious to network badness. My money is on an SMTP policy run amok.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the Exchange thing struck me as an extremely odd assumption to make.
A couple of comments though - I admin a few Exchange Servers. For the most part, they take literally zero effort to maintain. They're very well behaved. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong?
On the other hand, it's definitely unnecessarily complex and bloated for 'home use'. Someone wanting to run a DIY mail server on a Windows box could do a lot worse than to take a look at the very clean, compact, GPL'd Hmailserver - www.hmailserver.com
But this isn't a failure to DELIVER it's a DELETION!
If the email doesn't get there, it is BOUNCED! not DELETED.
K?
pair.com. Ten years, no problems.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
So the RFC states nowhere that mail will be delivered? Maybe so, but it damn sure states that if any MTA acccepts mail (by not rejecting it outright, or indicating it's not up to the task right now with a temporary error code), that piece of mail just has been given a guarantee to be delivered locally, or forwarded as appropriate. If either is impossible, an error message will be returned to the sender. Mail accepted MUST NOT be dropped, ever.
I know, I violate this point of the RFC many times a day by silently dropping bounces to invalid local accounts, and silently dropping stuff from some bad spam nets. For other stuff, there's greylisting, QueueLA and RefuseLA.
Michael
naturally there is alot more, including cases where it is acceptable not to send a notification, but I don't think any apply here.
So basically, SMTP is defined as a reliable protocol which guarantees delivery or notification of failure. The days of unreliable e-mail no longer apply.
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.
So it probably doesn't affect the majority of their users who are not doing anything fancy.
I may twist orthodoxy to partly justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
Same here. Ever since they closed the Pasadena Call Center and dumped about 2/3 of their most experienced employees the quality of service has been dropping. It used to be that you had to understand what was going on in order to work there. Now, all you need is the ability to read scripts. You don't even need to be able to tell when the scripts don't apply, or when to ask somebody that knows what they're doing for help. Just read the script and don't care if it works or not.
I must say that this is just typical of the new EarthLink mis-management. Do anything that increases the short-term bottom line and to hell with the long-term effects. EarthLink has fallen into the hands of the MBAs and doesn't have long to last.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I am currently woking for the United States Antarctica Program in Antartica. My email is a vital link between Antarctica nad my life off the ice. Earthlink has seriously dropped the ball. I have had so many problems with their webmail it has made me almost scream. I now have to tell people if they really have to get ahold of me they have to use my yahoo account. I sincerely hope that earthlink gets the feedback through lost revenue because they have not shown any interest in fixing the problems. I have strong thoughts for any company that stands between me and my family.
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 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.