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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.
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)
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
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 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.