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."

Comments

White list spam block with challenge

[BrianRoach]

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 ... but there's simply no practical way to respond to them all within the time limit (during business hours it's not practical - it's impossible at 2am while you're sleeping). And unfortunately it seems that a lot of their members simply don't understand what it means when you tell them they have to add you to their list or they won't get your email.

- Roach

Re:What MTA do they use?

[yourlord]

Earthlink uses an SMTP server they developed in house because they felt the existing servers out there would not scale to the level they needed and were not secure enough.

I used to work there back in the day.

Re:Lost e-mail? WHAT THE HECK?

[gregmark]

E-mail should never be lost! ... To actually LOOSE e-mail indicates that Earthlink is ACCEPTING the mail and then DUMPING it!!!!

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.

Re:No guaranteed email delivery

[TheJasper]

Remember this folks, no where in the RFC's is there anything that states email will get delivered.... This is what I thought when I read the headline (having used that excuse in the past ;). So I immediately looked up RFC2821 - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

6.1 Reliable Delivery and Replies by Email

      When the receiver-SMTP accepts a piece of mail (by sending a "250 OK"
      message in response to DATA), it is accepting responsibility for
      delivering or relaying the message. It must take this responsibility
      seriously. It MUST NOT lose the message for frivolous reasons, such
      as because the host later crashes or because of a predictable
      resource shortage.

      If there is a delivery failure after acceptance of a message, the
      receiver-SMTP MUST formulate and mail a notification message.

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.

SMTP Digression

[Spaceman40]

I think you have an unrealistic expectation of the quality of service you can expect from email.

I wrote an SMTP server a while back (to check out Ruby's network libraries), and while going through the RFCs I found that there are expectations of quality that include delivery of something. It all comes down to the protocol: if a server accepts a message, it takes responsibility for the message's delivery. A server should reject the message if it cannot deliver (causing the delivery server to either try again later or tell the user there's a problem).

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):

450 Requested mail action not taken: mailbox unavailable [E.g., mailbox busy]
550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable [E.g., mailbox not found, no access]
451 Requested action aborted: error in processing
452 Requested action not taken: insufficient system storage
552 Requested mail action aborted: exceeded storage allocation
553 Requested action not taken: mailbox name not allowed [E.g., mailbox syntax incorrect]
554 Transaction failed

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.