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Massive Email Crash Hits Canadian ISP Shaw
rueger writes "One of Canada's biggest cable/Internet providers has their customers in an outrage. '... after an interruption of Shaw's email services Thursday led to millions of emails being deleted ... About 70 per cent of Shaw's email customers were affected when the company was troubleshooting an unrelated email delay problem and an attempted solution caused incoming emails to be deleted ... Emails were deleted for a 10-hour period between 7:45 a.m. and 6:15 p.m. Thursday, although customers did not learn about the problem until Friday, and only then by calling customer service or accessing an online forum for Shaw Internet subscribers.' To top it off, when Shaw did send out notices about this, they looked so much like every day phishing spam that many people deleted them unread."
Who?
Are one of the reasons I don't use ISP hosted email. Main reason is portability.
Except when the failing account is that forwarder account.
There will be more mail tomorrow.
And Carly Rae Jepson. "We'll Send it Maybe!"
oops, you're right about that. If the first hop fucks up, it's game over. :>( I guess I've been lucky that my school hasn't failed yet.
I've hosted my own mail server for about 15 years and I regularly think to myself, 'I'm tired of worrying about hardware and my circuit. Maybe I should let somebody else host it.'
Then it seems there's always an article like this that clears my head.
Cox over the years has had some spectacular email outages and fuckups. To the point where I now use Gmail via IMAP and a private domain via IMAP.
The details are that the messages were never delivered in the first place, your setup would not protect against such a problem.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
isn't a holding-bay?
Shaw is probably the least abusive of the canadian major telecom companies. I've been a shaw customer for 14 years and this is the only incedent I've had other than lines being blown down in a storm. My wife's email was effected but mine was not. This is a normal (and rare) human error... most of the actual abuse telecom companies dish out is abusive contracts and misleading advertizing like 3-year cellphone contracts and "Optik TV and Internet" ... which is actually satellite and DSL, not FTTH.
Like, ones that make a backup before messing with critical data? As an elementary precaution known to anybody halfway competent in IT?
This just demonstrates a massive, massive management screwup, as they allowed unqualified personnel to work on their systems. Save a buck, loose a million.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I do much the same with my own primary and secondary on hosted vservers and forward to my home-machine (via dyn-dns). So far, no loss.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
From TFA : "The mistake was an “isolated event,” Lakshman said, and promised a detailed review, which would include a discussion about compensation."
Except it isn't. Few years ago I had a business's domain email hosted with Shaw (was included with the internet service and they provided IMAP), and they lost all of it. They wouldn't return my calls about it, and on the third time I called in a week or so later I was told it would not be recoverable, that there is no backup for their business email service at all, instead they would credit the account ~5 days of internet service. I was floored, but was too busy to get into it with them and I had our email backed up so I just moved on with a email hosting provider I felt more confident about.
Shaw's internet service has been decent, but I wouldn't trust them as anything more then a data pipe.
Yeah, messing up is normal. Failing mark a snapshot before becoming with a million emails is incompetence. With a snapshot, human error might have resulted in losing three minutes worth of emails.
"To err is human, to fuck up the whole system requires root."
Also, gmail exists.
Haven't we all fantasized about just deleting the goddamn queue and going home?
Imagine that - a registered member logs in as AC to tell us that he's a douche. Wow - at least he knows he's a douche!! There is hope for him. Not much, but some hope.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Indeed. And with preventing the server from accepting emails, and a snapshot, there would have been no loss at all. (Emails in the 3 minutes going to the secondary...)
Those truly incompetent are those not aware that they can make mistakes. Seems management is trying hard to make the engineers more like them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/07/13/2050234/citys-it-infrastructure-brought-to-its-knees-by-data-center-outage
I would say Distributel is less abusive, similar prices, runs over Shaw lines but internet is unlimited - no overage fees. Teksavvy used to be good too, not sure if they still are.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
BTW: Gmail provides IMAP and POP access, which is a stumbling block for those who want a desktop email client. I'm not sure about Yahoo or Hotmail.
I'm sorry, I don't follow your logic. How is providing the option for POP and IMAP -- in addition to webmail -- considered a "stumbling block"?
How do you know?
Making mistakes is human. This is why a competent professional acknowledges that he will make a mistake sooner or later, and designs his activities so that mistakes in execution won't have catastrophic consequences. These guys failed to properly do this.
Yeap, the whole mail system is designed from the core so mail should never be lost as I learnt in my young days.
Managing to loose a single email never mind millions is quite an achievement.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
...if your email is not in at least two physically separate places, you are at risk of losing all of it, forever.
It's weird Shaw can't restore from a backup - the article is a bit weird on the exact details about what happened and just ends with "the emails were not backed up".
If your online mail provider does not allow you to access or export your data to your own PC (via IMAP, POP, or whatever) then you should switch to one that does - and start backing up your own email if you want to be more confident that it's going to survive catastrophes.
The details are that the messages were never delivered in the first place, your setup would not protect against such a problem.
That's true.
How bad this is depends on the system -- in this case it sounds like Shaw was doing "accept, then drop" which is the worst case because no one is notified of the failure. If however Shaw rejected spam rather than accept it, the sending mail system would notify the sender that the message was not delivered. It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
Shaw might be less abusive of their customers of their internet service.
When it comes to other things, they're nasty as hell.
Barrett Xplore ring any bells for the Canadians here? Shaw taking over Starchoice ring any bells, too?
I ran my own store and decided to sell satellite service and equipment. Barrett Xplore wouldn't even give me the time of day. Eventually their answer was "FUCK OFF" (not joking, those were the actual words from the sales droid). I took their advice and sold FTA equipment after that. Oddly enough, just as I did that, after a few previous months of literally begging Bell and eventually phoning up the CRTC asking why the hell they regulate that only Shaw and Bell can sell service here when they monopolize the sales end of it as well, shuttering legitimate business, Bell called telling me I'm now an authorized dealer. It was too late at that point, I was knee deep in Pansats by then and making $1,000,000 a year in sales. Although their sign looked nice in the door.
If you ever wondered why there was an explosion in sales of FTA in Canada, now you know why. Those idiots caused it through their decision to be complete assholes to anyone running their own shop. All of those of us who decided to go into that business ended up giving up on those jokers and just rolled our own business. Plenty more profitable too...
I work for TELUS, and can assure you that optik tv is NOT a satellite service. It is an IPTV service being delivered over either ADSL 2+ or VDSL connections (and sometimes fibre in new areas).
Satellite tv is offered in areas where we don't have the broadband infrastructure to support standard Optik TV. However we refer to that as TELUS satellite TV and not Optik tv.
I don't believe TELUS ever claimed optik was FTTH. The optik name refers to the fact that it is served by our new fibre network. The "last mile" is still copper in most neighbourhoods though (past the DSLAM essentially).
Minor part of your post i know, but thought i would help clarify since you seemed to be confused on what optik is.
Cheers.
http://www.telus.com/content/tv/sat/
http://www.telus.com/content/tv/optik/index.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telus_TV
-----
This post reflects my own views and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer.
Damn, isn't there anybody here but me who has been locked out of their gmail account for about 2 weeks now? I have not changed a thing in my fetchmailrc or mailfilterrc's, and have been sucking my gmail account dry at 3 minute intervals with fetchmail for damned near 5 years.
2 weeks ago, both fetchmail and mailfilter started reporting password failures. It worked about 30 minutes a day for 5 or 6 days, but has not worked since the last week of February.
I call them up, get some yahoo whose command of English sucks dead toads through soda straws, he leaves to go get someone who speaks English, but the next guy isn't a hell of a lot better, and he finally speaks clear enough that he is telling me the account is blocked because my machine is compromised. I object, its a linux box, behind a router running DD-WRT. Doesn't make squat to him, my machine is compromised.
Seeing as how everything that comes in here has to run the clamav gauntlet, and that this is a linux machine which has not had java enabled anywhere near firefox in months, currently at V-19.0.2, AND that its behind a router running DD-WRT, AND neither chkrootkit nor rkhunter can find anything to complain about, I seriously doubt it has been compromised.
I had been gradually weaning my mailing list activities, moving them to other servers precisely because of their no dups policy, so that was all the impetus I needed to just move all my subs. I still scan them on schedule just in case they actually get someone who reads english wondering why a fetchmail instance is failing to login, telling fetchmail the password is toast when its the same pw I've been using for years, and its long enough John didn't get it in 6 hours of grinding on it when I last checked with john the ripper.
Until that happens, screw gmail, and the camel that rode in on them.
Cheers, Gene
"To top it off, when Shaw did send out notices about this, they looked so much like every day phishing spam that many people deleted them unread."
Erm. No they didn't? I'm looking at one right now and it doesn't look remotely like 'every day phishing spam'. It doesn't offer me anything, threaten me with anything, or ask me to click on anything. It doesn't include any links except to a forum thread, which the text doesn't make any special effort to make you click on. It didn't trigger my mental 'phishing detector' in the slightest.
I got the email notification late Saturday, two days after the event happened, I guess. That's not a horrible delay. I also saw a bunch of delayed mails come through around that time - 10 or so - and they notified me of the sender and subject line of three mails that were lost, so looks like they managed to recover quite a lot.
I dunno, I guess I'm not TOTALLY OUTRAGED at this. As another commenter said, you know, admins screw up sometimes. Lord knows I have. The fact that they're at least able to identify the subject lines of all the lost mails makes a big difference; you could get any really vital ones re-sent.
Teksavvy seems to be getting worse. I check them every so often, and last time I checked, their AUP now specifically says you can't run servers; I'm pretty sure it didn't used to say that. They don't appear to offer static IPs for residential accounts any more. Their business pricing isn't very competitive. Distributel's AUP looks similar to Teksavvy's and Shaw's. I can't really see much to recommend any of the resellers over just using Shaw directly any more unless you really need the 'unlimited' data. That's still an advantage, but I think that may be going away soon, with the recent legal settlement. Shaw's caps aren't really that terrible either, they're way higher than Telus' - I think 250GB for 25Mb/sec, and 400GB for 50Mb/sec. And they do offer unlimited accounts, though at higher prices.
It's worth noting that some of Shaw's business services are weirdly well priced. I'm on their 50Mb/s business account; it sounds expensive, but then you see that it includes TV, and you'd think there'd be a catch, but there really isn't. The business 50Mb/sec service gives you basically the same services you'd get in the home 50Mb/s internet + basic cable TV bundle, for the same price (or $10 cheaper, I forget), you get a static IP address, the AUP on business accounts permits servers, you get a higher bandwidth cap and your uplink speed is faster. So...yeah, there's absolutely no reason not to get it. I did.
There's a lot of incompetence about, especially bullshit such as the secondary being /dev/null itself as some sort of stupid anti-spam bandaid. I was stung by that one when I had the situation where the primary that was accepting mail for a company I was working for was getting congested and the host they were paying the ISP to supply as the secondary had a management imposed policy of just dropping everything. Probably 2/3 of incoming mail during working hours was never delivered in that four month window before they admitted that we'd been paying to let them throw our incoming email away.
MS Exchange lowered the bar. Yes I know it's supposed to do a dozen other things but it's MTA was crap for years and still seems to generate a lot of panic on sysadmin mailing lists.
While it's utterly trivial to alias everything incoming (or even outgoing) to another host that's another bit of infrastructure and often seen as an unnecessary expense. Their backups will be system files, whatever is in the mail spool at any given day is beneath their care factor and anything that arrives after the last backup is gone anyway.
Remember this folks before considering outsourcing, it's not their email so they don't care about it as much as you do. While you may want to keep stuff in two places they are not going to bother to go to the extra expense unless it's to their advantage.
Teksavvy seems to be getting worse. I check them every so often, and last time I checked, their AUP now specifically says you can't run servers; I'm pretty sure it didn't used to say that.
No it's always said that. Though they really don't enforce it unless people are being abusive, it's more of a CYA clause. They only offer static IP's for DSL customers, that being the nature and problems with the cable plants used by the majority of companies(rogers/shaw/cogeco). Really though everyone got the shaft from the CRTC on the latest round of TPIA agreements, and tek is moving to a new ATPIA system which will cost more. But you'll get more, which is okay. Though they're still fighting the ruling, so is distrubutel, and electronic box.
Om, nomnomnom...
You don't even need a secondary. If your SMTP server goes off-line, the senders should retry for up to 4 hours. So you can quite literally unplug a mail server, do what you got to do within 4 hours, plug it back in and no mail wil be lost.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Fibre To Aardvarks?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Did you ask for your money back?
Well if everybody has their mail servers configured correctly the incoming mail should be flag for redelivery by the sending MTA for at least 2-4 days, so hopefully nothing is lost. I believe Sendmail is 4 days. You would think with so many users Shaw would also have at least secondary MX records for failover. Despite being a horrible protocol email does have it's delivery protections. The problem these days is that everybody *expects* immediacy with a technology that was designed with broken connections in mind. Just think about it like this: "They don't deliver on Saturdays anymore.. don't worry you will get it on Monday"
Shaw is probably the least abusive of the canadian major telecom companies. I've been a shaw customer for 14 years and this is the only incedent I've had other than lines being blown down in a storm. My wife's email was effected but mine was not. This is a normal (and rare) human error... most of the actual abuse telecom companies dish out is abusive contracts and misleading advertizing like 3-year cellphone contracts and "Optik TV and Internet" ... which is actually satellite and DSL, not FTTH.
Less abusive to customer perhaps, not to their employees.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/03/08/bc-shaw-contracts.html
You have to log in with the gmail interface and answer a captcha. Then your account's back on.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You are right. I was thinking of IMAP servers for clients sending outbound mail, but they should be separate and a secondary would not help.
Although the postfix/sendmail default for delivery failure is 2 days, I believe.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There's a lot of incompetence about, especially bullshit such as the secondary being /dev/null itself as some sort of stupid anti-spam bandaid.
How stupid is that? Incredible! The whole reason for secondaries seeing more spam is that some of them do not have spam filters because of incompetent mailadmins. The fix is to either have the secondaries forward to the primaries (when they are back up and storing for some time before that) or to have the same spam filter on the secondaries.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If the primary was down, the email would have gone to the secondary. That did not happen so far, ever, except when I tested it. Also, failure to forward results in an email that eventually gets delivered if email gets through at all. So unless the server is down for several days, I would have known. Except for very exotic scenarios, that means no loss. Postfix is a very, very reliable MTA and the whole email-system is designed for reliability.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
panic on sysadmin mailing lists
Hehehe, good old Microsoft. Never transparent, never clear, always good for surprises and gets more obscure than Linux kernel hacking when you have to fix problems MS did not anticipate. In German we call these "Schoenwettersysteme" (translates as "nice-weather only systems"). Toys, not fit for any real-world use.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is wheel of fortune
same PHB that let there data center fire take out 911 and other stuff in Calgary. Now I can see a fire killing all power or tripping the master power switch but not having a back up data center?
HR sees = cs degree as competent in IT while passing over people who went to tech schools or have years of experience
Shaw actually has pretty crappy caps, and they DO enforce them. My Telus internet usage has recently, in the last 4-6 months, been removed from their services page, so even if they measure it, they can't enforce caps, because users can't check their own usage. Also, Shaw fairly strictly throttles P2P, and is happy to serve copyright infringement warnings.
That's not to say either one is particularly great.
I used to have ETTS from Novus, and that was very nice for a residential service, but it is only offered in multi-unit buildings pre-wired for it.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
But, if anything happens, It's my own fault. I don't have to trust my ISP to do anything but provide the pipe.
If your email is stored in Gmail, then Google will actually make backups of them.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
bah, let's say 5 million emails would have arrived during that time period. From my unfortunate 6.5 year history at a major email provider, I can tell you that %98 of the email is normally blocked as junk at the perimeter using RBLs, another %50 of what makes it through is junk blocked by anti-virus and anti-spam engines leaving around %1 of real "valuable" email.
Of that, about %50 is commercial email that literally no one will miss (except the people sending it).
What remains is 25k emails, the vast majority of which are forwards from friends and relatives (forward this four leaf clover for luck!) and other garbage. All in all, after an 8 hour outage, the number of real emails that were missed was probably on the order of around 100.
I would never trust exchange as a relay. Everywhere I worked where I had the power to do so, Exchange did not sit in the DMZ, and relayed through proper unix mail servers. I prefer sendmail, because I am familiar with it and know how to properly extend and secure it. Use postfix if you prefer, but again, I'd never trust a Microsoft Exchange mail relay.
The whole point is that the emails were accepted by the primary MX, then deleted. As far as the sender's concerned, the email was delivered properly, because it was accepted by the MX.
That means there'd be no reason for the sender to try the secondary, so you lose your email.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Depends on if the sender had read receipt turned on and if the receiver allowed acknowledging read receipts to where the sender would know that the mail had not been ultimately received and read.
On another note, I had an ISP do a mail server upgrade that when it went live, sent backed up mail out to everybody. I got mail intended for people I didn't know, people I did know, personal e-mail meant for others, etc.
Just deleting e-mail is probably quite a bit better than sending it all to the wrong recipients. I still wonder how they managed that - but they did. And I immediately dropped them as my ISP.
It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
That depends on how the spam is being sent to you.
If the spam is coming directly from a spamming tool that ignores failures then rejecting it won't create a bounce. On the other hand if the spam is being sent to you by a proper MTA then the reject will cause the sending MTA to send a bounce message to whoever the message claims to be from.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I don't believe 911 was affected, though many other government services were affected, including all registry services, and all electronic health records in the hospitals. To be fair, I'm not sure how much blame Shaw has in that one, The government contracted IBM (I think) to do the data centre, and IBM (if that's who it was) hosted it in the Shaw building, Without knowing the contracts involved, it's equally likely that this was a government screw up, an IBM screw up, or a Shaw screw up. Ok, the amount of damage from the fire itself seems excessive, indicating a poorly designed data centre, which was Shaw's fault. But I honestly put the lack of any redundant systems for such critical infrastructure down as a government screw up, as it is likely their contract that specified only a single data centre. (for such mission critical stuff, I can't figure why they wouldn't have a minimum of two completely redundant systems in two different cities running with live fail-over capabilities. There's no reason that outage should have lasted more than a minute or two, let alone the week plus that it did.)
"Optik TV and Internet" ... which is actually satellite and DSL
I'm a very happy Telus "Optik TV and Internet customer", and I assure you it's not satellite - It's IP TV. And yes, my Internet is delivered over a copper pair, but so what? It's fast and reliable - Faster than I was getting from Shaw when I switched.
Oh, sorry, I meant that in a good way. I meant that a lot of people need a desktop email client, and in the past Hotmail and Yahoo didn't offer that, whereas Gmail has had it for years.
I'm on Telus Optik TV/Internet and mine is FTTH.
Yeap, the whole mail system is designed from the core so mail should never be lost as I learnt in my young days.
There were always ways to lose mails. One obvious way is if a mail server dies then you lose all mail between the last backup and the mailserver dieing. Another is if both the original mail and the bounce suffer a delivery failure but these circumstances were rare afaict. The majority of the time mails were either delivered successfully or bounced to the sender.
Then spam and virus mails with faked from addresses came along. If you bounce such mails you create backscatter for an unrelated user. If you reject them during the SMTP session then there is less chance of backscatter than if you bounce them yourself but it can still happen if the spam/virus mail is being sent to you by another MTA rather than directly by the virus/spamming tool. To avoid backscatter and keep things simple many filters just discard mails that they identify as spam or virus mails without attempting to inform the sender. If a mail is misidenfied as spam or a virus mail in such a system either due to imperfect hueristics or a configuration screwup then it will be silently lost.
In summary the deluge of spam and virus mails has lead to reactions that destroyed the relibility of internet email.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
He's talking about Free-to-air. Probably of the satellite variety.
That assumes email can be accidentally deleted on my server. As it goes into 3 different copies, one of them remote, and I have no reason messing with any of the two copies that stay on the server, it cannot. I actually do know how an MTA works...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I've also been on Shaw since pretty much continuously since the first month they offered service, and I live in one of the first cities activated. Yes, about 14 years. Haven't used their email or web services since the first year.
I had one incident with Shaw which was very annoying. An OpenBSD firewall just suddenly stopped working with no change on my part. If just the firewall accessed the internet, it worked normally. But as soon a NAT client relayed traffic through the firewall concurrently, responses from the Shaw head-end would cease to arrive, for about 30 seconds. If I had ping running, I'd seen 30 ping packets go out, then all of sudden 30 pink packet responses, then maybe a few other packets, then another 30 second hiatus. Who knows, maybe I had something unorthodox in my pf configuration about handling all the background arp chatter. I had only ever aspired to "works for me" with my pf configuration.
The Shaw technician determined that the problem was customer premise equipment by showing that routing my service into a Mac with no firewall present worked just fine. The network trace showing their head-end buffering 30 seconds worth of ping responses and then blurping them back in a packet noogie didn't strike him as a hinting toward an anomaly with their own administration.
This had happened once before for a week or so, and then suddenly cleared itself up with no intervention on my part. The next time it was permanent.
I didn't feel like fighting with them or with messing with my firewall configuration, so I ordered Telus as a backup, and that worked perfectly with my firewall without changing anything. While I had both services, I observed that Shaw is fundamentally superior. You don't see this in data rates (not often) but you do see this whenever you're surfing the web with a big download running in background. Telus gets very chunky. I was banned by a family member from downloading anything on our Telus connection during a remote session to the office. Shaw has tiny lurches, too, but you almost don't notice them. This whole problem, likely having something to do with buffer bloat, has become progressively worse (not better) over the last 14 years, with the biggest uptick in chunkiness right around the time Netflix became popular.
Telus is also a vastly more irritating company to deal with. Don't even get me started, I could go for a week.
Shaw is no angel, but over the term of my experience, they've about as enlightened and as reliable as any ISP on the planet. There's no such thing as an ISP that never pisses anyone off.
However, by some miracle of economics, I'm now paying more for essentially the same service than I was 14 years ago. I was a heavy user then. Good grief, I downloaded 100 megabyte service patches over dial-up the year before Shaw offered broadband. Now that 100MB patch is 700MB ISO, so there has been usage inflation, yet hardly outstripping technological progress. Somehow in the telecoms industry, economies of scale run contrary to every other field of economic endeavor.
The Shaw email outage is a brutal error, but I wouldn't trade Shaw for 90% of the other ISPs out there, not without a gun to my head. This is easier for me to say having the wits to set myself apart from ISP email services 13 years ago. This also made it easier to switch pipes when I did experience my Shaw difficulties.
Note that my PF problems went away when I rebuilt my ruleset from scratch on a FreeBSD server that replaced my old OpenBSD firewall, when time permitted me to mess with this.
I'm sure it was a case where something unusual in my configuration triggered a bug in how the service was configured on their side. Shaw is not the kind of ISP that digs into anomalies even if you shove the packet trace right in their face. Maybe after this email thing boils over, they'll get religion on pursuing those small anomalies people were noticing a week before one final fault routed all their received email into the giant bit bucket.
My university (I graduated long ago) gives a complementary email account to all allumni. Very useful for maintaining a constant address regardless of ISP.
Tell that to google. I have no access by any method. End of discussion. I didn't even call them until after my username and passwd known to be good, was rejected trying to login via FF.
I don't use webmail. Ever. Its a solution promulgated because they can wrap it up in so damned much advertising that you sometimes can't find the frigging message. Why folks, mostly winders users I suppose, use it, and put up with the hassle of spending 5 minutes to log in using a browser, when that is an automatic function of fetchmail that takes less than 100 milliseconds when committed to a background script. If the login is successful, then that waiting mail is downloaded to my hard drive at 400kb/sec & 30 seconds later I'm gone. I hit the + key and read it.
Now, if they wanted to cull the accounts that are not seeing their advertising, that's fine by me, as I have access to other mail servers. But no, they can't be honest, they have to lie like a used car salesman, telling me my machine is infected. There are 2 or 3 mailing lists, one of them a 500 msgs/day list still being fed into it. But they'll probably not notice as they have probably and old message culler that kicks in when the mailbox is at 95%. And I have no clue how much space that is.
In short, but at length in this reply, it is googles problem. They can fix it. If they were changing something that required I change a fetchmail option, they could have issued a broadcast to all users message. They did not.
Cheers, Gene
I've run enterprise email servers before, and every now and then a connector will break. For example, piping email traffic to Exchange via Mail Marshal will infrequently result in mail delivery failures because something is broken. It gets fixed shortly after its reported, but it isn't always reported in a timely fashion. So, isn't this fairly common?
Shaw only throttles *upstream* P2P, so being a selfish ass, I don't care. I throttle it harder than Shaw does myself. :P
Shaw's published caps are clearly better than Telus'. I can't speak to enforcement any more, though. I actually used to work in Shaw's AUP team (which was like five people in the Vancouver office) and we'd just do the top X% of worst offenders from overloaded routers and they got an assload of warnings and phone calls before any enforcement, but that was years back (when the caps were actually kinda crappy, like 50GB on Xtreme) and things will likely be different now. And I've never been on Telus, so I have no experience there.
Shaw serving copyright infringement warnings? You got any links on that? Never heard of it before.
It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
That depends on how the spam is being sent to you.
If the spam is coming directly from a spamming tool that ignores failures then rejecting it won't create a bounce. On the other hand if the spam is being sent to you by a proper MTA then the reject will cause the sending MTA to send a bounce message to whoever the message claims to be from.
Ah. Good point. True.
I was referring to the destination MTA (your server) not generating a bounce, and in that equation I hadn't thought about the possibility of the sending MTA sending a bounce.
Thanks for the correction. :)
The error message you get when you can't log in directs you to a web page where it explains you have to log in by web. Maybe those "winders" users follow documentation better than you?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Not from fetchmail:
But I had to turn it on in .fetchmailrc & when I did, without the prescan by mailfilter, it worked, its sucking over 100 old mails dating back to March 1 now. So we wait and see if it will accept the next pull request. This gives me a list of lists whose subscriptions I need to move. lkml and mplayer for starters. Now I have re-enabled mailfilter too.
fetchmail's latest does have a new error message though, which for here make zero sense, not multidrop. everything goes to me although I do have a few /dev/null destinations in my procmailrc.
fetchmail: awakened at Tue Mar 12 11:46:52 2013
fetchmail: restarting fetchmail (/home/gene/.fetchmailrc changed)
fetchmail: warning: multidrop for pop.gmail.com requires envelope option!
fetchmail: warning: Do not ask for support if all mail goes to postmaster!
fetchmail: starting fetchmail 6.3.9-rc2 daemon
And the docs for 6.3.9-rc2 do not appear to discuss this. In any event, if mailfilter doesn't nuke it on the server before fetchmail pulls it, its handed off to to procmail SA and clamav. I see what survives that.
Anyway after 12 days, its working again, until gmail gets another fart stuck crossways I guess. As to when that might be, I haven't the foggiest.
Cheers, Gene.
Too bad it refuses to talk IMAP properly.
Shaw might be less abusive of their customers of their internet service.
Incorrect. Shaw acts like a monopoly in many respects and so does not always care about customer loyalty. So they often use dirty tricks to maximize profits. I ran into this when they offered me a "free upgrade" to faster Internet service. After the free trial I requested a switch back to my original lower priced service and suddenly my IP phone service no longeer worked. When I called them to complain they said my phone would only work if I paid them an extra $10 per month QOS (quality of service) package. Even though my phone was working fine before the "free upgrade". Then they tried to get me to switch to their IP phone service which they just happened to begin one month after they upgraded me.
So basically, Shaw began an IP phone service and then screwed all existing customer already using other IP phone services into paying more.
Here they are two monopolies. Shaw and Telus. They are the only Internet and major phone providers. They play off of each other in order to make sure customers pay as much as possible for service. They do not compete on price... not in a competitive way.
SMTP isn't multicast. It still has to be received by a single MTA, and then spit out to all the storage locations. If the initial receiving MTA dumps it without storing it properly, then it's going to get deleted. Even if you have multiple MX records, the sender doesn't try to use the second unless it knows the first has failed.
The single point of failure is still the primary MTA.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
So? Traditional UNIX MTAs are extremely reliable. And the SMTP dialog is only completed successfully _after_ the email has been stored. This is not some kind of Microsoft trash we are talking about here. Also, the whole discussion is about loss by admin error, just in case you forgot.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Nonsense, I finally* got a call from Shaw after my second month of using 1Tb of my 200Gb cap, and they basically said, 'hey, quittit.' No threats, no charges. I have never* received any* copyright warnings either...
http://marsandmore.com - Posters of space, spacecraft, and astronomy.