Slashdot Mirror
British ISP Bombards Users With Deleted Emails
judgecorp writes "For three days, customers at British ISP Sky have been receiving a flood of old and deleted messages. The problem started when the company switched its email provider from Google to Yahoo. As it began to move accounts from one provider to another, it became obvious that the new provider could not tell which emails in the old system had been sent or deleted. Some users had up to 8000 old messages. The incident has been going for three days, as users are migrated. Sky is apparently unable to fix the problem — its best advice been to suggest users delete the old messages."
actually, I'd wager it's Google who bungled it - they store items their own way - because they can - and when asked to move the old mailbox, my bet is that Google didn't use the IMAP protocol as written and transferred all the deleted mail in a folder marked something like "Google-like deleted folder but not really deleted just archived". When the Yahoo servers received it, they ignored it as non-standard and shunted the "deleted" (but not actually deleted) mail to the inbox.
If Google had actually deleted the mail instead of archiving it, then there wouldn't be a problem.