UK ISP PlusNet Accidentally Deletes 700GB of Email

steste writes "A tale of email woe for PlusNET ISP. According to this announcement they have spent the last month attempting to recover 700GB of accidentally deleted emails. By their estimates, up to 12GB of these had yet to be read by their recipients. Despite the efforts of a data recovery specialist, they have now given up on recovering any of the deleted data. Well that's one way to deal with spam." Spam is one thing; I just wonder how inevitable losses like this one square with the EU-wide data retention laws.

Googlymail

[Philomathie]

I'm glad I forced my family to switch to Gmail *strokes Gmail* because we just happen to be on PlusNet...

your objection is SO last week

[misanthrope101]

You do realize, I suppose, that all stories have, by virtue of describing events in the past, already happened? That's not to say we should cover the release of the 386sx processor or anything that archaic, but stories that highlight the unreliability of systems we heavily rely on do raise questions and get the ol' brain-cells moving about. It's a discussion site, you know, and even if the events discussed are more than 3 days old, sometimes interesting points are still made. That would be what we call the point of discussion sites.

Besides, it always mystifies me that people who feel that their time is wasted by duplicate or outdated stories have no problem wasting more of their time, not to mention server space and the time of all the readers, posting "this has already been covered." Do you get karmic cool points for ranting (again) about (another) dupe? What's the payoff? Does it make you happy? I'm not the most fanatically efficient person out there, but it seems petty and, well, stupid to not only dwell on, but to go to the point to complain in writing about the dupe or outdated story, which actually raises the net energy and time spent on this problem that you ostensibly found so vexing. No, I'm not complaining about you, only wondering what the hell you find so moving about the whole issue. Is it just the principle? A matter of pride? Does it bode ill for humanity? What gives?

Quality Company

[WebfishUK]

I've been a PlusNet user for several years now and have nothing but praise for them. Reliable service, competitive pricing and excellent support. However, I've always used Yahoo for my email...

Re:Data Recovery Specialist

[walt-sjc]

To be fair, they were probably NOT using Windows (which is much easier to recover deleted files from than Unix is.) Also, recovering a few gig on a drive is very different than recovering millions of files totalling HUNDREDS of gigs spanning dozens of drives. Most likely, the drive were not brand-new high density models. Many ISP's still have massive arrays of old 36G drives or smaller (which isn't really a bad thing considering the drive latency issues when supporting a million users. You want to spread your load over as many arms as possible.) RAID systems can make things even more difficult.

Anyway, the big question of the day is: where are the backups????

Re:Welcome to three weeks ago

[value_added]

It could be that people don't submit articles from El Reg because they can't figure out what a punter is. At any rate ...

From the article:

"At the time of making this change the engineer had two management console sessions open - one to the backup storage system and one to live storage. These both have the same interface ... the engineer made an incorrect presumption that the window he was working in was the back-up rather than the live server. Subsequently the command to reconfigure the disk pack and remove all data therein was made to the wrong server."

Anyone who has inadvertently typed an 'rm -rf' should now feel a bit better.

I do wonder whether this will cause people (and companies) to re-evaluate the growing popularity and hence reliance on web-based email. Myself, I don't go near it. Leaving the reliability concerns, and ignoring the historically bad reputation of services such as Hotmail, the spammy footers and similarly badly formatted garbage that users of web-based email end up sending everyone else, I can't fathom why it's so difficult for someone simply to log in remotely to a server that their company manages, or their own box at home. I hear you can even use those same tubes to do it.

This incident makes for a good argument, but my guess is that people will want to continue use their browsers for everything and similarly continue to rely on companies they think they know.

Am I missing something?

[OnesAndNoughts]

FTA: Our data recovery specialists have been able to provide a partial file list of the email data, but it has since become clear that we will not be able to recover the directory structure. Without the directory structure we cannot recover any meaningful data, due to complexity of associating the data with the relevant customer accounts.

If they've got the e-mails why not just re-queue it? Surely the "To" field is a bit of a give-away.

Re:Conspiracy

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is, was the admin fired before, or after the deletion?

what do you mean by "secure"?

[artifex2004]

For "secure" and/or "important" e-mails, they get stored locally or on my mobile device and possibly even printed out and locked away for later retrieval. "Important" e-mails will be archived on GMail but "secure" ones never are.

What do you mean by "secure"? Surely you wouldn't trust anything that is a security concern with SMTP and possibly also POP3, two protocols where everything is sent plaintext.

difficult to create a universal standard

[MarkByers]

"Would it really be that difficult to create a universal standard..."

Yes.

Re:what do you mean by "secure"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you wouldn't trust anything that is a security concern with SMTP and possibly also POP3, two protocols where everything is sent plaintext.

Four words for you:

----- BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE -----

Re:I guess if I look at my email

[walt-sjc]

1) Use your ISP's servers (or other email service) for outbound mail. In 99.9% of "blocking" cases, port 587 (the MSA port) is still open so you CAN use some other service. Inbound is generally not an issue (unless your ISP is on Planet Stupid. In this case, get a real ISP and not one that delivers "damaged" service.)
2) Use Spamassassin, and tune it according to the WIDELY available docs. SA even runs on Windows.

Re:I guess if I look at my email

[infosec_spaz]

JEEZUS!!! When did email become so fucking important as to go through this kind of self torture?!?!? Just read it, and delete it!!

Re:Welcome to three weeks ago

[Jugalator]

I do wonder whether this will cause people (and companies) to re-evaluate the growing popularity and hence reliance on web-based email. Myself, I don't go near it.

I wouldn't rely on a webmail much if it's from some random local ISP, but if it's about a company having a major part as its company profile to provide webmail, like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo!, I think you'd be pretty safe. I can't imagine these lacking some healthy amounts of redundancy as it would be devastating if e.g. Gmail suddenly crashed and Google couldn't do anything.

Re:I guess if I look at my email

[spyrochaete]

I ran a POP3/SMTP server for many years. It was a great experience and I learned volumes. Especially about open relays. One day I investigated why no email was being sent or recieved, and found an 800MB cache file clogging up the works thanks to 40,000 spams being sent from China. That took a little while to mop up.

Spam became such a nuisance that I recently migrated to Google's free Gmail for your domain [google.com] hosting service. It's webmail and POP3 client complient and the spam filter is a friggin marvel. It intercepts at least 199 of every 200 spams. I highly recommend their service! Free access gets you 25 addresses with 2GB each!

Re:On the plus side....

[Xenna]

How the h*ll does a repeat of a joke that was already made in the article itself get modded up as +5 Funny? Instant replay?

Shall I repeat it again to increase my karma?

X (puzzled)