EarthLink Is Losing a Lot of Email 291
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."
What MTA do they use? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lost e-mail? WHAT THE HECK? (Score:1, Informative)
White list spam block with challenge (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:DIY (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What MTA do they use? (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work there back in the day.
Re:DIY (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wonder if they can be sued (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What MTA do they use? (Score:3, Informative)
These days, good old postfix is more than sufficient. Or qmail, if you can stand it -- it works for Yahoo, who deals with more than a little bit of email.
Re:Lost e-mail? WHAT THE HECK? (Score:5, Informative)
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:DIY (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:No guaranteed email delivery (Score:1, Informative)
If the email doesn't get there, it is BOUNCED! not DELETED.
K?
Re:Powweb sometimes does not forward email. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No guaranteed email delivery (Score:1, Informative)
I know, I violate this point of the RFC many times a day by silently dropping bounces to invalid local accounts, and silently dropping stuff from some bad spam nets. For other stuff, there's greylisting, QueueLA and RefuseLA.
Michael
Re:No guaranteed email delivery (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 [faqs.org], 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.
More Info via Earthling (Score:2, Informative)
Re:As An Earthlink Customer (Score:2, Informative)
So it probably doesn't affect the majority of their users who are not doing anything fancy.
Re:DIY (Score:3, Informative)
Same here. Ever since they closed the Pasadena Call Center and dumped about 2/3 of their most experienced employees the quality of service has been dropping. It used to be that you had to understand what was going on in order to work there. Now, all you need is the ability to read scripts. You don't even need to be able to tell when the scripts don't apply, or when to ask somebody that knows what they're doing for help. Just read the script and don't care if it works or not.
I must say that this is just typical of the new EarthLink mis-management. Do anything that increases the short-term bottom line and to hell with the long-term effects. EarthLink has fallen into the hands of the MBAs and doesn't have long to last.
Re:They DID notify customers (Score:3, Informative)
Mail problems at Earthlink - Insiders view (Score:2, Informative)
Earthlink Mail (Score:1, Informative)
At least twice a year i would get an influx of email, all of it past due, yet all of it picked up by me via POP3 with instructions to "delete from server on pickup." I spent a month and a half trying to get info from Earthlink as to why my supposedly deleted mail was being stored on some ELN server somewhere and then vomited up to me somewhere in Nov or Dec of each year.
I also performed several iterations of a similar trace-mail routine, sending duplicate messages to three accounts; most often, maybe 10% of those emails ended up in the Earthlink mailbox. Needless to say, i chose to use a company who managed to get all of my emails to me.
I recommend to all my clients that they do NOT use Earthlink if they really need their email.