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."

Wonder if they can be sued

[kalirion]

This isn't a free webmail account, this is something customers pay for. Some people could have lost a lot of business. And what if someone has been searching for a job for the last 6 months and their monster.com etc contact info has only this email address?

I bet I know whats happening...

[aliendisaster]

I used to work for a hosting company (a pretty shitey one at that). They refused to update their mail systems so all customers had email issues. They used an old customized version of SendMail on the Linux box's. The problem, the queues were getting full and either locking the mail up or raising the machine's processes up so it could no longer do anything. The solution, delete the mail off the server and kill all processes. This was a temporary solution that turned into a permanent one because "It worked." The problem was, the mail was gone when it happened so all the tech support guys had to hear the poo poo mad customers.

I would wager thats whats going on here and they don't want to admit it. There is some admin there (or it could be company policy) that see's alot of mail getting queued up but not being delivered but instead of fixing the problem he just deletes the mail and everything's fine.

Not only losing incoming email

[pmuellr]

Last month or so, yahoo started bouncing email from earthlink. 100% of the time. Calls to support eventually indicated it was a known problem (didn't admit it until pressed), and then indicated multi-day wait for it to be fixed. It was easier to fix on my wife's side; reroute her mail through my hosting server. Though the advice from our 13 year old son was probably the best: "why aren't you using gmail?"

Re:White list spam block with challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, we notify customers that use earthlink to get another email provider as we can not send email to earthlink because of that problem.

I also refuse to deal with ebay customers on earthlink. I get that response email and I hit the trash with their questions.

Re:DIY

[towerdave]

Hmmmm, I have been running SBS2003 at home for a few years now with no problems, including Exchange. No MCSE here, although I'd love to be able to get one now that they aren't dumbed down. I'm not saying it's the perfect tool for the job, but it works fine for me.

I used to be in Tech Support for MindSpring, and remember the Netcom mail fiasco. This sounds like it could be worse. Glad I'm not there anymore.

TowerDave

Re:Lost e-mail? WHAT THE HECK?

[SanityInAnarchy]

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

Then it's a horrible policy.

Every single email service I've signed up for that does spam filtering has a "spam" or "bulk mail" or "junk mail" folder. I implemented my own when I deployed my own personal server.

And virus scans should be able to remove the virus and tag the message as "WHOOPS THIS HAS A VIRUS", but shouuld not drop them on the floor.

If this is causing undue stress, you could implement policies in the handshake. "Oh, I've gotten 100 emails from you in the past hour, and 90 of them were spam/viruses. REJECT." Or put it in some sort of tarpit.

An email service losing email is somewhat like anyone losing data these days. There is absolutely no situation where email should completely disappear into an email server and never come out.

So? No guaranteed US postal mail either ....

[King_TJ]

But if they started losing 9 out of every 10 letters you mailed, how long would you keep using them?

Re:DIY

[jafiwam]

Essentially true.

Though I wouldn't use the word "inept".

Try putting a couple hundred domains and 10k users on it and your threat surface for spammers goes up exponentially from a small server with a few domains and a couple hundred users.

Ours gets tens of thousands of bogus connection attempts from spammers per hour. How many are you getting? 50? That's not including the stuff that does get into the filters to be processed by the rules.

Until you have run a big box with lots of users on it, you have no freaking idea what we deal with on a daily basis. And it has gotten MUCH worse in the past 18 months.

Boost to my ego...

[Anonymous Coward]

All this time I thought people just wanted to stop talking to me, including all those mailing lists I'm on. Wow, it's great to know that it's not, but rather my Earthlink email account.

I personally haven't lost email through my earthlink account yet. I have noticed that their spam filters occasionally throw them in the wrong place. I had to turn off spam filtering, re-enable it, and then rebuild my allowed Senders list all over. Seems the issue may be with the number of emails you have in your allowed senders list. They used to limit that list at one point, but I haven't seen that limit lately, so it may be the cause of the issues. Also their test of the new webmail built off openlaszlo was pulled and ran rather slow once they actually tried to implement it.

Keep in mind this is the same company that I spent hours on the phone with trying to get them to bill my CC instead of a closed sprint DSL account for just the email address. After I got frustrated, I called the cancelation department and got it resolved by them. I'd say skip calling tech support these days, call the cancelation department, tell them you have had it with lost emails and let them pressure the lazy techs there to fix the issue. Either that or just drop them if you can stand having to re-subscribe to all sorts of junk, change your billing notices, contact info for all your friends in email, etc... After a while I decided dealing with them was less of a headache than trying to find out where to change my email addy at on some of the lists I get mail from.