WE'VE LOST YOUR E-MAILS -- AGAIN!

Are you part of the small minority? According to PlusNet, it is only a small minority of us who have received emails over the past 72 hours with blank subject lines and no message. I'd like to know how many this has happened to. Last time PlusNet lost email, they told us not to worry, it was probably all SPAM. This time we know it's not, because we can see the sender. We shouldn't have to email correspondents asking them to re-send, because our ISP lost their message

Anyone else seriously sick of this unreliability?



PlusNet support message below
***************************************


01/09/2006 @ 15:19 Email Delays - UPDATE
This is an update to the previous report regarding email delays, a copy of which can be found here:-
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1157103112.htm

We are pleased to report that our email queues remain at a manageable level and email should now be delivered on time.

There is a possibility that some old email may still be slightly delayed.

Throughout the duration of this problem a small minority of customers reported receiving a number of incomplete or malformed emails. These may have comprised of blank emails or emails with partial content.

Our network engineers identified this as a problem affecting 2 of our mxcores (mail servers). The corruption of this email was caused by a problem with the software that resides on our Antivirus platform. We regret to inform customers that due to the technical nature of this problem it is not possible to retrieve the full content of these emails.

We would like to apologise to customers for the inconvenience and their continued patience over the past few days.

Service Status will remain at amber over the weekend as we continue to monitor the platfrom.

Kind Regards.

Bob Pullen
Customer Support

give them their dues, they apologised

In reply to:

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One thing that these guys (other ISPs) all have in common is their complete inability in being able to manage a network, which is something that we are totally transparent on and also do totally effectively.

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Sorry, I just wanted to be first for once. =)

As you were ...

I had a few blank emails a couple of days ago. Everyone appeared to be spam to me (based on senders address and/or subject). I have received every non-spam email although some have been delayed.

I hope that was a sarcastic comment

bs0d.

lol you dont know me obviously

How dare you steal my signature! The bill is in the post.

A lot of people had feared this and it seems they were right to do so.

I find it amazing that 2 users were being spammed so heavily that it brought the whole email system to its knees as well as bring the portal to a crawl and crash. They were reportedly receiving 10% of all email to the relevant servers AFAIK. I am not certain what PN are doing but something is seriously wrong with their setup and not being technical I can't even advise.

I was wondering if there was some new virus/trojan out because at the same time Plusnet had issues, the Eclipse network monitor was also reporting problems with their mail servers also timing out.

to be fair my email has been carp from F2S for the last 24 hours, they are blaming spam

Edited by soundsystem (Fri 01-Sep-06 23:24:30)

There is definately something going on atm as thats now 3 providers who are having issues (F2S and PN confirmed as because of spam and Eclipse who don't tell you much).

will find my reply from cs and post it in the min


found it

Firstly allow me to apologise for the inconvenience this is causing.

There has been a SPAM attack on one of our mail servers.

We are dealing with it, but at the moment emails are being delayed by up to an hour and a half.

The problem has now been resolved but there is a backload of emails which will take a while to clear.

Hope this has helped

Regards

Edited by soundsystem (Fri 01-Sep-06 23:24:12)

What PN explained was that some spam was sent out using two people's domain names and email addresses and the non-delivery report is what caused the overload from thousands of those replies rather than a virus.

just received an email i sent to myself 48 hours ago - quality!

Sorry if I didn't make it clear, I initially thought it could be a virus or trojan, but ruled that out when it was reported to have been caused by only a couple of accounts. It is just odd that at least 3 ISPs all suffered similar mail problems at the same time.

This just shows how shoddy their in-house procedures are..


There is quite clearly NO defined configuration details for any server, with it being done any "old way as long as it works" slapdash installation.

How the hell can you "mis-configure" two servers??? The only way you do this is if you have no details on how it should be done and therefore people configure them from the pervious knowledge of how they did the last one.... however many months before.


Its just typical shoddy PlusNet to be honest.


It should of been installed, then checked, then a second engineer check the settings, and then once confirmed all settings are correct, allowed to go into a live enviroment.

Remember we are talking about servers that deal with peoples e-mails screwing it up results in lost e-mails ... as they have then found out however many days later..

Edited by deleted (Sat 02-Sep-06 07:42:09)

"Are you part of the small minority?"

Yes, I am.

Plusnet really screwed up, thankfully my new ISP were kind enough to send me the contents of the email (my "Welsome" message (mail/news server/DNS info. etc) via normal printed mail so I could re-configure my software after BT had migrated me!

Plusnet - very adept at turning a problem into a catastrophe ...

i agree...shoddy in the extreme.

it shows no one gets the boot at plusnet because failures happen multiple times. if i made mistakes like this in my job resulting in data loss and then happened to be stupid enough to let it happen again i'd be out on my ear ASAP. i'd probably get a fairly stiff reprimand just for introducing the possibility of data loss or backup failure. plusnet go the whole hog more than once and still nothing changes in house.

shameful operation they are.

But you did get it!!

These have been lost!

fair point, i was just highlighting another ISP has issues with mail as well.

you know in the interests of been fair and the like

But arn't they 2 years ahead of the rest and just lost a batch of emails already.
Maybe in two years time every ISP will be losing emails on a regular basis.

This ISP is just more than accident prone.

lol i cant possibly comment

in 2 years tho will we be using email?

Of course. PN are using it now and they are two years ahead, so we must do or that would be a logical impossibility!.