How thorough was the Webmail investigation?

While we await the, yet again, delayed Webmail incident report, I have to question the validity of the investigation because of the following sequence of events:

Monday (May, 6)
13:37

I've also not received any following feedback from information given to two members of PlusNet staff. I've received nothing more being ignored by one and a statement that all addresses they've checked were found to be in the database from the other. I don't think it's too much to ask for them to at least follow up on these things.

It has been suggested that email addresses were transferred to the atmail system en-masse when it was setup. I don't have the posts to hand but this was an interpretation of a statement by PlusNet, not a wild conspiracy theory. This would explain why even email addresses which were never on contact through anyone sending mail to or from that address via webmail would have been in the database. If true, it's another bizarre decision and one that needs to be justified.

Ian,

Whilst I understand your concern, we are confident that all addresses hit by this incident were present in the @Mail database. As I have already mentioned to you on a number of occasions we checked a wealth of email addresses from customers who were in a similar position to yourself.

As you are aware, I also collated the addresses you sent to me via PM.

Our priority at the moment is on getting the incident report out and concentrating on the wider user issues such as importing missing address contacts etc. from the @Mail database across to SquirrelMail.

I could probably get hold of the evidence for you but it takes time. To really dig deep into the logs (which is where we found one of your addresses IIRC) we're talking a good 40 minutes work. Bear in mind too that the database is offline and the servers relocated to Sheffield from London.

I will revisit my PMs and grab the email addresses to see what if anything I can do for you but please be aware that this may take me a while as it takes a long time and those in a position to get the information for me are very, very busy at the moment.

Kind Rgds,

Fair enough. It does take time to search for individual details and I can understand it may not be the best way to spend resources at this time.

That said, I'd have thought a system to quickly and easily check through the logs for a given address or account wouldn't be that hard to knock up and would be an invaluable tool for investigation and customer queries. It's always easier to let a script run on something than perform the same tedious operations dozens of times after all

We're investigating, were confident we haven't missed anything but will be following up on individual cases and performing ongoing and deeper investigation later, but are very busy right now.. is, IMHO a fair answer.

Thanks Bob.

Bob,
Thank you and I appreciate that I

In reply to:

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It has been suggested that email addresses were transferred to the atmail system en-masse when it was setup.

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Yes, I've seen that statement but the PM's bouncing back and forth between PlusNet and myself clearly stated that the addresses were found in the logs and last Tuesday.
I simply asked for a copy of the log with that info, this seemed a reasonable request to make as I had already been supplied a snippet containing details for (as already stated) an email address of mine that I had not asked about.

I merely mention that possibility as well.. it's something else it would be nice to have confirmation of

I'd guess there may be multiple places within webmail that need to be checked. Some will be easy and lead to a quick response, others as Bob has said will take a lot longer.

In reply to:

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I'd guess there may be multiple places within webmail that need to be checked.

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They may well have checked in numerous places when trying to find a connection between email addresses and the Webmail server(s), however in this case it

Yes, they were located in different tables over numerous Webmail databases afaik. The query we had (ie the 'quick tool') gave back true or false based on searching a pile of text for an email address from different tables, but it didn't return what tables and fields the email address was linked to. The query to extract that detail and turn it into something meaningful is too hard to write generically, but one of the DBAs can (And will if required for us to be 100% here) dig out the details as needed (As Bob says though, it has proved time consuming for some of the addresses we have had to find and as such it may take a while).

In terms of the email addresses that were copied from our old Webmail system to Atmail, it may have been a weird decision that needs to be justified (I don't disagree), but it is what it is and was a decision we can't reverse now. I don't think there is anyone here that will be able to give the definitive answer about why we chose to do it that way - I guess it seemed like the right thing to do at the time and for existing webmail users it would certainly have been a requirement. If I do find out the answer to this one I will let you know...

Ian