12-09-2006, 11:14 AM
Quote:Here is something I wish I were making up. A good friend of mine noticed last June a sudden and precipitous decline in his volume of incoming e-mail with the numbers dropping by 80-90 percent. Was he less popular, less interesting than before? Or maybe some Bayesian filter had been imposed by his ISP (Earthlink) to suddenly spare him completely from spam. No such luck.
The trend continued so my friend, who has long been in the networking business, himself, started running experiments. 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...
full article: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/...01274.html
ign028: Kim