Massive Email Crash Hits Canadian ISP Shaw 150
rueger writes "One of Canada's biggest cable/Internet providers has their customers in an outrage. '... after an interruption of Shaw's email services Thursday led to millions of emails being deleted ... About 70 per cent of Shaw's email customers were affected when the company was troubleshooting an unrelated email delay problem and an attempted solution caused incoming emails to be deleted ... Emails were deleted for a 10-hour period between 7:45 a.m. and 6:15 p.m. Thursday, although customers did not learn about the problem until Friday, and only then by calling customer service or accessing an online forum for Shaw Internet subscribers.' To top it off, when Shaw did send out notices about this, they looked so much like every day phishing spam that many people deleted them unread."
Re:I thought MY US ISP sucked donkey schlongs... (Score:5, Interesting)
Shaw is probably the least abusive of the canadian major telecom companies. I've been a shaw customer for 14 years and this is the only incedent I've had other than lines being blown down in a storm. My wife's email was effected but mine was not. This is a normal (and rare) human error... most of the actual abuse telecom companies dish out is abusive contracts and misleading advertizing like 3-year cellphone contracts and "Optik TV and Internet" ... which is actually satellite and DSL, not FTTH.
Re:Not an "Isolated event" (Score:4, Interesting)
"A small number of our customers may be experiencing a minor problem with..." is standard big provider boilerplate for "between some and most of our customers are having a major problem with..."
Until proven otherwise, when I hear "a small number of...", I immediately translate that into "a few have yet to complain to us about..."
Re:It's Shaw. This is not surprising. (Score:5, Interesting)
Damn, isn't there anybody here but me who has been locked out of their gmail account for about 2 weeks now? I have not changed a thing in my fetchmailrc or mailfilterrc's, and have been sucking my gmail account dry at 3 minute intervals with fetchmail for damned near 5 years.
2 weeks ago, both fetchmail and mailfilter started reporting password failures. It worked about 30 minutes a day for 5 or 6 days, but has not worked since the last week of February.
I call them up, get some yahoo whose command of English sucks dead toads through soda straws, he leaves to go get someone who speaks English, but the next guy isn't a hell of a lot better, and he finally speaks clear enough that he is telling me the account is blocked because my machine is compromised. I object, its a linux box, behind a router running DD-WRT. Doesn't make squat to him, my machine is compromised.
Seeing as how everything that comes in here has to run the clamav gauntlet, and that this is a linux machine which has not had java enabled anywhere near firefox in months, currently at V-19.0.2, AND that its behind a router running DD-WRT, AND neither chkrootkit nor rkhunter can find anything to complain about, I seriously doubt it has been compromised.
I had been gradually weaning my mailing list activities, moving them to other servers precisely because of their no dups policy, so that was all the impetus I needed to just move all my subs. I still scan them on schedule just in case they actually get someone who reads english wondering why a fetchmail instance is failing to login, telling fetchmail the password is toast when its the same pw I've been using for years, and its long enough John didn't get it in 6 hours of grinding on it when I last checked with john the ripper.
Until that happens, screw gmail, and the camel that rode in on them.
Cheers, Gene