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."
Blame? (Score:3, Funny)
Who? [youtube.com]
I thought MY US ISP sucked donkey schlongs... (Score:1)
WAIT.... "deleted?"
As in, "spilled the seed on the ground?"
I can understand if things maybe don't get delivered for a few hours, or maybe a few got munged up somewhere during the repairs, but to blissfully direct the firehose into the abyss that is /dev/null...
Who pays for that?
Oh, wait. Canadians are rather accepting of abuse on the part of their phone/cable/broadband suppliers, and the Tories back up the big businesses.
"Unacceptable! Unacceptable! Mepps, mepps!"
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.
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Teksavvy seems to be getting worse. I check them every so often, and last time I checked, their AUP now specifically says you can't run servers; I'm pretty sure it didn't used to say that. They don't appear to offer static IPs for residential accounts any more. Their business pricing isn't very competitive. Distributel's AUP looks similar to Teksavvy's and Shaw's. I can't really see much to recommend any of the resellers over just using Shaw directly any more unless you really need the 'unlimited' data. Tha
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Teksavvy seems to be getting worse. I check them every so often, and last time I checked, their AUP now specifically says you can't run servers; I'm pretty sure it didn't used to say that.
No it's always said that. Though they really don't enforce it unless people are being abusive, it's more of a CYA clause. They only offer static IP's for DSL customers, that being the nature and problems with the cable plants used by the majority of companies(rogers/shaw/cogeco). Really though everyone got the shaft from the CRTC on the latest round of TPIA agreements, and tek is moving to a new ATPIA system which will cost more. But you'll get more, which is okay. Though they're still fighting the rul
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Shaw actually has pretty crappy caps, and they DO enforce them. My Telus internet usage has recently, in the last 4-6 months, been removed from their services page, so even if they measure it, they can't enforce caps, because users can't check their own usage. Also, Shaw fairly strictly throttles P2P, and is happy to serve copyright infringement warnings.
That's not to say either one is particularly great.
I used to have ETTS from Novus, and that was very nice for a residential service, but it is only offered
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Shaw only throttles *upstream* P2P, so being a selfish ass, I don't care. I throttle it harder than Shaw does myself. :P
Shaw's published caps are clearly better than Telus'. I can't speak to enforcement any more, though. I actually used to work in Shaw's AUP team (which was like five people in the Vancouver office) and we'd just do the top X% of worst offenders from overloaded routers and they got an assload of warnings and phone calls before any enforcement, but that was years back (when the caps were actu
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Making mistakes is human. This is why a competent professional acknowledges that he will make a mistake sooner or later, and designs his activities so that mistakes in execution won't have catastrophic consequences. These guys failed to properly do this.
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Shaw might be less abusive of their customers of their internet service.
When it comes to other things, they're nasty as hell.
Barrett Xplore ring any bells for the Canadians here? Shaw taking over Starchoice ring any bells, too?
I ran my own store and decided to sell satellite service and equipment. Barrett Xplore wouldn't even give me the time of day. Eventually their answer was "FUCK OFF" (not joking, those were the actual words from the sales droid). I took their advice and sold FTA equipment after tha
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He's talking about Free-to-air [wikipedia.org]. Probably of the satellite variety.
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I work for TELUS, and can assure you that optik tv is NOT a satellite service. It is an IPTV service being delivered over either ADSL 2+ or VDSL connections (and sometimes fibre in new areas).
Satellite tv is offered in areas where we don't have the broadband infrastructure to support standard Optik TV. However we refer to that as TELUS satellite TV and not Optik tv.
I don't believe TELUS ever claimed optik was FTTH. The optik name refers to the fact that it is served by our new fibre network. The "last mile"
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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.
Less abusive to customer perhaps, not to their employees.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/03/08/bc-shaw-contracts.html
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"Optik TV and Internet" ... which is actually satellite and DSL
I'm a very happy Telus "Optik TV and Internet customer", and I assure you it's not satellite - It's IP TV. And yes, my Internet is delivered over a copper pair, but so what? It's fast and reliable - Faster than I was getting from Shaw when I switched.
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I've also been on Shaw since pretty much continuously since the first month they offered service, and I live in one of the first cities activated. Yes, about 14 years. Haven't used their email or web services since the first year.
I had one incident with Shaw which was very annoying. An OpenBSD firewall just suddenly stopped working with no change on my part. If just the firewall accessed the internet, it worked normally. But as soon a NAT client relayed traffic through the firewall concurrently, respon
Things like this (Score:5, Insightful)
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At least in the USA, then you get nailed for anywhere from 10-40% surcharges for "business-class service" which basically means you pay $400 a year for fixed IP and the "privilege" of running a server on your own broadband line."
My ISP tries to explain the ridiculous cost boost on "well, you get 'priority' on service calls. You have 10 email addresses and 10MB of free web space on our server!"
I shut them up one time:
I've been on "the internet" longer than you've existed as a company. Even at 2am, nobody has
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You don't need a fixed IP to receive mail. For years I've used a dynamic DNS service and that worked just fine. I've even for a while ran a web site off a dynamic DNS, also worked. Not recommended of course, but it works.
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Be aware: that was the old days. Nowadays, most need a business class service just to have port 80 and 25 unblocked. You can't run a web server or a mail server on most customer grade connection because the ports are blocked by your ISP.
I used to do it too. Only risk was that during the IP switch, due to the lag of DNS updates depending mostly on TTL and how server respect it, you may have somebody impersonating your site or grab your mail.
Risk was very slim, the machine that gets your old IP would have to
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How terrible!
And how do you access your own NAS or printer over the net?
These days, more and more devices come with their built-in webserver that enables the owner to contact home from his smartphone or tablet.
It is a security nightmare, but that is a different topic.
In the Netherlands, it is forbidden to filter internet other than for security or customer-opted convenience reasons (e.g. spam filtering).
Many providers also offer fixed or semi-fixed IP as standard feature.
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In a recent programme on local TV, some investigative journalist reported that they had found many
NAS devices online. A certain brand of NAS comes with sharing enabled by default, with a default password.
You just need to unpack your NAS and connect it to your local network and all the data you put on it
is accessible to the world. It uses UPNP to overcome the NAT problem.
The journalist found several NAS boxes with backups of very private data on it.
Another issue is the HP all-in-one printer/scanner device
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More importantly, you get an IP address from a range that is not on the ISP's dynamic range, which is always going to be on the RBLs, so good luck running your own mail server without a business class line. Personally, I just relay through dyndns, but then you lose the ability to see errors directly from the receiving party. I'll probably get around to getting a business line again eventually mostly because of this.
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I use my university alumnus account (Score:2)
My university (I graduated long ago) gives a complementary email account to all allumni. Very useful for maintaining a constant address regardless of ISP.
Because I DISagree (Score:2)
Imagine that - a registered member logs in as AC to tell us that he's a douche. Wow - at least he knows he's a douche!! There is hope for him. Not much, but some hope.
Don't worry (Score:5, Funny)
There will be more mail tomorrow.
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Which VP is he under then, sales?
DIY vs. ISP (Score:1)
I've hosted my own mail server for about 15 years and I regularly think to myself, 'I'm tired of worrying about hardware and my circuit. Maybe I should let somebody else host it.'
Then it seems there's always an article like this that clears my head.
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I have primary and secondary on differently hosted vservers with local backups (via procmail) and immediate forwarding to my machine at home. Very little chance of loss and hardware is the provider's to worry about.
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I've hosted my own mail server for about 15 years and I regularly think to myself, 'I'm tired of worrying about hardware and my circuit. Maybe I should let somebody else host it.'
Then it seems there's always an article like this that clears my head.
Why are you continuing to run a set-up that, by your own admission, is a great hassle ameliorated by a once in blue moon event? Seems like wearing a crash helmet whenever outdoors, and justifying it by pointing at an incident in which a pedestrian got clocked by a golf ball and ended up with a brain clot.
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Fair enough. I can totally understand those reasons.
This isn't unusual (Score:2)
/dev/null (Score:5, Funny)
isn't a holding-bay?
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isn't a holding-bay?
/dev/null isn't, but sadly the "Trash" folder is.
A few years ago I was working as an email administrator and got a call to someone's desk that was having a problem with their mail client because some of the folders were too full. One of them was Trash, so I was about to erase messages from the folder when the user paniced; "wait, that's important!"
For whatever reason, they were using the Trash folder for "real work"
(Sigh.)
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It's not that the person in question is stupid, it's that such peopl
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I had that too - some insane bullshit of using it as a transfer point to sort stuff.
If I remember correctly (it's been a long time) the user I was dealing with was deleting messages he had dealt with, but got into the habit of referring back to the messages when necessary in the Trash folder. I suggested moving these sort of messages to another locally-stored folder, but the user refused saying "I'm used to working out of my Trash now."
I'd set up mail clients to empty Trash on exit, and when the guy that was doing this logged back in it was of course empty, so he came to rant at me in the lunch room to the amusement of all onlookers.
Logical. I considered trying that, but never did.
Now every few months he rings me up about a full disk, and each time I have to suggest emptying the Trash mail folder and the "Recycle Bin" on his desktop.
That reminds me... another thing that was going on back then was that a small set of users refused to del
What about hiring competent engineers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like, ones that make a backup before messing with critical data? As an elementary precaution known to anybody halfway competent in IT?
This just demonstrates a massive, massive management screwup, as they allowed unqualified personnel to work on their systems. Save a buck, loose a million.
Yep, backup/snapshot before mucking with productio (Score:3)
"To err is human, to fuck up the whole system requires root."
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Indeed. And with preventing the server from accepting emails, and a snapshot, there would have been no loss at all. (Emails in the 3 minutes going to the secondary...)
Those truly incompetent are those not aware that they can make mistakes. Seems management is trying hard to make the engineers more like them.
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Yeap, the whole mail system is designed from the core so mail should never be lost as I learnt in my young days.
Managing to loose a single email never mind millions is quite an achievement.
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panic on sysadmin mailing lists
Hehehe, good old Microsoft. Never transparent, never clear, always good for surprises and gets more obscure than Linux kernel hacking when you have to fix problems MS did not anticipate. In German we call these "Schoenwettersysteme" (translates as "nice-weather only systems"). Toys, not fit for any real-world use.
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I would never trust exchange as a relay. Everywhere I worked where I had the power to do so, Exchange did not sit in the DMZ, and relayed through proper unix mail servers. I prefer sendmail, because I am familiar with it and know how to properly extend and secure it. Use postfix if you prefer, but again, I'd never trust a Microsoft Exchange mail relay.
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Yeap, the whole mail system is designed from the core so mail should never be lost as I learnt in my young days.
There were always ways to lose mails. One obvious way is if a mail server dies then you lose all mail between the last backup and the mailserver dieing. Another is if both the original mail and the bounce suffer a delivery failure but these circumstances were rare afaict. The majority of the time mails were either delivered successfully or bounced to the sender.
Then spam and virus mails with faked from addresses came along. If you bounce such mails you create backscatter for an unrelated user. If you reject
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There's a lot of incompetence about, especially bullshit such as the secondary being /dev/null itself as some sort of stupid anti-spam bandaid.
How stupid is that? Incredible! The whole reason for secondaries seeing more spam is that some of them do not have spam filters because of incompetent mailadmins. The fix is to either have the secondaries forward to the primaries (when they are back up and storing for some time before that) or to have the same spam filter on the secondaries.
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You are right. I was thinking of IMAP servers for clients sending outbound mail, but they should be separate and a secondary would not help.
Although the postfix/sendmail default for delivery failure is 2 days, I believe.
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Like, ones that make a backup before messing with critical data? As an elementary precaution known to anybody halfway competent in IT?
This just demonstrates a massive, massive management screwup, as they allowed unqualified personnel to work on their systems. Save a buck, loose a million.
Speculation: backed up the email server settings, made minor change such that spam matched against "*" wildcard.
Spam of course gets deleted and not backed up.
Hours later(!), someone notices overly aggressive spam filter and restores backed-up rules.
Just prior to xmas, I was without internet for > a week due to some routing issues within Shaw, so it may well be that they have an over abundance of incompetence these days.
Also, lost->lose. Tight->loose. See how easy it is to make a simple mistake o
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Hmm. Good theory!
If they were halfway competent, they would store the spam for a few days though, just for this eventuality. Personally, I keep all spam on my own mail servers for a while.
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I think you might have summed up the real issue in the part "Hours later(!)" ... I understand mistakes, I've made my share of real doozies... but what's the first thing you do after changing a system? TEST. Sure sometimes you don't manage to test every conceivable way something works, but even the simplest test will notice a complete failure like this (every time I touch my spam rules the first thing I do is send myself an email to make sure it still gets through)
So while I unfortunately understand a short
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Aaaand, fail! I have quite a bit of experience in that class, including several years of running network traffic capturing with very hard real-time conditions where all maintenance was done on the running system, because there was no other possibility. (Was easy though, as the whole thing was my own design. But it was listening on a backbone.) I have been running mail-servers for 15 years, DNS and web servers for 10. I have designed, built and administrated a computer cluster for 6 years. I admit that these
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I was just thinking that. I realise that there is a lot of data, but backups are really important. I've lost stuff before (drives dying) and I'm getting quite anal about making backups. I have a website with a crapload of software that I've built, including a backup system (backups the sites, the databases, and the backup software). The test is that its all saved my poor miserable hide, more than once. Accidentally deleting data is bad. Drives crashing is worse. I used to play an old-timer game calle
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Indeed. Everybody with real experience has lost or come close to losing data that they cared about. Those that can learn from experience learn to never be without backups and in particular to never, ever, ever work on life data without backups _before_ it is their job to handle critical data for others.
Re:What about hiring competent engineers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not at all. If you are halfway competent, then you are prepared for this scenario and the backup is not expensive. And if you are competent, then you have a reasonable cost-estimate for making your customers mad. These clowns did not have either it seems.
same PHB that let there data center fire take out (Score:2)
same PHB that let there data center fire take out 911 and other stuff in Calgary. Now I can see a fire killing all power or tripping the master power switch but not having a back up data center?
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I don't believe 911 was affected, though many other government services were affected, including all registry services, and all electronic health records in the hospitals. To be fair, I'm not sure how much blame Shaw has in that one, The government contracted IBM (I think) to do the data centre, and IBM (if that's who it was) hosted it in the Shaw building, Without knowing the contracts involved, it's equally likely that this was a government screw up, an IBM screw up, or a Shaw screw up. Ok, the amount of
HR sees = cs degree as compentent in IT (Score:2)
HR sees = cs degree as competent in IT while passing over people who went to tech schools or have years of experience
Not an "Isolated event" (Score:2, Informative)
From TFA : "The mistake was an “isolated event,” Lakshman said, and promised a detailed review, which would include a discussion about compensation."
Except it isn't. Few years ago I had a business's domain email hosted with Shaw (was included with the internet service and they provided IMAP), and they lost all of it. They wouldn't return my calls about it, and on the third time I called in a week or so later I was told it would not be recoverable, that there is no backup for their business ema
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..."
Ah... Shaw. Their email has caused grief for years (Score:1)
I've been working with a Vancouver based retailer's email newsletter for years. Around here, Shaw is by far the worst of the bigger email domains on the list for deliverability - at least on any of the big webmail providers, recipients can white-list the email address we use to send out emails. Further, some emails will be completely deleted and not put into the junk folder at all. And emails that are suspected spam, will be deleted after only 7 days - don't go on a 10 day vacation.
I could go on, but suffic
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BTW: Gmail provides IMAP and POP access, which is a stumbling block for those who want a desktop email client. I'm not sure about Yahoo or Hotmail.
I'm sorry, I don't follow your logic. How is providing the option for POP and IMAP -- in addition to webmail -- considered a "stumbling block"?
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Oh, sorry, I meant that in a good way. I meant that a lot of people need a desktop email client, and in the past Hotmail and Yahoo didn't offer that, whereas Gmail has had it for years.
It's Shaw. This is not surprising. (Score:3)
Also, gmail exists.
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
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Did you ask for your money back?
Re:It's Shaw. This is not surprising. (Score:5, Informative)
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Tell that to google. I have no access by any method. End of discussion. I didn't even call them until after my username and passwd known to be good, was rejected trying to login via FF.
I don't use webmail. Ever. Its a solution promulgated because they can wrap it up in so damned much advertising that you sometimes can't find the frigging message. Why folks, mostly winders users I suppose, use it, and put up with the hassle of spending 5 minutes to log in using a browser, when that is an automatic func
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Not from fetchmail:
But I had to turn it on in .fetchmailrc & when I did, without the prescan by mailfilter, it worked, its sucking over 100 old mails dating back to March 1 now. So we wait and see if it will accept the next pull request. This gives me a list of lists whose subscriptions I need to move. lkml and mplayer for starters. Now I have re-enabled mailfilter too.
fetchmail's latest does have a new error message though, which for here make zero sense, not multidrop. everything goes to me although
Cmon (Score:2, Funny)
Haven't we all fantasized about just deleting the goddamn queue and going home?
Last year, their datacenter had fire/explosions... (Score:1)
http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/07/13/2050234/citys-it-infrastructure-brought-to-its-knees-by-data-center-outage
Like with everything digital.... (Score:3)
...if your email is not in at least two physically separate places, you are at risk of losing all of it, forever.
It's weird Shaw can't restore from a backup - the article is a bit weird on the exact details about what happened and just ends with "the emails were not backed up".
If your online mail provider does not allow you to access or export your data to your own PC (via IMAP, POP, or whatever) then you should switch to one that does - and start backing up your own email if you want to be more confident that it's going to survive catastrophes.
Backups wouldn't help - storing 2 places would (Score:3)
Remember this folks before considering outsourcing, it's not their email so they don't care about it as much as you do. While you may want to keep stuff in two place
What? (Score:5, Informative)
"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."
Erm. No they didn't? I'm looking at one right now and it doesn't look remotely like 'every day phishing spam'. It doesn't offer me anything, threaten me with anything, or ask me to click on anything. It doesn't include any links except to a forum thread, which the text doesn't make any special effort to make you click on. It didn't trigger my mental 'phishing detector' in the slightest.
I got the email notification late Saturday, two days after the event happened, I guess. That's not a horrible delay. I also saw a bunch of delayed mails come through around that time - 10 or so - and they notified me of the sender and subject line of three mails that were lost, so looks like they managed to recover quite a lot.
I dunno, I guess I'm not TOTALLY OUTRAGED at this. As another commenter said, you know, admins screw up sometimes. Lord knows I have. The fact that they're at least able to identify the subject lines of all the lost mails makes a big difference; you could get any really vital ones re-sent.
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Oh, and I should have included that there were zero spelling errors, which pretty much disqualifies it as a phishing attempt on its own. :) The Venn diagram of 'phishers' and 'people in possession of working spell check' seems to have no overlap.
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Indeed not, but it is a rhetorical flourish. It's a semi-common usage to denote an incredulous response to a wrong assertion. The idea, I think, is that both a question and an incredulous response rise in pitch at the end.
Email is designed for this. (Score:1)
Well if everybody has their mail servers configured correctly the incoming mail should be flag for redelivery by the sending MTA for at least 2-4 days, so hopefully nothing is lost. I believe Sendmail is 4 days. You would think with so many users Shaw would also have at least secondary MX records for failover. Despite being a horrible protocol email does have it's delivery protections. The problem these days is that everybody *expects* immediacy with a technology that was designed with broken connections i
Re:Email is designed for this. (Score:4, Informative)
The emails were received and accepted, but then deleted. There is nothing your MTA is going to do about this.
People mock me for running my own servers (Score:3)
But, if anything happens, It's my own fault. I don't have to trust my ISP to do anything but provide the pipe.
Re:Sometimes it's better to copy and forward... (Score:4, Insightful)
Except when the failing account is that forwarder account.
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Re:Sometimes it's better to copy and forward... (Score:5, Informative)
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The details are that the messages were never delivered in the first place, your setup would not protect against such a problem.
That's true.
How bad this is depends on the system -- in this case it sounds like Shaw was doing "accept, then drop" which is the worst case because no one is notified of the failure. If however Shaw rejected spam rather than accept it, the sending mail system would notify the sender that the message was not delivered. It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then f
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It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
That depends on how the spam is being sent to you.
If the spam is coming directly from a spamming tool that ignores failures then rejecting it won't create a bounce. On the other hand if the spam is being sent to you by a proper MTA then the reject will cause the sending MTA to send a bounce message to whoever the message claims to be from.
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It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
That depends on how the spam is being sent to you.
If the spam is coming directly from a spamming tool that ignores failures then rejecting it won't create a bounce. On the other hand if the spam is being sent to you by a proper MTA then the reject will cause the sending MTA to send a bounce message to whoever the message claims to be from.
Ah. Good point. True.
I was referring to the destination MTA (your server) not generating a bounce, and in that equation I hadn't thought about the possibility of the sending MTA sending a bounce.
Thanks for the correction. :)
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I do much the same with my own primary and secondary on hosted vservers and forward to my home-machine (via dyn-dns). So far, no loss.
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If the primary was down, the email would have gone to the secondary. That did not happen so far, ever, except when I tested it. Also, failure to forward results in an email that eventually gets delivered if email gets through at all. So unless the server is down for several days, I would have known. Except for very exotic scenarios, that means no loss. Postfix is a very, very reliable MTA and the whole email-system is designed for reliability.
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The whole point is that the emails were accepted by the primary MX, then deleted. As far as the sender's concerned, the email was delivered properly, because it was accepted by the MX.
That means there'd be no reason for the sender to try the secondary, so you lose your email.
Re: (Score:2)
On another note, I had an ISP do a mail server upgrade that when it went live, sent backed up mail out to everybody. I got mail intended for people I didn't know, people I did know, personal e-mail meant for others, etc.
Just deleting e-mail is probably quite a bit better than sending it all to the wrong recipi
Re: (Score:2)
That assumes email can be accidentally deleted on my server. As it goes into 3 different copies, one of them remote, and I have no reason messing with any of the two copies that stay on the server, it cannot. I actually do know how an MTA works...
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SMTP isn't multicast. It still has to be received by a single MTA, and then spit out to all the storage locations. If the initial receiving MTA dumps it without storing it properly, then it's going to get deleted. Even if you have multiple MX records, the sender doesn't try to use the second unless it knows the first has failed.
The single point of failure is still the primary MTA.
Re: (Score:2)
So? Traditional UNIX MTAs are extremely reliable. And the SMTP dialog is only completed successfully _after_ the email has been stored. This is not some kind of Microsoft trash we are talking about here. Also, the whole discussion is about loss by admin error, just in case you forgot.
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If your email is stored in Gmail, then Google will actually make backups of them.
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bah, let's say 5 million emails would have arrived during that time period. From my unfortunate 6.5 year history at a major email provider, I can tell you that %98 of the email is normally blocked as junk at the perimeter using RBLs, another %50 of what makes it through is junk blocked by anti-virus and anti-spam engines leaving around %1 of real "valuable" email.
Of that, about %50 is commercial email that literally no one will miss (except the people sending it).
What remains is 25k emails, the vast majorit
Re: (Score:1)
And Carly Rae Jepson. "We'll Send it Maybe!"
Re: (Score:2)
This is wheel of fortune