Earthlink Loses A Lot Of Email

Many people suspect their ISP's mail servers from screwing up from time to time (or even all the time, according to some), but one man tracked down the failure rate of his Earthlink email account, and came up with a staggeringly high number.

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. The two groups affected are those who get their mail with an Earthlink-hosted domain and those with aliased e-mail addresses like my friend's Blackberry.

Ouch! Up to 90% of their email is being lost. In a sense, you have to admire the forthrightness of the tech who admitted it, but it sure does make the company look bad when they do something like this. Earthlink email users will probably not take this news lying down when word travels.