Some email *HAS* been lost and *IS* still being lost

[#1]

*** PLEASE DO NOT MERGE THIS INTO THE MONSTER NO EMAIL THREAD ***

*** PLEASE DO ADD DETAILS OF SUSPECTED AWOL MAIL PLUS ANY EVIDENCE THEREOF ***

OK, further to the following post which is buried deep amongst god knows how many merged and now almost unintelligible threads ...

@mikeb wrote:

@fleurh wrote:

"Think I've read elsewhere on this thread about problems with emails to a .plus.com address being rejected as spam now. "

@jab1 wrote:

@fleurh It would be interesting to know where you have read this, and in what context. ...

[aol] Me too [/aol]  

Contrary to various claims at various times by various people that mail is not or will not be lost etc. ... I have (almost always) daily incoming mail from more than one source apparently conspicuous by it's absence.  Last message received Tuesday 9th November 0410 hours.  Perhaps more than a tad coincidental methinks.

Also, the one PN A/C that has spam filtering turned "ON" appears to be potentially missing more things than all those A/Cs where it is turned "OFF" from Wednesday 10th onwards. I can't remember whether AV filtering is always "ON" for all A/Cs or if it's just part of the spam filtering. Once again, perhaps more than a tad coincidental though methinks.

Every time over the last 25 years that email has had issues, this kinda thing happens. It used to be primarily yahoo groups et al, one refusal by PN and messages are suspended until you find out and jump through hoops to get them turned on again ! Not something I use at all now or anything too similar but the same kinda problem does still exist with various other what you might call bulk senders of genuine mail. Bounces or refusals tend to lead to messages lost during the incident at best or being suspended at worst. Any potential problem with spam (or AV) filtering being an issue is somewhat more difficult to analyse due to the inherent delays in changing settings but I may go tweaking to see what happens at some point in time if there is no reliable and informed comment from PN

... there appears to be little doubt in my mind that a problem currently exists that clearly wasn't present on Tuesday 9th November.

One very obvious example:

I am a member of freecycle and I have received a requested message at least once each and every day to one email address on one of my PN A/Cs going back to at least October 2006.  The last message received was on Tuesday 9th November 0410 hours. Nothing whatsoever since then. Unfortunately, subject lines no longer include a handy incremental reference number so it's difficult to spot any other obvious missing messages over time but at a very quick scan, there does appear to be at least one message every day prior to Tuesday. There must have been at the very least several 100 messages posted on the board since Tuesday and there are no apparent reports about any issues that I can find anywhere.

However, I have now set up an entirely new freecycle A/C identical to my existing one other than using a hotmail e-mail address.  My hotmail A/C is receiving all requested messages in a timely manner whereas my PN A/C still is not.  I have to accept there is a (VERY slim IMHO) possibility of a problem at the sending end but what is happening appears to me to be far too much of a coincidence. All fingers are clearly pointing at PN.

The long-standing PN A/C concerned has catch-all enabled with spam filtering disabled and this has been the case ever since these options were first made available. This is NOT a webmail or IMAP issue as I only ever use POP3. Nothing whatsoever has changed at this end and nor have I tweaked any options, settings or configuration anywhere in any way for donkey's years.

What exactly have PN done or changed since Tuesday that is potentially affecting email being received even when message filtering is 100% turned "OFF" and in fact has never even been turned "ON" at any time since day 1 ?

Moderator's note by Mike (Mav): Post released from Spam Filter.

[#2]

Well I am sure email has been lost as I get daily emails from a number of subscriptions.  Now it is feasible that these subscriptions have gone on holiday for a few days but I very much doubt it.  In fact there was a period when community notifications stopped even though I was reading additions. Then there is a missing invoice for some gardening materials and I have yet to see anything as normal by email; I have, however, received the goods and a good old paper form of the invoice. So, if there's any doubt about emails being lost, whoever is saying that is categorically wrong. Why doesn't PN just fess up, rather than look disingenuous - and maybe put a bit more effort in.

[#3]

My experience seems to indicate that throughout the problems, when not ablet to receive mail, the. PN incoming servers have been responding with an smtp ' temporary error' code. In these circumstances  a properly configured sending server should queue and retry,  possiblty at increasing time intervals. I have my office emails forwarded to one of my PN email addresses and whilst I've seen a number of ' mail delayed' messages on my office server,  I've seen no 'delivery failure' messages. 

[#4]

Not much point in my joining in with complaints all I can say is that I expected to get, but didn't receive any emails throughout Wednesday and Thursday. I am not able to check to confirm anything was actually missed on those days, because I have no means to check.

[#5]

Yes I feel that’s correct. I get quite a number of daily ‘digests’ from various user groups etc. and all of them seem to have arrived though in all sorts of different orders. It’s going to depend on how well-behaved their email systems are though so I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some to some users have evaporated. I’ve not had any of the ‘last chance’ sort of emails which some of the boards use when they believe that an account has gone permanently offline so it sounds as though the normal dialogue was in place.

[#6]

Hi @harrym1byt 

Thought I would let you know that I have just received an email dated last Thursday and had others from last Wednesday earlier today so I don't think the problem has been fully rectified. 

[#7]

Yep -  Nothing received between Tues 9/11 21:22 & Thurs 11/11 06:10. 

This is definitely not normal as I get emails every day including the odd 'just mailing you again in case you weren't just ignoring the marketing we sent yesterday' emails - which is a good indicator of a problem. There are usually a couple late at night, which suggests that the problem started on Tuesday night as others have suggested NOT Weds am as claimed by PN (backed up by partner getting unable to send / receive error on Tuesday night, but put it down to a network glitch). Accepting when it actually started may help with diagnosing/ rectifying the problem.

Would be nice if PN told us what's happened / happening rather than just repeating  'we're working on it' (though from past experience working on a service desk, it's normal to play down the extent/cause of a disaster while it's in progress, but with a bit more info than we're getting here to keep the customer feeling valued!)

[#8]

I am having the same issue with email dated a few days ago arriving in my inbox this morning.  I raised an issue with a supplier of goods regarding an issue with delivery and they replied promptly, but the reply was delayed by about 2 days?

Although I have unsubscribed from all Plus forum posts a few days ago when the issue was "resolved" I am still getting notifications from those threads.  An email that should have arrived in my inbox on Friday morning only arrived at 18.49 hours yesterday.  Same with notifications from another forum.  I receive the notifications a long time after it was posted.

[#9]

Same here - many many emails missing.

[#10]

My emails from the affected period still haven't arrived. I am now assuming they are lost. The glib responses from PN when they do respond are disingenous in my opinion. I don't know why they now can't admit that some users have lost their emails from Wed. 

I am in a fortunate postion that I have my own domain name and it will be easy to move to another email service which I will almost certain do ahead of a review of whether I remain with PN when my contract comes to an end. I've been a customer for 20+ years but I PN have not been open with customers with this issue and that tells me enough about their priorities.

[#11]

I know some mail is being lost. I have been in an ongoing discussion with a third party where I can see a web log of our communications, but not the content. I saw they had sent me an email on Saturday but it did not arrive. Because I knew it was likely an important email in the context of our discussion I asked them to send it again. Fortunately they were very understanding and second email arrived today and our discussion is back on track. I'm not a happy bunny, this email fiasco nearly cost me a considerable amount of money.

I'm now looking into options to set up with a third party email service. I don't really want the hassle of that as I've had my email addresses for over 7 years and it will be a pain to change. But at least it will be independent of whatever new ISP that move to after ditching Plusnet. I had not planned to move until at least FTTP becomes available here, but my satisfaction and confidence in Plusnet is gone, and without a reliable email service there seems little reason to stay.

[#12]

Thanks for comments various. It's 'good' (so to speak !) to see that it's not just me finding expected stuff still missing.  PN clearly need to take note and stop issuing the generic & over-optimistic cut 'n' paste status reports in addition to being a tad more honest about what exactly has been and still is going on here



Given the range of services various that could potentially be affected by whoever/whatever caused the apparent problem with reaching some/most/all IP addresses 212.159.9.xxx ...

relay.plus.net
homepages.plus.net
portal.plus.net
webmail.plus.net
mx.core.plus.net
mx.avasin.plus.net
mail.plus.net
imap.plus.net

(1) Plus similar for force9, madasafish, metronet, free-online et al
(2) Plus other vaguely 'interesting' looking stuff
(3) Some may of course be historic and therefore not currently in use

... this would suggest that incoming mail is quite likely to have been subject to the same hit 'n' miss access issues known to be affecting many other services in addition to potentially not being able to deal with any stuff that might actually have been received.

Whilst I kinda agree with the previous comment that a " properly configured system should retry at 4 hours, 1 day, several days etc. " that's fine in an ideal situation but not in the real world and it's definitely not something to be used as a get-out !  For a system sending maybe a handful of messages per hour/day/whatever it's dead easy. HOWEVER, for bulk senders it's almost entirely impractical and rarely (if ever) seems to happen.

As I've said a number of times before, one refusal or lack of response from PN and a message is very often dumped (at best) and all future messages may well also get suspended (at worst) until you can positively confirm that your receiving problem has been resolved. Virtually all mailing lists, message boards and many if not all commercial organisations in general that I can expect mail from appear to make NO attempt to resend if a message is rejected or refused for any reason. Messages have been lost and other issues have arisen each and every time there has been a problem with PN email over the past ~25 years !



As for the 1 obvious example I noted when starting this thread, things are still no different even today. I've not received any incoming mail at all today other than messages from this forum. That may well be reasonable or perhaps not, only time will tell. I've not seen any ancient, delayed or out of sequence messages for a couple of days now either. Whilst it's quite possible that something somewhere in PN Towers still has messages to deliver and/or has a stuck queue, I would like to think PN are keeping an eye on things to ensure that everything stashed away somewhere is being dequeued in a timely manner.

On Saturday, as well as opening the duplicate freecycle A/C I also tweaked the mail settings on both A/Cs to increase the volume of messages allegedly being sent out. I have no interest in the extra messages, it was simply to see whether if enough messages were sent, some would get delivered even if some, most or almost all did not. It made no apparent difference. As of just now, there have been no messages showing up at my PN A/C since the last one was received on Tuesday 9th November. However, there is no shortage of them in Ye Olde Hotmail A/C. 

The all important scores on the doors so far:  

Hotmail 29 (from Saturday 13th November to date)

Plusnet 0 (from Wednesday 10th November to date)



I've also checked but can't see any obvious differences in the way mail which is being delivered has been routed either. It's still generally speaking ...

sender -> mx.core.plus.net -> cloudmark/avasin.plus.net -> inmx.plus.net -> mbox

sender -> mx.core.plus.net -> inmx.plus.net -> mbox

... for filtered and non-filtered A/Cs respectively so it doesn't appear that my main mail A/C is suddenly now getting filtered despite being configured not to be.
 


Soooooooooooooooo, something's still very odd somewhere and I can't see what, where or why at the moment. The lack of any sensible information on what the problem(s) are/were & various somewhat disingenuous status posts is far from helpful and not in any way encouraging into the bargain

[#13]

I have all my email sent to @MyDomainName which forwards it to my Plusnet account from which I access it both by IMAP (iPhone) and POP3 (PC). I also (inadvertently) have all emails forwarded to an old BT account which fortunately BT haven’t closed. Comparing the BT webmail with Plusnet’s, I can confirm that 62 emails were lost by Plusnet over Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, some of them of vital legal time-critical importance.

A further five emails, randomly timed amongst the missing ones were delivered late, the worst being a message received on the BT webmail on Thursday at 17.24 and showing on the Plusnet webmail as at Friday 16.53, over 23 hours later.

I would agree that Plusnet’s saying that the problems are with logins only is disingenuous to say the least, if not totally misleading. It would have saved me a considerable amount of time had they been open and honest about the problem from the start. I have serious doubts as to whether I should continue to use them.

[#14]

I suppose it’s reasonably clear that if PN’s email front end goes down or becomes inaccessible any emails heading it’s way won’t be received. If the sender doesn’t retry then they’re lost, end of. Only the sender knows what’s happened and it’s up to it to handle the issue somehow.  There isn’t a magic unlimited email buffer in the sky.

From my analysis I’ve lost 1 daily digest from one particular forum and (probably) several emails from eBay regarding some watch lists. I can understand eBay not resending the latter as it’s a volatile marketplace. On the other hand I’ve received all of the daily digests from various other forums and eBay and PayPal acknowledgements from orders placed from the 9th onwards although they took their time arriving and the order of arrival was a bit off. Presumably depends on their resending schedule.

IMHO if email systems can’t manage to cope with occasional bounces you can hardly blame the receiving end. There are myriad potential points of failure en route as well as with the recipient. How would anyone except the sender know something went wrong? It’s a bit off if a financial or some other critical site can’t handle non-deliveries cleanly.

[#15]

For information here's the extract from the SMTP specification

When an SMTP server returns a temporary error status (4yz) code after
   the DATA command is completed with <CRLF>.<CRLF>, it MUST NOT make a
   subsequent attempt to deliver that message.  The SMTP client retains
   responsibility for the delivery of that message and may either return
   it to the user or requeue it for a subsequent attempt