Robert X. Cringely has beentesting how much email gets through. EarthLink is the worst losing up to 9 messages out of 10! Slashdot has the summary here. PBS has the full article from Cringely.
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. 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.
In the same article, he takes shots at MegaPath and BellSouth:
I have a backup business DSL account from Megapath, a national broadband ISP which is the only DSL provider here in Charleston who offered static IP addresses when I was shopping around. Of course the DSL actually comes from BellSouth, which I think of simply as The Devil for its poor service and vindictive ways, from which Megapath presumably would protect me for only three times the price.
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