[brlug-general] Mail to Earthlink

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 02:30:42AM -0500, Shannon Roddy wrote:

> Earthlink has a bit of a record for this kind of thing...
> 
> 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."

I have seen this happen with Hotmail as well.  I run my own MTA, so I
could verify that mails were accepted by the Hotmail SMTP servers yet were not
delivered to the user or bounced.  Having run a mail server for years, I've
also seen Yahoo exhibit some flakey behavior (they don't update their DNS for
over a week sometimes, for example, and they often don't retry at all).  Yahoo
"premium" also doesn't add "In-Reply-To:" headers!

Gmail is the best by far.  They follow standards and seem to fix things when
they break.  As far as I can tell, they try to do everything right.