Current email situation.

[#1]

Quote from: nlewis65

So what is the point of having an email address and a mailbox

That's an increasingly pertinent question, as ISPs degrade the email service by adding ever more layers of spam filtering to avoid having to buy ever more disk storage. And that's the dirty secret here: an ISP's spam filters exist for the benefit of the ISP, not its customers.
Online businesses serving customers should not rely on email as a sole means of communication. A better approach would be to integrate a customer account service with the website. That's exactly what Amazon et al do. Email can then be relegated to a signalling function, for example to acknowledge that an order has been received or dispatched. In other words email should simply reflect information already available in the account. Consequently if email is lost, no real harm is done.

[#2]

Quote

an ISP's spam filters exist for the benefit of the ISP

Are you saying users would prefer enormous mailboxes full of 90-99% spam?
Given the ever decreasing cost of storage and the simplicity of it I am sure Plusnet would quite happily drop their spam platforms in favour of an extra couple of storage arrays.

[#3]

Quote from: astarsolutions

Are you saying users would prefer enormous mailboxes full of 90-99% spam?

No. I'm saying that ISPs invest in spam filters because they see it as a solution to ever increasing storage requirements.

[#4]

Thats all well and good for larger businesses but for smaller 1 man band businesses it is not feasable. As her business increases then we will, money allowing, look at more solid solutions but for now we have to make do with what we have got. Like I have said previously I accept that emails do go missing from time to time. I have been on the end of the phone myself trying to explain to a customer why they have not received any emails even though we were just a technical department for the network installation and not the ISP, but to lose a whole days worth of emails due to a network upgrade now that is negligence on Plusnets part. I also accept that the engineer has held his hand up and admitted that his team caused the problem but surely systems should've been put in place to safeguard everyones emails in the event that something like this did happen.

[#5]

My email is not working at the moment and its 22.44 - although according to plusnet it was all fixed at 18.15 today - this has happened a few times and plusnet always deny that its a problem their end - very annoying

[#6]

Quote

I'm saying that ISPs invest in spam filters because they see it as a solution to ever increasing storage requirements

That still doesn't make any sense; storage is got to be significantly cheaper than spam prevention solutions.

[#7]

Quote from: nlewis65

Thats all well and good for larger businesses but for smaller 1 man band businesses it is not feasable.

Options for small businesses are improving. There are free online commerce software packages such as osCommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com/) for those who want to host their own website. And there is Google Checkout (http://checkout.google.com/) for those who just want to put together a simple website with payments. I haven't looked into them much, but if I wanted to set up an online business (which I do) then these are the places I would start from.

[#8]

Quote from: linux

Quote from: nlewis65 Thats all well and good for larger businesses but for smaller 1 man band businesses it is not feasable. Options for small businesses are improving.

That I must agree but that doesn't answer the question as to why Plusnet put all our emails at risk with this upgrade. Perhaps someone from the team that was involved with this upgrade can comment on the safeguards that they put in place before hand.

[#9]

Quote from: astarsolutions

That still doesn't make any sense; storage is got to be significantly cheaper than spam prevention solutions.

It's not just a question of buying more disks, but of providing more servers, infrastructure and possibly staff to support them. With apparently no upper limit to the tide of spam, there is no upper limit to the required storage.

[#10]

With the restructuring of the mail storage platform it is now very scalable, storage servers can easily be added increasing the available storage space.
Spam prevention involves real time processing as the e-mails pass through the system, there are also the problems associated with the classification of spam. Plusnet have been trying different systems for a while and it is clearly not an easy thing to get right.
The reason they deal with spam rather than store it (which would be a lot easier) is because their customers would would find it unacceptable to have in boxes full of spam.

[#11]

Hi there,
In response to the posts I've seen since I last took a look at this thread...

Quote from: xpher

Got 1 test message. But have been sent other mail which I have not received. The mail I'm not receiving is to my domains.

That sounds like a different issue to me. Have you raised a ticket? If so, if you have the ID I can look into it when I'm next in the office.

Quote from: road

An even bigger improvement would be to not receive the 90% in the first place!

You don't. We were deferring about 60% of the stuff before the Critical Path boxes were introduced.

Quote from: nlewis65

Your original update said that "no emails will be lost" so how come we have still not had them? Can one of the Plusnet staff please explain to me why this is.

This post may help answer that question.

Quote from: xpher

Mail comimg through now. Just having probs with php form not sending me mail.

Again, not sure this is related. Raise a ticket and we can look into it.

Quote from: linux

That's an increasingly pertinent question, as ISPs degrade the email service by adding ever more layers of spam filtering to avoid having to buy ever more disk storage.

We've spent plenty of money on disk storage! In case you missed it first time round take a look here.

[#12]

Quote from: astarsolutions

The reason they deal with spam rather than store it (which would be a lot easier) is because their customers would would find it unacceptable to have in boxes full of spam.

If storing email is easier then why does it have to be automatically deleted from customers’ spam folders after 21 days?

[#13]

Quote from: astarsolutions

E-Mail isn't one of their "value added" services so it is something we pay for. But like a previous poster mentioned if its important take it elsewhere; I know we shouldn't have to but past experience has taught us all, its necessary.

If this is the case I probably raise a ticket and ask for a reduction in my monthly fees as I do not require PN email service. I host my own mailserver and moved my DNS to here and I also use their MX backup both for $28 per year. As for mailservers these can be free and up to how much you want to pay.

[#14]

There's been no response to my earlier email. Doesn't PlusNet keep a log of what goes through its mail-server? If it only recorded sender and delivery date then the information exists to inform users of who was trying to contact them.
Rather than directly black-holing what is supposed to be spam (but which is actually ham when errors of this kind are made), why isn't it hived off to a temporary file for a few hours so that errors - which will occur as long as Plusnet employs humans beings - can be recovered?

[#15]

Please could we have a report here or on the Service Status web page of the fate of the 90% of messages that were blackholed but NOT deleted. When will they be delivered?
(Because until we know that they should have been delivered we won't know they have been definitively lost. The later update only mentions delivery of new messages, not dealing with the backlog.)
Or do you need to give an upward revision of the proportion of legitimate email that you discarded in transit?
[Reference is to Status message @ 10.27 on 23/08/07]