Earthlink has unequivocally denied an online columnist’s report that the Internet service provider has been failing to deliver as many as nine out of 10 e-mails to its customers.
“Our e-mail is delivering fine,” said Earthlink spokeswoman Carla Shaw. “We’re not seeing anything that corresponds to what was posted on those Web sites [PBS.org and Slashdot.org].”
PBS.org technology columnist Robert Cringely recently posted an article in which he claimed a friend had started noticing he was getting significantly less e-mail at his Earthlink address.
“The trend continued so my friend, who has long been in the networking business, himself, started running experiments,” Cringely wrote. “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% 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.”
Shaw said last week she was trying to contact Cringely to get more details.
“We’re trying to find out what was his experience and what led to this post because we’re not seeing anything that corresponds to what was posted,” she said. “We’re trying to find out if it was an isolated experience, because from our side we can say e-mail is delivering.”
When asked to respond to Earthlink’s denial, Cringely offered the contact information of his source, who asked to remain off the record. The source said Earthlink seemed to be failing to deliver e-mail to domains it hosts, but that subscribers may not be affected.
However, one e-mail executive who asked not to be named said some e-mailers are, indeed, having trouble getting their messages delivered to Earthlink address holders.
“Off the record, they’re having some problems managing the spam they’re getting,” said the executive. “They’re not a big-budget group over there and they have a lot of legacy systems. Even their legacy systems have legacy systems.”
Earthlink addresses typically account for single-digit percentages of business-to-consumer marketers’ e-mail house files, making the ISP one of the top-10 address providers.
Recent innovations by the world’s most prolific spammers—such as image spam and hijacking consumers’ computers—has resulted in an astronomical rise in the amount of unsolicited e-mail hitting ISP’s networks, accroding to reports.
“We’re giving them [Earthlink] the benefit of the doubt that they’re doing everything that they can to fix it,” said the executive. “There are other ISPs that I wouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt to, but Earthlink is one that genuinely wants to to work with senders, and they’re just having their shit handed to them right now because of all this spam.”
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