Interesting People mailing list archives
Impact of viruses and span on email performance
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 09:05:21 -0400
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 08:33:10 -0400 From: Dave, This weekend I accidentally discovered that I was not receiving some emails sent to my MIT alumni email address. I went to the university's website and found no mention of a problem in the alumni email area and so I sent an email reporting the problem. Below is the message I got back. What disturbs me most about this situation is that they clearly know there is a problem and yet they make no effort to proactively communicate. Most people who this impacts probably don't even know they are missing mail. Also, I wonder how many other forwarding systems/accounts across the globe are experiencing the same problems as a result of the viruses, worms and spam and are not informing their customers. I realize this is a bit of catch 22. If they let people know there's a problem then they will be inundated with inquiries and worried alumni; meanwhile if someone discovers a problem, they lose confidence in the system and stop using the account completely. I'm sure MIT's counting on this not being publicized and so only a handful of folks like me discovering the problem and shunning the service. btw, EFL in the message below, stands for email forwarding for life. -----Original Message----- From: ansinfo () MIT EDU [mailto:ansinfo () MIT EDU] Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 Subject: problems with EFL Thank you for your email. The recent EFL problems have had a number of causes. The well-documented viruses and spam have caused many problems across the Internet and it seems that many ISPs (internet service providers) have increased the sensitivity of their spam filters and slowed down the rate in which they accept email. The specific problem we have been seeing is due to the slow rate in which some ISPs accept our forwarded email. We have seen instances where an ISP accepts email from us at a rate of 1 piece per minute. And sometimes those emails are not accepted by the ISP, even after a full minute passes. We assume that the transfer failed and then returned the email to the end of the queue on our end to be resent later. This is causing huge delays in email delivery. MIT's network managers are attempting to work with major ISPs to resolve the problems. Please understand that we are doing the best we can to resolve the situation as quickly as possible. I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. Sincerely, Katonio Butler MIT Infinite Connection Web Technical Services help () alum mit edu =========================================================== Please retain the case reference in the subject line for future replies associated with this case
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- Impact of viruses and span on email performance Dave Farber (Sep 09)