British ISP Bombards Users With Deleted Emails 134
judgecorp writes "For three days, customers at British ISP Sky have been receiving a flood of old and deleted messages. The problem started when the company switched its email provider from Google to Yahoo. As it began to move accounts from one provider to another, it became obvious that the new provider could not tell which emails in the old system had been sent or deleted. Some users had up to 8000 old messages. The incident has been going for three days, as users are migrated. Sky is apparently unable to fix the problem — its best advice been to suggest users delete the old messages."
Re:I'd be pretty pissed (Score:5, Funny)
if they had only let the good yahoo engineers work from home, none of this fark-up would have happened...
(snark)
IT happens (Score:4, Funny)
Recently, I saw a large organization convert email systems. They are split into handful of business units that had their own IT staff and email systems. They made the announcement and told us how it would go. All your email, calendar, and contacts would be converted and everyone's mailbox size would be 25G. As the migration got closer, one business unit's IT kept making frustrating announcements while the other units went as smooth as expected. (I don't know the source of that units internal issues, but this is what was seen from the outside)
Announcement: Our mailboxes will be 2G in size instead of the 25G that everyone else gets.
Announcement: You will have to move your contacts by hand, we will take care of your calendar and email.
Announcement: You can't move personal email groups because the addresses are not saved in any known email standard.
Announcement: We tried to migrate a calendar but could not get it to work. We won't be able to migrate calendars.
Announcement: The automated email migration is taking longer than we expected, bu the vendor is working with us.
Announcement: The automated migration is taking too long, so we wont be able to do it. You will have to archive your own email.
Announcement: If you need someone to migrate your stuff, we can have a contractor do it for $200.00 for each mailbox.
Announcement: We recommend everyone purchase a license of Acrobat Pro and PDF your emails. Or email old messages to your self after the switch.
Announcement: Our existing system archives email after 1 year, you have to open each archived message once before you PDF it or it will PDF an empty email.
Announcement: Here is a trick to open up to 10 archived emails at once.
Announcement: We must remove every copy of the old email client (due to licensing) so all your old personal archives in that system will not longer be accessible.
And all the central mail groups needed to be recreated by the admin team with no conversion from the old lists. And the new groups could not contain outside email accounts. There were a hand full of mistakes that showed that someone had to do this by hand (scripts or automation would have create different mistakes).
I kind of feel bad for that IT team. Because if that was the flow of announcements going out, you can only imagine what they were dealing with inside the team.
Re:I'd be pretty pissed (Score:5, Funny)
This raises several questions:
Yahoo still exists?
Who on earth would move them from Google to Yahoo instead of the other way around?
Did anybody expect something different?
Who got paid for this?