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, Informative)
"Deleted" (Score:3, Informative)
I guess they used the Facebook definition of deleting contents...
Re:I'd be pretty pissed (Score:5, Informative)
OK, manager of a data centre and an ISP here. This happens very easily if you move from one IMAP/POP3 provider to another (even if just changing software on your mail server, sometimes even with a major version update). There are two issues normally:
For IMAP users, the way the IMAP server stores it's flags for Seen, Deleted etc. may not be recognised by the new software.
For POP3 users, whether or not an email has been downloaded is tracked by the client, based upon the UID for the message. If this UID is changed (different servers use different systems) the client will decide the message are new - where users decide to leave messages on the mail server (rather than deleting them after retrieval), this is a common problem.
Neither of these cases is necessarily the fault of Sky, sometimes it's just not possible to reliably import this information between mail servers, and in the case of POP3 users, it's just down to the fact that POP3 is not designed for leaving read messages on the server for multiple clients to pick up.
Re:I'd be pretty pissed (Score:5, Informative)
Surely they could just opt to sync every folder except the "[Gmail]/All Mail" folder. Doing that, and syncing [Gmail]/Trash to the Yahoo! deleted mail equivalent would sort it all out.
I think you're right though. Sounds like the people handling the migration just aren't very familiar with the Google IMAP interface.
Re:I'd be pretty pissed (Score:5, Informative)
Neither of these cases is necessarily the fault of Sky, sometimes it's just not possible to reliably import this information between mail servers, and in the case of POP3 users, it's just down to the fact that POP3 is not designed for leaving read messages on the server for multiple clients to pick up.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Sky is one of the UK's biggest ISPs, and they're moving their email provider from probably the biggest webmail provider in the world (Google) to probably the second largest (Yahoo). Are you really telling me that it was beyond the abilities of any of these three parties to a) do a test migration to check for serious errors, and b) make sure their migration methodology/toolset was compatible with the two technologies at hand before making the move?
To let such a huge and obvious public-facing error go live to so many people smacks of absolutely shocking incompetence.