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."
Slight oversight? (Score:3)
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They were pretty late to the game, but they do support IMAP.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/mobile/mail/imap-01.html [yahoo.com]
"Deleted" (Score:3, Informative)
I guess they used the Facebook definition of deleting contents...
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> On the Google side it was configured such that a delete
> requested over the POP protocol was interpreted as
> archiving the message.
Then they were not correctly implementing the protocol.
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As long as the message is no longer visible to POP clients, they are indeed following the protocol. The POP protocol does not require the server to find every copy of the message in existence across all servers on the Internet and delete them. If downloading the mail to your computer caused the copy accessible through the webinterface to get deleted, people would be screaming about data loss. Gmail offers four possible configurations on what happens to
I have a habit of never deleting emails (Score:3)
...Unless they're really useless or are too sensitive (I never send sensitive information via email, but despite my best efforts, I do get them sent to me). But I guess even that's not consolation that the information was private by any stretch of the imagination.
I keep trying to explain to people, email with Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc... is like having a private conversation in a coffee shop or something. Yeah, you can get "some" privacy, but really, anyone can listen in or record if they really wanted to since you don't control the venue. Anything without PGP/GPG encryption is like that.
I can only imagine what this might be like for those folks. If this happened to me, and if I do delete messages, I'd be not only livid, but hosed as well. How can you sift through that much info in a single morning... or a week's worth of mornings?
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Gotta completely ruin your week, if not a few weeks. This can not only ruin productivity, it can also potentially end a relationship with a client(s) or even cost new opportunities. Why would anyone trust someone who couldn't even get their emails in order (although if it's someone with understanding, they could potentially make it through), but that's an awful lot of duplicates.
An absolute disaster.
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My bet would be the latter. If they move it to a different server and are not careful to preserve the UID numbers on each message, then your POP client has no way to know they are the same messages.
Email by MurdochEmpire (TM) (Score:3)
Telling the difference between emails that have been deleted and those that haven't, along with those that have been sent and those that haven't, costs extra. Doing it any other way means Progressivism wins!
Outrage! by Murdoch (Score:2)
Simultaneously, Murdoch himself releases a statement calling for email service quality reform without realising he's contradicting his own company line.
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Grow a sense of humour already.
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If your dumb ass didn't notice, it was a two-part joke pointing directly at a very specific recent incident in American politics...
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If your dumb ass didn't notice, it was a two-part joke pointing directly at a very specific recent incident in American politics...
Don't give up your day job.
Really? (Score:3)
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You are absolutely right, that's how it should have been done. And you can take it in more steps. You don't have to go directly from one to all. Decide how many steps are appropriate and then increase the number of users exponentially between each step.
This sort of approach is standard practice at Google. I don't think Google made the decision to rush this through. I imagine Google was warning about the possibility of som
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Wouldn't you try a test run on one user account before letting it fly for all users?
I'm pretty much constantly amazed at what crap manages to be considered "competent IT staff" these days. This's at one of the biggest names out there too. There's a lot of blame to pass around here, from HR (for suggesting them), to management (for hiring them), to the drone who did this without bothering to first get their ducks in a row (research the problem maybe?). Then there's the moving from gmail to Yahoo bit. Wouldn't anyone be better than Yahoo, just based on their press over the last few years
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Not migrating a few accounts at a time does seem to be an over-achievement in dumb-assery. Don't be too harsh on the IT staff however. I'm sure some manager/bean counter types made the decision to migrate based on cost only. Then, the project gets dumped on an already over-burdened IT staff under a tight schedule. Even "competent" IT people can screw up when they're given unrealistic requirements.
I'm not necessarily disputing your assertion, but at my former employer, the penny-pinchers were constantly
then move it back jerks (Score:1)
Dirty secret is, yahoos email passwords db has already been cracked wide open by a previous xss flaw, it is merely coincidence that i have had floods of btyahoo customers call me with "why do all my friends tell me i sent them 200 spam mails (headers confirm its from yahoo)", yet none of them are infected with anything, coincidence i tell ya, then wait till you hear POP3 problems with btyahoo garbage or their shtty software, go abroad on a business trip and there is a whole world of crap awaiting for you
th
"Deleted" (Score:1)
I would have hoped that "deleted" meant "deleted". How naïve of me.
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I would have hoped that "deleted" meant "deleted". How naïve of me.
Indeed. How else do you expect people to recover their email messages they accidentally moved to the trash, confirmed the move, and then deleted? ;)
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As far as anyone can tell with Google, "deleted" does mean "deleted". However, most gmail users "delete" email by archiving it, not actually deleting it. In gmail, you only see mail if it is tagged in some way, or you search for it, so simply removing the "inbox" tag means you stop seeing the mail in your inbox (but it's still there in searches).
Having all of this not-really-deleted mail show up again and surprise users was a completely predictable side effect of moving mail from Google's idea of mail org
Why would an ISP have used Google in 1st place? (Score:2)
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IMO the bundling of email service and addresses with internet access service is a historical artifact that adds lockin and reduces competition in the internet access market.
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Not providing email greatly lowers support costs because you don't have to help noobs through how to configure mail clients, getting blamed when their Outlook Express eats their old email, getting complaints about spam, etc. Plus you don't have to field hundreds of support calls when you bungle up moving the services on the back end, like here.
Par for the course at Yahoo (Score:1)
All the speculation and desceiptions are bunk (Score:5, Interesting)
Had they actually *tested* this, in advance, would we be discussing the various flaws in each mail systems' implementations, or their real/imagined problems?
No. We would not even know it happened.
Don't blame Google's use of IMAP flags and folders, blame Yahoo!'s apparent lack of planning. Or Sky. Or whoever. Plenty of blame at the receiving end.
If you're moving mail from some system into yours, the responsibility is yours to make it right.
And I've done this. Wait till ya hose up the passwords, my friend. Fun times.
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.
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I guess the advantage of having multiple IT departments in the same organization is that when you give each of them the same tasks, you can see which ones are competent and which aren't.
I'm with the parent in feeling bad for the IT team that had all this trouble. On the other hand, one has to wonder why all the other IT departments managed to pull off the migration smoothly, but this one didn't.
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Mistakes with this level of both fail and visibility are invariably due to politics rather than technology. I'm guessing some mid-level manager decided their department was special and severely under-estimated the amount of resources required, and tried to in-house the migration for a political reason that now is obviously stupid but at the time seemed really smart, or at least said manager wasn't told it was doomed to failure.
Why do ISPs even offer email as a service (Score:1)
Reason 8000 (Score:3)
to run your own mail server.
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to run your own mail server.
Absolutely. With incredibly cheap backup MX services and the ease of using your ISP's SMTP server as a relay, there's no reason not to run your own, even if you're on a residential link.
Unable to fix problem? (Score:3)
Sky is apparently unable to fix the problem — its best advice been to suggest users delete the old messages
I can tell you a fix to the problem in two seconds - Go back to Google. You are going to risk pissing off your customers with this, then they will discover that they have worse spam filtering, to save some money? Sounds like Sky needs to rethink a few things - that is a major issue!
Also, Google with Imap and all my mail clients that plug into it have no issues with this. Why is Yahoo having an issue with this? Sounds like someone at Yahoo is just lazy and doesn't want to be bothered to do a few hours worth of programming - meaning bad customer service they are offering to the ISP which turns around to screwing the end customer. I mean, really, that is inexcusable!
Gmail does not use folders (Score:1)
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Which might of flown if sublabels did not exist. But they do, so "label" is just Googles name for folder.
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Folders with symlinks maybe.
The ease of use is incredible though. I love being able to have an E-Mail with multiple labels, and see/edit all of those labels easily.
It's 2013, and most E-Mail clients still treat an E-Mail with multiple labels as multiple copies. I can't easily search, edit, or even delete my E-Mail with anything but the gmail web interface.
"Just hit delete" (Score:2)
Google is not good at deleting stuff (Score:1)
A similar thing happend to me too. I switched from google to another provider. I deleted my emails (also the trash) on my google account but after that old emails came in over IMAP which i did delete several weeks ago. Normally they shouldn't have existed on the google server anymore.
I deleted my whole account but i can still acces my google calender over the private ical link...
Who uses ISP Email? (Score:2)
Email is so incredibly useful, but far less useful if you have to change email addresses with every ISP.
I have entered my email in far too many important sites, let alone given it to people/organizations, for me to recover from having a change of address.
The real story (Score:1)
..is that, despite USERS EXPLICITLY DELETING THEM, Google still retained all the messages. You can't have a problem with re-delivering an e-mail you don't have.
Google. Keeping every piece of information they can possible learn about you forever, whether you like it or not.
Amazing Catcha Moment - I got "Expunge."
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Google makes it clear they do not delete emails. And they also make it very clear how you can permanently delete emails. Click on "delete" in the webmail interface.
It would have been very easy for Yahoo to provide users with a "clean" inbox. All they had to do was to map the gmail inbox to the Yahoo inbox, create a Gmail "all mail" folder, and recreate all other folders/labels to match what Gmail was providing. The only downside would have been where users had tagged emails with multiple labels, and they wo
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Test run? (Score:2)
Re:I'd be pretty pissed (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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actually, I'd wager it's Google who bungled it - they store items their own way - because they can - and when asked to move the old mailbox, my bet is that Google didn't use the IMAP protocol as written and transferred all the deleted mail in a folder marked something like "Google-like deleted folder but not really deleted just archived". When the Yahoo servers received it, they ignored it as non-standard and shunted the "deleted" (but not actually deleted) mail to the inbox.
If Google had actually deleted t
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, Insightful)
oh bullshit. It *is* the fault of Sky because they chose to change what they were doing without working around the issues their customers were going to see.
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God damn you're an idiot. Yes you did.
"Neither of these cases is necessarily the fault of Sky,"
Yes, it's entirely their fault. They can't work worth a fuck.
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So if their tests showed it couldn't be done without the (relatively minor) inconvenience of unflagging mails, should they just have shrugged and never changed a thing?
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No but they should have contacted their customers BEFORE they startet the process so I can decide if I want to go with this bullshit or do something about it.
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So basically what you're saying is that 99% of corporate are done using a system designed initially as a hobby project by an intern at Sun?
99% of what we use and do today is the result of accidental discoveries. "Designed as a hobby project" is a more deliberate, intentional genesis. The key word here is "initially". The state of something today is not the same as its initial discovery or invention. "Designed by an intern" shows a more informed and qualified genesis than "resulted from an accident", but that doesn't necessarily make it better today.
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.
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It's not an "error". Those users who *chose* to use POP3 instead of IMAP are getting exactly what they should expect from using POP3 instead of IMAP. POP3 was never designed to leave mail on the server and keep track of read/unread states. Any users affected can only blame themselves.
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No one cares about POP3 or IMAP. Seriously. Those are back-end choices that needed to stay back-end. Sky should have worked this out so that mail shown in the UI before was the same as mail shown in the UI after. Everything behind the scenes was on the ISP to keep behind the scenes, whatever technical cleverness that would have required.
I've done email archiving products for a living. This sort of BS isn't trivial - you have to think it through, and do extensive testing - but it sure isn't rocket scien
Re:I'd be pretty pissed (Score:4)
If the service "offers POP3 support", which presumably they do, then it is the service supplier's problem. Not the user's fault for using one of the two services on offer which happens to be the less sophisticated one.
And in any case, I've not read anything in this thread or TFA to imply that POP3 users are affected while IMAP ones aren't. The GGP points out a way in which the problem would occur for users of both technologies. If I use an IMAP client to "delete" an email on one day, there is zero good reason for it to reappear in my inbox a year later. That is a system error pure and simple.
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Yes, because the average user knows the difference, am I rite?
There is a car analogy here somewhere, and it involves blaming the client for not having a Masters in Automotive engineering.
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For IMAP users, the way the IMAP server stores it's flags for Seen, Deleted etc. may not be recognised by the new software.
Ok, I'll give you the Seen and Sent flags, but why is Deleted stored as a flag rather than by say, deleting it?
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My experience with various imap configurations for gmail (mutt, emacs) agrees. To delete something, you have to move it to the [Gmail]/Trash folder, rather than going through the standard imap 'delete' procedure.
That said, it's pretty obvious if you look for a few minutes that [Gmail]/Trash should refer to a trash-like location, so it might be a good idea to not import it, or import it into the trash-like location. Unless the deletion process has been so borked (gmail 'deletes' by copying messages to the
Re:I'd be pretty pissed (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I'm pretty certain I know exactly what happened, because I just handled a major migration to google and dealt with an issue like this. It's due to the way google uses labels instead of folders, and how they (mostly-transparently) expose them as folder via imap (though this is one of the few non-transparent side effects).
In google, when you "delete" a message via imap, it doesn't get deleted. Instead, google just removes the label. That message still exist with all of the other labels, and it also exists in "All Mail" (which is exposed via IMAP through the "[Gmail]/All Mail" folder). So, if you have new mail come it, it is by default in your INBOX and your "[Gmail]/All Mail" folders. When you then delete it from the INBOX via imap, it's still in All Mail.
The way to deal with this is to move the message into "[Gmail]/Trash" instead of deleting it. That will truely delete it. However, since that wasn't done all along, those "deleted" messages are now orphaned in "[Gmail]/All Mail". There is a potential way to resolve even this problem, but it depends on how the account has been used. If users have logged into Gmail directly and taken advantage of the "Archive" feature to remove a message from the inbox (without truely deleting it) then all bets are off. There is no way to differentiate intentionally saved messages from deleted-via-imap messages. However, if it has only been accessed via imap (and users haven't intentionally been trying to take advantage of the All Mail folder), then you can do the following via a script:
Go through every message in "[Gmail]/All Mail".
For each message, try to find that same message in another folder.
If you don't find it in another folder, then that message only exists in "[Gmail]/All Mail". You can then move it to "[Gmail]/Trash" to get rid of it.
Searching for messages 1 at a time is a bit slow, so you can optimize this by first building a list of all messages in other folders. If you just retrieve a few headers from every message, it's actually fairly fast. The "Message-ID" field is usually sufficient for this, but there may be messages here and there that don't have that header, so you'll have to have other headers to fall back on.
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.
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Yes, for migrating off of google, that's also an option (which I thought of right after clicking submit), assuming the recipient system supports folders. I don't know about yahoo. I was messing with hotmail a few months back before our migration, and I think my reccollection was that they support IMAP to the inbox, but no arbitrary folders. In a case like that, you'd have to collapse all the mail down to 1 folder (the INBOX), so pulling All Mail would be the easiest way.
In my case, we had a similar sort of
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Ah right, I get you. I didn't realise the folder support might not be there - it would probably cause more trouble than it's worth pulling individual folders separately and trying to remove duplications (multiple-tagged). Since they've apparently already copied over the All Mail folder for all their users you're right that the simplest fix would be pull the Trash and remove anything that is in there from the user's accounts.
Seems like the sort of thing you'd test before migrating all your live user accounts
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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.
Which is ridiculous since one learns quite a bit about Gmail IMAP by having used it at all (just ask anyone having configured iOS+Gmail prior to Apple's adding the "Gmail" option for account setup) or reading the public documentation.
This is simply a case of the project team a) not reading very-available documentation on a very key part of the project b) not testing and uncovering this issue and c) doing a big-bang migration of all accounts. a+b+c = predicable clusterfuck.
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I think the only solution would be to let the end user decide (which seems to be the solution they've hit upon). The problem of "deleted" emails reappearing should not be too worrying, as it lets the en
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A faster way would be to delete all in All Mail, then recurse through the other folders creating a duplicate tag in All Mail. Messages that only existed in All Mail before will be gone. All others are preserved.
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A faster way would be to delete all in All Mail, then recurse through the other folders creating a duplicate tag in All Mail. Messages that only existed in All Mail before will be gone. All others are preserved.
You would think so, wouldn't you. And that would probably work if this were a fully imap compliant system, but that's exactly the point (and why they got into this mess to begin with)...it isn't.
For gmail, the message in "All Mail" is the sole existence of the actual message in the system. The copies of the message in other "folders" are really just references to the copy in "All Mail". So deleting it from All Mail is not really a choice. I can't remember from my testing back then what would happen if you D
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That is a fairly ugly implementation.
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I've done the sync between gmail and Dovecot and Cyrus IMAP.
The 'tags as folders' thing isn't an issue for imap clients as the server tells the client (because its tagged) that the message is deleted.
I can safely say Yahoo is at fault. Having moved many millions of messages myself, there is no reason on Google's side that this 'HAD' to happen.
The Deleted flag is NOT one of the flags that Google doesn't handle properly.
If you simply run IMAPSync on gmail, it will work almost flawlessly, none of the issues S
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You are right...it MOSTLY works flawlessly, but there are subtle issues you need to pay attention to. The All Mail thing usually would not be such a concern I would think. If you were migrating to a server that is fully imap compliant, then yes, those deleted messages would show up in an additional folder called '[Gmail]/All Mail' on the destination server, and you could just promptly delete that folder and you'd be back to what you would have expected.
However, the fact that these messages are showing up in
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If the users had actually deleted the mail instead of archiving it, then there wouldn't be a problem.
You realize that those email were not deleted.
Regardless of the summary the emails were archived not deleted.
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People aren't getting paid to spread FUD about Yahoo yet though. Give it a bit.
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Actually, I doubt it was Yahoo's fault either. This can't be the first time Yahoo has done an import from Google, can it (assuming they even handle the importintg for you...google doesn't)? If they had done this before, they'd have known about this problem with IMAP and the All Mail folder. So I'm guessing it Sky itself that made the mistake (or whatever consultant they hired to to do it) because of their unfamiliarity with Google's system.
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?
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Google does not sell info to advertisers. Google sells adverts based on your info. If you are going to bash Google, then at least get your damn facts straight!
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"Google scans your e-mail and sells that info to advertisers. Even when you pay for it. Scary shit. Yahoo for business doesn't do this."
Even though you're wrong, if they scan business mails of let's say paper-cup manufacturers, do you think showing them ads for paper-cups from another firm will generate many sales?
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You might want to read the summary again. Google already had the data. They shipped it to Yahoo, and Yahoo bungled it up.
Actually, this is Google's fault I was migrating away from Google using POP3 to download my mail messages off their server. IMAP had been too slow with thunderbird and evolution. When it was done, I noticed that pop3 sends me my sent mail.
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Google does delete stuff (at least from our view...who can say what they really do behind the scenes). This is just a case of Google only being a pseudo-imap system. It's compatible with imap clients, but it's got some oddities in how they expose their internal system to imap. See my post above for more info.
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I could say, because in the past I have been working on the team responsible for making backup copies of Gmail on tape. But I think the underlying storage system has been replaced since I worked on it. But a few of the key points haven't changed.
Once a user delete a message it does become inaccessible to that user. But it doesn't mean that all copies will be gone instantly. Having all copies be gone inst
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Don't use ISP email. (Score:2)
Never, ever, use ISP provided email.
Firstly, you might change ISP, so you lose your old email.
Secondly, they pull tricks like this.
Thirdly, they won't provide as good a solution as a dedicated email provider.
What I am wondering is if you can set up a new personal GMail account, and get it to sync your old emails from the ISP's own gmail service.
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Back in' day, Steam account names were the same as the email address you signed up with. I used an email account I had from about 15 years ago when the only email address I had was an ISP-proscribed one with my dial-up package. Neither the email account nor ISP still exist and while it's possible to change the email address the account is connected to, but I can't change my Steam username. Anachronism!
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Couldn't you just set up both accounts in your mail client and just drag and drop the messages between the different sets of folders to upload them to the new account? I'm sure I've done something similar once before.
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"Our ISP moved its email to Yahoo "
I don't quite understand this. Why doesn't the ISP have its own mail servers? What does this look like to you as the end user? Are the server settings on your e-mail client referencing mail.yourisp.com or some yahoo.com server? When the change occurred, what happened to usernames and e-mail addresses from your ISP that conflicted with Yahoo! usernames?