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 ·Charter
 ·EarthLink
| [Services] Loss of EarthLink email, degraded Web Mail performanc As of late, EarthLink has developed serious problems with their email service, having to do with severely degraded Web Mail performance for certain customers and outright loss of messages from the EarthLink POP server Inbox.
ISSUE #1: Since early September 2011 I've noticed a severe degradation of performance with EarthLink Web Mail. With a network monitor applet installed on my machines that simulates the send/received lights on a dial-up modem, I can see brief bursts of data on my 1.5 Mbps DSL line, separated by long, long periods of no activity. It now takes 30-60 seconds to open a folder or a message in Web Mail, or to go from one message to the next, where it used to happen in 2-3 seconds. EarthLink Tech Support via their online chat is completely unhelpful and denies that anything is wrong. I checked with a few other EarthLink DSL users here in town, and they reported no problems. One of them specifically mentioned using Internet Explorer. I then ran a test, changing the User Agent in my SeaMonkey browser from Mozilla running on Linux (the default value) to Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows NT 6.1 (Windows 7), in essence, lying to the EarthLink server about what browser and operating system I'm using. Presto! The speed was back to what it was before September 4. EarthLink has changed their Web Mail software to give MSIE users preferential treatment. For customers using anything other than MSIE, our Web Mail performance on DSL is now slower than a 56K dial-up line. I've seen the same Web Mail performance degradation with Firefox and Opera browsers, regardless of the operating system; the only difference is the browser. (I have other machines available, running Windows XP and Windows 98SE, so I was able to test different browser/OS combinations fairly easily while tracking down the cause.) Unfortunately, if one has only a Mac or only a Linux machine, MSIE isn't even an option, so EarthLink Web Mail performance simply sucks.
Just to make it perfectly clear, this is not a phone line problem and it is not a problem with the DSL equipment or the network. It is purely a software problem of EarthLink's making in their Web Mail system, one which they refuse to acknowledge, despite the easy reproducibility. Moreover, the quality of their technical support staff has taken a nosedive in recent years, and the evidence is that they don't accurately report, or even bother to report fault analysis to their engineers from customers who are more competent than they are.
ISSUE #2: Yesterday evening, between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. PDT, EarthLink lost about 6 days of mail from my inbox. It simply vanished.  I had opened a message in Web Mail and was called away from my desk, so I left the message on the screen. When I returned later in the evening, the message was still there. I clicked on the Inbox link to check other messages, but the Inbox was EMPTY!! Except for downloading messages with a POP client around 6 a.m., I had been checking messages all day only with Web Mail, so there was no reason for them to disappear. Even if I had accidentally marked them all and bulk-deleted them, they should have been in my Trash folder, but they're not; they're simply GONE. Strangely, the messages that were in the Trash folder, the Anonymous Mail folders, Known Spam, etc., are all still there. A one-hour chat session with Technical Support was a total waste of time. He had me change my password (which wasn't the issue), then had me change my client to non-destructively read messages from the POP server (it was already set up that way before I contacted EarthLink, and has been that way for years). He also directed me to send test messages to myself and try downloading them with the other machine that is set up to clear the inbox after downloading. Of course, the POP client on my archiving machine did exactly that, exactly that which it had been set up to do 8 years ago; it saved the two or three test messages and cleared the POP inbox on the server. Now the rep blamed me for downloading the messages with a client and causing the messages to be deleted from the server, even though I presented him with incontestable evidence that EarthLink's mail server is malfunctioning and losing messages. The last 6 days' messages were already gone before I contacted EarthLink, but now it is somehow my fault. Idiot!!
I routinely download messages to an archiving machine and clear the EarthLink Inbox with a POP client (SeaMonkey Suite) once every 5-10 days, or when the Inbox gets about 50% full. The rest of the time I either use Web Mail, which takes multiple mouse clicks to delete mail, or POP clients on other machines that are set up to copy messages from the server for reading, but leave the original message on the server. This has been set up so that I can archive messages to a single machine, yet have the convenience of being able to read messages and compose replies with a full-featured client program elsewhere, instead of the relatively clunky Web Mail interface in a browser. I've been doing this for over 10 years now, and I know what I'm doing. I could practically do it in my sleep and I've never, ever accidentally deleted messages. Fortunately, precisely because I've been doing this, I had copied messages into one of the clients as recently as 6 a.m. yesterday, so I lost somewhere around 10-20 messages between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. If I weren't in the habit of doing so and relied only on EarthLink Web Mail, I would have lost all of my messages for the last 6 days, maybe 200 or more. It's likely that other EarthLink customers lost the contents of their Inboxes late yesterday, Monday, September 26, 2011. If you did, too, please post your observations here.
If this doesn't get fixed soon, like before the end of September, I'll be an ex-EarthLink customer, even though I've been with them since 1997. Judging by their continuous downward slide in staffing quality, I may be switching back to Verizon DSL, since Verizon is my CLEC and EarthLink quietly handed over DSL provisioning to them anyway sometime in the last year or so. I don't need EarthLink as a middleman, especially since their service is getting so poor, and switching my email is as simple as changing the destination address in my email forwarding service; friends and business contacts won't even know that I've changed my ISP. (I already did that last night, within minutes after signing off with the incompetent EarthLink rep. All my email now is funneled into a Yahoo! Plus account, and their POP service is just as good as that of EarthLink's, and is a bit cheaper for mail-only service.) | |
Reviews:
·Charter
·EarthLink
| Re: [Services] Loss of EarthLink email, degraded Web Mail perfor Update: I just got confirmation from another EarthLink user here in town that his inbox has been wiped clean since yesterday, too. Although he doesn't normally use Web Mail, he logged into Web Mail while we were chatting and it shows zero messages, where he was expecting 4-5 new messages. | |
 DrStrangeTechnically feasiblePremium
join:2001-07-23
West Hartford, CT
kudos:1 | reply to fivebyfive
For what it's worth, I don't see anything missing from my Earthlink mailboxes.
E-mail is the only service I still pay them for, so if that develops any issues I'll finally go get some cheap mail hosting. | | |
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| Thanks, DrStrange. That's useful to know. If only some users see loss of messages, it could point to file system corruption on their servers. | |
| reply to fivebyfive
POP mail and web mail seem to be working here. On the slow web mail page loading, I regularly run into a "redirects exceeded" type of message, after a long wait for log in. What seems to help with that is to clear all the earthlink.net cookies from my browser. | |
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