Lost mail bounces - problem confirmed

Ben Brown has made the post quoted below to the Plusnet portal forums
confirming that mail bounces will be lost for mail sent via the Plusnet
servers which does not reach it's intended destination. This will
include emails sent via the PN mail servers from the ccgi platform.

As you can see he doesn't expect this to be fixed until the new year. He
considers it is low priority so I don't expect a service status to be
issued - hence this posting to alert other users.

<quote>
I know exactly what is causing this, however I'm not convinced that this
is a problem that warrants an amber light.

At the moment the sober virus is responsible for tens of thousands of
emails to be processed by our servers which are made to look like
delivery failure notices. If nothing is done about this it will cause
huge loads and strains on our mail platform and could cause great
problems to all our customers, so we are blackholing all email that
looks like it contains the sober virus that comes onto our servers.

Unfortunately a side effect of this is that mail delivery failures sent
though our servers seem to be getting caught out by this filtering so
are not arriving at thier intended destination.

I have raised this as a problem (29575) however as it is not directly
customer affecting (no actual valid email is being lost) it will be
assigned a low priority and is unlikely to be fixed now until the new year.
_________________
Regards,

Ben Brown
PlusNet Comms Team
</quote>

--
John
Former Member of Plusnet Usergroup

jelv wrote

> Ben Brown has made the post quoted below to the Plusnet portal forums
> confirming that mail bounces will be lost for mail sent via the Plusnet
> servers which does not reach it's intended destination. This will
> include emails sent via the PN mail servers from the ccgi platform.
>
> As you can see he doesn't expect this to be fixed until the new year. He
> considers it is low priority so I don't expect a service status to be
> issued - hence this posting to alert other users.


Are you expecting pussnet to give a shit about customers?

jelv <(E-Mail Removed)-o-m> wrote on Thu, 22 Dec 2005 20:44:29 +0000:
>
> I have raised this as a problem (29575) however as it is not directly
> customer affecting (no actual valid email is being lost) it will be
> assigned a low priority and is unlikely to be fixed now until the new year.

This is an obvious lie, since a non delivery report is generated in
response to an "actual valid email" which was not delivered. If the
bounce is then discarded by PlusNet, that "actual valid email" has
been lost -- it was not delivered to its destination and no report of
its failure to be delivered was delivered to its source.

Ignoring the fact, of course, that it is entirely possible for an
"actual valid email" to "look like" an NDR.

--
David Taylor

I have now created a poll regarding this issue on the portal forums. I
have included a full range of options all the way down to "Not an issue
- I don't care if I NDR's are binned". I would be grateful if *all*
Plusnet users could vote so that it gives a true impression.

--
John
Former Member of Plusnet Usergroup

jelv <(E-Mail Removed)-o-m> wrote in news:43abd33b$0$82642
$(E-Mail Removed):

> I have now created a poll regarding this issue on the portal forums. I
> have included a full range of options all the way down to "Not an issue
> - I don't care if I NDR's are binned". I would be grateful if *all*
> Plusnet users could vote so that it gives a true impression.
>

I only have F9 portal access so I asked here, does the poll take into
account what would happen if NDRs were not binned? The possibility of
large mail queues, server slowdowns and whatnot. It could be considered
irresponsible for PlusNet not to take preventative action and
unfortunately due to the nature of the problem there is no simple measure
which can resolve the problem without causing other problems.
So an option should be:

Does having no NDRs cause more of a problem than the potential problems
caused by the problem which binning them addresses?

--
Colin
*Drop DEAD from the email address to reply*

Oh and I've just run a test.
Whatever the problem is, it doesn't affect me as I am receiving bounce
messages. So basically PlusNet are not simply binning all bounce messages,
they must be pattern matching for the ones which look most like the virus.
The fact that not all bounces are blocked makes it less of a problem than
implied in the original post.

--
Colin
*Drop DEAD from the email address to reply*

cw wrote:
> Oh and I've just run a test.
> Whatever the problem is, it doesn't affect me as I am receiving bounce
> messages. So basically PlusNet are not simply binning all bounce messages,
> they must be pattern matching for the ones which look most like the virus.
> The fact that not all bounces are blocked makes it less of a problem than
> implied in the original post.
>
They've finally done something about it. From the portal forums:

<quote benbrown>
As you may have noticed I've not posted a huge amount over the last few
hours, however there has been a good reason for this.

As this has caused such concern among you I have been liasing closely
with the networks department and we have come up with and implemented a
fix for the problem causing our bounceback mails to be blackholed.

We couldn't remove the filters as this is blocking around 27,000 emails
a day, most of these carring the sober-y worm.

As an alternative we have now changed the wording of our bounceback
emails so they no longer match the filter used for sober-y detection,
and are delivered successfully. I've tested this myself and am happy
with this fix.

All of this is a part time measure as when sober-y traffic dies down we
can remove the filters altogether.
_________________
Regards,

Ben Brown
PlusNet Comms Team</quote>

Seems such a fairly simple fix - I've tried and I am getting bounces now.

--
John
Former Member of Plusnet Usergroup