[cfgeeks] IAXT

[Gil Young]

"Here is something I wish I were making up. A good friend of mine 
noticed last June a sudden and precipitous decline in his volume of 
incoming e-mail with the numbers dropping by 80-90 percent. Was he less 
popular, less interesting than before? Or maybe some Bayesian filter had 
been imposed by his ISP (Earthlink) to suddenly spare him completely 
from spam. No such luck.

The trend continued so my friend, who has long been in the networking 
business, himself, started running experiments. He sent messages from 
other accounts to his Earthlink address, to his aliased Blackberry 
address, and to his Gmail account. For every 10 messages sent, 1-2 
arrived in his Earthlink mailbox, 1-2 (not necessarily the SAME 1-2) on 
his Blackberry, and all 10 arrived with Gmail.

Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally 
found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since 
June, he was told, Earthlink's mail system has been so overloaded that 
some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. 
It isn't bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink 
hasn't mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they 
complain."


http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20061201_001274.html