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Filter error responsible .Mac mail loss

updated 07:05 pm EST, Thu February 5, 2004

.Mac mail loss

Sources confirm that the emails not delivered during the type Apple's have been permanently lost. A misconfigured filter against e-mail viruses caused the problem, which persisted for several hours on Monday. Apple has records of the sender addresses for all e-mail that were lost, but does not currently intend to release this information to .Mac members. Apple has not notified customers, and is reportedly deleting posts on its discussion board trying to convey information regarding the situation. (Apple did not respond to requests for comment or confirmation.)

by MacNN Staff

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02/06, 01:01am | report spam | close Reply |
How about that

The problem with .Mac is Windows and all the wonderful viruses that infect our inboxes every day.

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02/06, 01:06am | report spam | close Reply |
delete

You know, I understand that it is their board and all, but the old "delete negative posts" policy really kind of ticks me off. I've seen it applied so arbitrarily in the past; don't they see that it reeks of incompetence? Maybe I'm old but it also reminds me of Orwell.
Sheesh...

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02/06, 01:24am | report spam | close Reply |
h***!!!!

I was waiting for a very important job offer response on Monday and it never came. This could have cost me a job, god damnit to h***.

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02/06, 01:58am | report spam | close Reply |
Re: h***

Sorry dude, but you shouldn't rely on something as unreliable and insecure as email for vital communications such as job offers. Give 'em a phone number. If you can't, well I guess you didn't want the job that badly, then, did you?

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02/06, 03:20am | report spam | close Reply |
RIPE.

this filter is just RIPE to screen 10-15 emails.

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02/06, 04:51am | report spam | close Reply |
Terrible..

"Apple has not notified customers, and is reportedly deleting posts on its discussion board trying to convey information regarding the situation. (Apple did not respond to requests for comment or confirmation.)"

Doesn't surprise me. But really terrible service from Apple.. Delete all signs of the problem and pretend it never existed.
Sour Apple.

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02/06, 05:50am | report spam | close Reply |
Never really understood..

This policy of not informing people. Happens everywhere. These filters were being put into place to help us. Everyone can s**** up. What is worse is denying it, when everyone knows it to be true. And if they do have senders and recipients emails, there is a remedy to the fact that the emails have been lost, by sending a list of senders emails addresses to each of the accounts that was bounced.

The email service is only a small part of .Mac. Are people more likely to pull away if someone screws up and admits it, or if a pattern of systematically hiding the truth emerges?

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02/06, 07:29am | report spam | close Reply |
re:RIPE

*****
*****

You sound like a stupid idiot. And you're not funny at all.

*****

*****

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02/06, 07:43am | report spam | close Reply |
dur...

If Apple indeed does have a list of who sent the undelivered e-mails, the ONLY thing they can/should do now is inform the intended recipients, or the senders themselves. Here we are, four days later, and no .Mac members have been notified of the situation. Which is worse: admitting that there was an error and doing your best to rectify the problem, or hiding the truth? I'd settle for fewer free/discounted shareware games if we could just have more reliable e-mail on .Mac.

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02/06, 08:50am | report spam | close Reply |
Re: RIPE

You're RIPE for an a**-whooping you stupid immature prick.

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02/06, 09:08am | report spam | close Reply |
re: RIPE

Don't you mean... 10-15 a**-whoopings? :)

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02/06, 09:40am | report spam | close Reply |
speculation

So "sources" have confirmed... I DIDN'T REALIZE MACNN WAS A RUMOR SITE! It's sad when there's more actual "news" on a site called "MacRumors" than on a site called "Mac News Network".

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02/06, 09:43am | report spam | close Reply |
haha

So we assume that just because MacNN reports something that it's fact??? Geez people. I love this logic of "Well, I read it on the internet so it must be true!!!"

Maybe MacNN should publish their 'reliable sources'... that may add some sort of credit to this article. Until then, this all just speculation.

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02/06, 09:44am | report spam | close Reply |
re: RIPE

All your 10-15 stupid idiot a**-whoopings are belong to stupid immature pricks (us)

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02/06, 11:04am | report spam | close Reply |
What else is new...

Just FYI, Apple is very Draconian on their message board. They delete any posts they do not like and they do it ALL THE TIME. I've had posts deleted asking about the system requirements for GarageBand. If you post about a problem with your iBook logic board or iPod battery, you will also probably find your message deleted.

I personally think this is deplorable. It has definitely affected how I deal with Apple. I used to be very evangelistic - now I approach them as a company trying to make money and I don't hold back any comments or action when dealing with obvious quality control issues.

And no way would I have .Mac in the first place - it's a complete ripoff.

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02/06, 11:11am | report spam | close Reply |
Good grief

Geez. You people act like the world ended because you lost some email. Get a life and get over it. It's just email.

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02/06, 12:18pm | report spam | close Reply |
It's not just e-mail

It's about an attitude that requires anything critical of Apple to be deleted from their message boards. Better yet, if you note how they do their point scoring for "Leveling" folks, any message they delete that you gave a mod up, you lose 5 points from your point score.

Thus, an informative, timely, etc. article that is critical of the company will get the muzzle because no one will mod it up. That's S***** on the part of Apple and they should be ashamed of being as pathetic as they are running a simple e-mail service. If their core competence is elsewhere (as I think it is), then they should let more competent folks run their server farm.

Outright losing of e-mail is inexcusable in this day and age... and Apple better have a good response to how this will never happen again. Otherwise, selling their enterprise-quality stuff just ain't going to happen... At the very least, they should send an e-mail to the senders telling them that the recipient didn't get the mail.

Worse, Apple never tells folks what gets deleted from their inbox as part of the spam filtering. I think this is problematic!

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02/06, 12:31pm | report spam | close Reply |
Right or not

Even if the information they published isn't fully factual, there are two things that ARE:

1) .Mac subscribers lost all email which arrived durring a 4 hour period, to which Apple's best recomendation at the time was to "...Contact anybody who may have sent you email and ask them to re-send it..."

2) Several posts on the .Mac Mail board asking questions regarding this lost email, and several posts backing up thoes who are asking these (valid) quesitons, have mysteriously dissappeared...

Again, while MacNN's text may not be 100% accurate, the occurences which it describes ARE!!!

I can vouge for both of these being a .Mac member...

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02/06, 12:37pm | report spam | close Reply |
Just email?

> Geez. You people act like the world ended because you lost some email.
> Get a life and get over it. It's just email.

You obvously never recieve any important email... In which case you are in no place to talk about "Getting a life..."

The key here is that all the customers who lost email are paying $100 a year for the service. We also have experienced email problems COUNTLESS TIMES!!! After the first several email outages I really wasn't that worried myself. Being lost emails and email down time have become a very regular occurance, it makes most of us wonder what our $100 a year is going twards...

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02/06, 02:16pm | report spam | close Reply |
Re: speculation

So "sources" have confirmed... I DIDN'T REALIZE MACNN WAS A RUMOR SITE! It's sad when there's more actual "news" on a site called "MacRumors" than on a site called "Mac News Network".

Oh, so unless a reporter prints names of their sources, its all rumors. I guess then Watergate was just a rumor, as it was all info from some unnamed 'source'.

And I also guess the talk from 'sources' about how there really weren't any WMD in Iraq are unreliable as well.

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02/06, 02:19pm | report spam | close Reply |
Apple message boards

What most people won't tell you is that Apple's message boards are for general discussion (like the MacNN forums), but for support help. So stupid, immature posts will be deleted, as will posts that aren't asking (in the non-MacNN style called 'politely') for help or responding with an actual helpful post.

Basically, if MacNN handled their forums like Apple, there'd be maybe three posts for each story (and the other 600 anti-Jew, anti-Bush, anti-US, RIPE-based posts would be all tossed - oh, if only we could get that...)

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02/06, 03:31pm | report spam | close Reply |
RE: Apple message boards

"oh, if only we could get that...) "

h***, I'd settle for actual MAC NEWS on a site called MAC NEWS NETWORK; obviously that's way too much to ask for.

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02/06, 03:58pm | report spam | close Reply |
omg

This is ridiculous, folks. We have no idea what happened here, and, as a couple sane individuals have pointed out, what evidence is there to support this claim?

MacNN -- I can't believe this! With every day I read MacMinute more and more often, but I keep coming back here because it used to be my favorite place to get Mac News, but man oh man... I should really stop doing this to myself :)

But look, it's fine to post rumored information, but it HAS to be clearly labeled as such. "Sources have confirmed" and "Apple has records of the sender addresses for all e-mail that were lost, but does not currently intend to release this information to .Mac members." are statements made that just aren't fact. As long as this is phrased in a different light, this item would be okay, but as such, they are posting unverified information as fact.

Can Apple filter their message boards? Of course!! It's not a freakin' chat room -- it's for support questions. Is it bizarre for them to delete posts that rant? No! Is it strange to delete legitimate questions? yes.

Now, to the person who compared this to Watergate: you're a moron. By your logic, i'll just open up an entire news corporation based on random heresay. Oh wait, that's fox news.

To other people who said "Apple's only response is to email people who might have emailed you during that time", when did Apple tell you this? I'm serious here, because they might have, i just don't know how, because I'm a .mac user, and I never heard of this probem, i don't know if i lost email, and apple certainly never told me anything of any kind one way or another... I did get email that day, did i lose others? I have no idea.

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02/06, 05:14pm | report spam | close Reply |
ripe

(I like the ripe guys!)

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02/06, 05:38pm | report spam | close Reply |
Thanks

"I did get email that day, did i lose others? I have no idea."

Thanks for proving my point.

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02/06, 06:28pm | report spam | close Reply |
wow

a wholeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee $100 for a year?!?!?!

for godsake you cheap m***.

servers go down, problmes occur.

if you missed a few emails big whoop

i have 7 domains and occasionalyl maintainence needs to be done on the servers by the host

if email gets lost....so be it

bunch fookin whiners around here, i swear.

at $100 a YEAR you should expect to get what you pay for.

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02/06, 06:35pm | report spam | close Reply |
ps.

and yes, i also have a .mac account as well, but im not stupid enough to make it my main email account :)

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02/06, 06:51pm | report spam | close Reply |
Not Speculation

Hi there... I'm Pete Hopkins (.Mac member name phopkins) and I'm the source from this story.

I received a phone call from William Minton of .Mac support (I may be spelling that name wrong), and he described that the e-mail was lost because of a MyDoom filter gone awry, and he sent me the addresses who had sent me e-mail that was lost.

I provided MacNN with his phone number, but apparently he did not comment for the story.

The deleted forum posts were purely factual, based on what I had learned from him. For example, a post that merely said "The e-mail that was lost on Monday is gone for good, it's not in a queue waiting to be delivered," in response to post asking if the e-mail would ever show up, was deleted.

.Mac support is choosing to leave its customers in the dark about what happened, which is, in my opinion, a poor decision.

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02/06, 07:26pm | report spam | close Reply |
typical

"Apple has not notified customers, and is reportedly deleting posts on its discussion board trying to convey information regarding the situation. (Apple did not respond to requests for comment or confirmation.)"

This is so typical of Apple. Hide something until they cannot possible hise it any longer. As if no one will find out! Its like the iPod battery debacle, The white spots problem on notebooks, the bad logic boards on iBooks, the list goes on and on. They are s******* up royally on quality control on EVERY front. And acting like big brother 1984, hypocrites!

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02/06, 09:36pm | report spam | close Reply |
viruses

It is "virii," not viruses.

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02/07, 12:21am | report spam | close Reply |
re: viruses

Actually, it's not "virii" -- that would mean the singular form is "virius" (to create the double i). If we're going to Latin-ize it, the plural should be viri, but Dictionary.com and the American Heritage Dictionary both list "viruses" as the plural. I'm not sure where this "virii" business came from, but people on the 'net seem to use it all the time. I'm sure it won't be long before it's listed as a variant in the dictionary, just like sherbert vs. sherbet.

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02/07, 08:51am | report spam | close Reply |
write to them

Write to them and include this article.
I did.
This might encourage them to at least give us the senders list.
Apple sometimes needs "prodding" to do the right thing...iBook anyone? iPod Batery Anyone?....5300 anyone? anyone?

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Filter error responsible .Mac mail loss

updated 07:05 pm EST, Thu February 5, 2004

.Mac mail loss

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How about that

delete

h***!!!!

Re: h***

RIPE.

Terrible..

Never really understood..

re:RIPE

dur...

Re: RIPE

re: RIPE

speculation

haha

re: RIPE

What else is new...

Good grief

It's not just e-mail

Right or not

Just email?

Re: speculation

Apple message boards

RE: Apple message boards

omg

ripe

Thanks

wow

ps.

Not Speculation

typical

viruses

re: viruses

write to them

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