For several years some people have been talking about email melt down. I've experienced my second mini meltdown this year.
major delays on emails
sending email via smtp often not working
receiving email via pop3 often not working
webmail often inaccessible
Back in the summer I started to have pretty big problems with my emails getting delayed, sometimes for days, also sometimes not being able to send. Eventually after quite some research on the web and talking with a couple of different ISP's I discovered that there was a spate of spambot computers taking over the web servers of ISPS's, and sending out lots I mean lots of Spam and flooding them, causing them to gridlock.
It was a fairly new technology for several ISP's to deal with. and took a while for some of them to fix. My ISP at that time, Ontel, had their web servers major compromised for about 6 weeks)
There is now another spate of this happening; I'd started to notice problems earlier on in November. and last week the same major delays for my email started happening with Lycos servers.
I also discovered that anyone sending from Lycos smtp or with an email or domain that is listed with Lycos will not be able to send email to hotmail or yahoo addresses and some others.
I've now set up a new account . . . (which I'm not going to put on this bog !!)
My websites www.movingsound.com and www.christofferdegraal.com are hosted with Lycos and all the emails I have given to people are with that domain, so I really REALLY hope that this gets fixed soon. ( I spoke with their customer help line. they've been working on fixing it for several weeks now.)
I thought initially that this was just for the ISP's concerned. However, in another conversation, ( how OD I get into these conversations !?!) It was explained to me that when I send an email it goes down kind of like a motorway, looking for junctions that are free enough to take... to go to the next 'sector' as the email jumps from the wiring from one ISP to another, going around the world.
Unfortunately even if the ISP I am using is not overrun by Spam, my email can end up going thru a grid locked ISP because the sign at the junction say's all is ok and then, a very short way down the path . . . gridlock and delay.
SO . . . at the moment this problem that some of the individual ISP's have can effect us all. It's a kind of leapfrog of spammers causing increasingly complex problems that then take some time to fix; weeks at a time it seems.
hope this of use for some people somewhere. -- now I need to prepare to send another update to let people know my new address.
