PlusNet wipes customers' email again

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 24 Aug 2007 at 10:08

PlusNet has once again admitted that it's accidentally deleted customer emails.

Last year the company lost several thousand customer emails after it accidentally wiped them from a live server.

Now the company claims that installation of a new spam filter has resulted in customers' emails being permanently wiped from their server.

PlusNet claims that, after installing the new junk mail filter on the morning of 23 August, customer emails began queuing on the spam appliance. The company decided to "roll back the changes late afternoon at which point new email should have been getting delivered immediately and older email should have been in the process of getting dequeued," according to a post on the company's support forum.

Something went wrong during that process. "We now believe that approximately 10% of legitimate email that was de-queued [sic] from the new spam appliance to our network was incorrectly recognised as spam and black-holed," says the support site. "Additionally the same percentage of new legitimate mails received between approximately 5pm and 11pm last night have also been deleted. These mails will not be recoverable and we recommend customers who have not received email that was sent yesterday to ask the sender to re-send where possible."

The ISP, which was bought by BT earlier this year, hasn't released details of how many emails have been wiped in this latest incident. The company has issued a statement apologising to customers for the breach and assuring customers that all email systems are now working properly, but has declined to comment further on the problems.