"Several Million" Emails Still in Queue after 1&1's Week-long Mail Server Fiasco

I heard about the ZDNet article from David, and found several related stories on The Register.

On Monday and Tuesday, 1&1 said an unexpected surge in email volume caused delays in delivering messages to some of its UK customers. Incoming emails were queued and stored; no data was lost. By Tuesday afternoon, the company reported that everything was back to normal.

But two days later, The Register said it heard from a dozen irate customers who were unable to access 1&1's POP3 or SMTP servers. The company's webmail interface also gave a "HTTP 500 Internal Server Error". Customers complained that lack of information compounded their frustration.

This morning, The Register published a reader's speculation that 1&1 might have been DDoS-ed. His client's website rocketed from 50 pageviews per day to peaks of 600,000 both this week and on Jan 7 and 8. Possibly coincidentally, The Register had mentioned a Jan 9 DDoS attack against FastHosts, a 1&1 subsidiary. But 1&1 Press Chief Richard Stevenson explained that the outage was caused by "an important update to our mail server software and the subsequent restart of the mail servers". He expected some disruption to continue throughout the day due to "planned" maintenance - which the company somehow neglected to announce.

One ZDNet reader claims she was told by 1&1 that 80 million emails were still queued as of earlier today. 1&1 confirmed that "several million" messages had accumulated in the pipeline during the disruption, but denied that the queue ever reached 80 million. When ZDNet asked whether 1&1 will compensate customers for the down time, the company wouldn't say.

This incident reminded me of Gmail's lost messages disaster from a few weeks ago. Google's system completely deleted 60 users' emails, but most readers focused on giving each other backup tips rather than complaining about Google. Gmail is free, after all - even though Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley reports that Google earns $9 per user per year in advertising revenue, and could double or triple this amount within 5 years.

At a time when even corporate users of enterprise mail systems like Microsoft Exchange are auto-forwarding their messages to free services such as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, does POP3 email still represent a viable offering from ISPs and hosting providers? Its future consists of bigger mailboxes, lower monthly fees, and unsticky customers who expect perfect service. Is it any wonder that BSkyB decided to offer its broadband customers co-branded Gmail instead of running its own service?