A Cox Internet Email Outage? 52
notthere asks: "In Florida, Cox High Speed Internet (the home service) has been having problems with out-of-network emails for almost a week, since that is the date on the latest piece
of email in my Inbox. I contacted Cox tech support this morning. The first responder read a statement to the effect that 'there were some problems, and they do not know when the problems will be fixed.' When I complained and demanded some clear explanation of what the problem was and when the service would resume, she said 'Cox HSI is an entertainment service, so we do not guarantee service. If you want to talk to our people in the business division, I'll be glad to give you their phone number.' I then asked to talk to a manager, who was certainly nicer (he apologized), but offered no answer or projection as to what the problem is and when it will be fixed. Interestingly, the Cox support web page reports no outages." If you use Cox's Internet service, have you recently had trouble connecting to your mail servers?
Charter has the same attitude (Score:2, Interesting)
They tout a 2meg (down only) connection, but you are luckey to see 1/4th of that.
They only provide mail service as an "extra."
Forget having any sort of Perl script, PHP, etc. on your web pages.
Their attitude seems to be that you pay for the bandwidth and bow at their feet for anything else they provide. Like Usenet, Mail, IRC, Web pages, etc.
Connections drop all the time, DHCP servers get reset without causing the client address leases to expire, mail is slow most times, etc.
Forget them ever being pro-active and telling you of planned service outages.
The only difference I have seen, was that Charter screwed up their mail servers certificates and the servers couldnt exchange mail with SOME other servers for months. I had been complaining for a LONG time (as in being on a first name basis with three or folks in their top level tech support group), so they gave me three free months of access.
Charter is a Cable TV company, not an ISP, and it shows. But then again, it was started by Paul Allen, so maybe that explains a lot.
Seems like Cox is in the same boat when it comes to service.
Interesting research (Score:2, Interesting)
Intermail was a software.com product. There were 2 versions: Intermail KX and Intermail MX. Post.Office was a totally different product, aimed at the "Exchange" market.
There was another company named phone.com that seriously mangled wireless applications such as a WAP proxy, MMS-C and other things that ended up being called MAG - Mobile Application Gateway.
The 2 companies merged (or better yet, collided) and formed Openwave. Intermail KX was killed in favor of Intermail MX. Intermail MX was renamed to be Openwave Email MX. Its a bunch of crappy marketing. Intermail (which is what everyone calls it still, inside openwave and out, as well as the app itself) runs on Sun Solaris. I think there may be support for HP-UX or AIX, but it has always been developed on Sun SPARC.
I work at an ISP that depolyed it (good or bad) about 4 years ago. The real weakness comes in the "MSS" or messagestore. This is the server that actually houses the messages. Looks like COX is running Intermail 6. The system stores the headers in a database and the message bodies as text files in giant filesystems. In Intermail MX 5 the headers were usually stored in an oracle database. This is where I guess, but I think the last DBA quit at openwave, so they decided that they will get better performance using "sleepycat" in imail 6. I call it berkleyDB. bad, bad, bad idea IMHO.
*sigh* With this kind of marketing company (openwave), there isn't a whole lot you can do. It's like telling EMC that their Symmetrix needs X, Y, and Z. You may as well just call Hitachi.
my 2c