Steve Friedl's Weblog

Now sytrino.net is displaying the following message:
"Sytrino.NET is no longer offering free email services. Paid users may login below. We regret any inconvienience we have caused. "

Is now moved to fusemail.net servers and dropped the free email accounts.

the vliou/vincent liou character (allegedly) behind sytrino may be up to something else. he's recently been spotted on the mailsnare.net forums asking a lot of questions about bandwidth, extra storage. maybe he has a lot of mail?

also funny that sytrino.net was recently redirecting to mailsnare's webmail server until mailsnare blocked it. allegedly, he was phishing for user logins and passwords. some interesting threads on sytrino and vliou on the emaildiscussions.com forum (where he and discussion of sytrino have been banned) and his newer posts on the mailsnare forum. if fusemail has a forum, i wouldn't be surprised if he posted there as well (as he was/maybe still is a fusemail subscriber).

Vliou has been trying to run an email service since March 2004. Vincent Liou started with St. Georges International Email Service (SGIES) and then to Sytrino. St. Georges is the name of the boarding school that he recently attended or is still attending in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Vincent did not get much attention until he raised SGIES storage from 30MB to 3GB in July. He did manage to get himself banned from the EmailDiscussions forum in April because of lying. In July he ran a SGIES Runboard forum where he claims he had banks of servers and received lots of attention. He also advertised in blogs like this and free forums. SGIES had many outages.

On August 19, Vincent advertised in the DSLReports forum. A person with username Removed started to banter with him. Removed reported SGIES to Shaw Cable. Shaw Cable warned Vincent August 20, and SGIES immediately shut down and stayed down. Then Sytrino.net appeared in January.

In between August and January, Vincent (aka vliou, p12,and more) was banned in UnitedEmailSystems and Fusemail forums, and his aliases banned in EmailDiscussions forum. As noted above, vliou is presently posting in the Mailsnare forum.

Thanks for the "report". I will follow Vincent around some. :)

You may see the domain names sgies.com and sytrino.net come up from time to time. Another email service, UnitedEmailSystems (UES), bought the domain names. I question the wisdom of these purchases, but that is another thread.

CORRECTION: I said in my previous post that Removed is from DSLReports forum. He comes from the BroadbandReports forum.

[Note: DSLReports and BroadbandReports are the same thing - Steve]

Steve and Removed,

Would you look at www.bgxmail.net? I think this is a Vincent Liou remake.

I belive Bgxmail is now a reputable service, and I am personally invovled in a small way and I will just say although he may be involved, I do think the relaibility of the service is around 99.8% since in the beginning and there are efforts being made to ensure it does not fall below 98% but I do believe the service has now reputable backers, and this may involve Fusemail and other people I do not know but I do not think it will fail like these other servicesm as it has has been going for 3-5 months now with not much downtime whatsoever and the only downtime has bene beyond their control.

I think that's enough said, as it is clearly a reputable service and I use it as my main account so this can't be wrong with the relaibilty as it has been faultless recently. If you want to find out more go to Bgxmail.net and click on the link for the forum more more info.

Well hes at it again bgxmail.net is running off shaw internet

i have visited the forum and he still does the same as he has done with all the other services

Dave,

It is not actually. It is running off of 3web, which runs lines off shaw. Check it out.

Please note that Bgxmail.net is currently running business lines of Telus. feel free to take a look. the IP address is found by doing a rDNS of mail.bgxmail.net which leads to 207.6.1.130. For those of you who are skeptical, feel free to email abuse@telus.net with your skepticism. We thank you for bearing with us.

Dave, I did not post the comment made on June 17. Someone faked my name. Guess who? :)

Steve and Removed,

Bgxmail.net has changed name again, to Mailnation.net.

MailNation.net is now hosted at the Netriplex datacenter.
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/lookup.ch?name=mailnation.net&type=A

get this - mailnation is now offering a patently absurd 1000GB (yes, one terabyte) free mailbox. with 10mb attachment limit (it was 15 megabytes just yesterday). and a "toll-free" number that's not toll-free. with no actual outbound SMTP service (guess he doesn't know how to set up alternate ports)

i frankly don't understand what this guy is trying to accomplish. it's idiotic. offer way, way, way more than you can possibly deliver. i note the comments from back in march - "efforts being made to ensure it [reliability] does not fall below 98%". 98% is absolutely, colossally, catastrophically bad for a mailserver. 99.8%, as suggested earlier in that post, is merely horrible.

i've been in the email business for more than a decade. it takes time, skill, expertise, and EXPERIENCE to run a reliable email service. apparently, mailnation has....time. but not much else.

hey vliou - you shouldn't even open your doors for business until you can offer 'four nines' reliability - 99.99%. when you exceed five nines, 99.999%, let us know. it'll give me an opportunity to reminisce about the good times years ago when i *passed* five nines reliability.

wow. this is incredible. it's like being on dialup, and the server is on dialup too! several minutes for some screen refreshes. icons/images that don't render (the ubiquitous red 'x'). frames that come up with the standard IE error for 'page not found'.

isn't there a law against this kind of incredibly bad service? there should be. there really should be. it's practically criminal, someone misrepresenting himself/his company as experts, reliable, etc - and all it is is off the shelf merak mailserver software. yep, buy some software, I 'r' a email provider!

pathetic.

wow. it's becoming comical, really. main page disappears. SSL logins stop working. now it won't let me in - because their license for the software has expired -

"IceWarp Web Mail has expired. Please, register now.
Click here to purchase"

am i on candid camera? ;^)

i must be on candid camera. now they've pulled SSL logins altogether. and when you go to their main page, across the very top, it displays in huge letters:

HTTP/1.1 404 Object Not Found Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 22:04:17 GMT X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
404 Object Not Found

*every single time i log in* there's something new and different broken. it's hilarious.

another day, another error. attempting to go to the help system (which is ostensibly at http://www.mailnation.net:85/helpdesk, but which is completely nonresponsive, so trying http://www.mailnation.net/helpdesk), gives the following error:

Notice: Undefined index: fn in c:\easyphp\www\helpdesk\index.php on line 17

Notice: Undefined index: fn in c:\easyphp\www\helpdesk\index.php on line 22

Fatal error: Call to undefined function mysql_connect() in c:\easyphp\www\helpdesk\class\class.php on line 49

------------
So, their mysql installation is down, rendering both the helpdesk, and the wordpress 'blog' that vliou maintains, totally unreachable. had they had real systems administration experience, this would be a fifteen second fix, maximum. i expect it'll be another day or so before it's fixed. of course, if they're reading along here, i've just shown them what the error is so maybe they'll have it fixed in a few hours.

yep - three hours later, the url is repointed to http://support.mailnation.net/mail/wordpress/. of course, the embedded URL actually *on* the wordpress page still points back to the wrong URL. and while the helpdesk page has also been repointed, it displays the following error above the page:
Notice: Undefined index: fn in c:\easyphp\www\helpdesk\index.php on line 17

Notice: Undefined index: fn in c:\easyphp\www\helpdesk\index.php on line 22

i wonder if there will ever be a day without errors.

oh, of course. once he shuts the doors on this fiasco, it'll be error free!

(my daily update?)
rolling over the icons for 'reply', 'forward', 'trash', etc. when displaying a message causes them to disappear. you just have a blank 'tray' where the icon was.
they come back after a few seconds. why? because each rollover causes the system to redownload the icon image. believe it or not. no caching at all. i'm sure that adds a good 20% of webserving load to the server for absolutely no good reason.

forty seconds from clicking the 'login' button to being presented with my inbox just now.

forty seconds. during the absolute weekly peak on my systems - between 10am and 2pm monday and tuesday, with 100 concurrent pop3 sessions going, 70 imap (and webmail) sessions live, more than 40 mysql queries per second, the longest i've ever had to wait was less than ten seconds when checking webmail. and that was anomalous - even at those peak times, it's typically less than three seconds to authenticate and be in your inbox.

40 seconds on a saturday afternoon.

clearly, i'm not rendered speechless by it, but at this rate.....

Wow, paul, you're very critical of a *free* email service. Why don't you run a similar thing before you start talking to yourself on a blog? It's kind of sad really. It's easier to critique others without being self-critical. Plus, these guys are upgrading their servers this week to please demanding users like yourself who need to calm down. REALLY.

ahem. you're certainly entitled to your opinion.

actually, i'm my own strongest critic. that's why my company provides bulletproof service - because i refuse to provide anything less.

so, by your measure, if someone offers something for free - and claims high reliability, etc etc - if it sucks, that's okay, because....it's free.

let's see...gmail is free....yahoo mail is free.....hotmail is free....there's about a dozen other sites that offer free personal email, and they don't have daily outages and server configuration screwups. but because these chuckle-heads say it's free, you won't complain when they lose all your mail?

let me repeat: you're entitled to your opinion. and, remarkably enough, *i'm entitled to mine*.

i'll continue to critique their colossally bad service as long as Mr. Friedl is inclined to post them.

mailnation.net site completely down. 100% nonresponsive. it's alive, but, well, dead:

telnet www.mailnation.net 80
Trying 209.59.2.110...
Connected to www.mailnation.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /

nuthin'.

ah. two minutes later on a non-qualified get:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 06:47:32 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 87

ErrorThe parameter is incorrect. Connection to www.mailnation.net closed by foreign host.

if you wait it out, the page will come up. of course, clicking on the 'login' button to go to webmail is another two minute wait before you get the actual login screen.

this morning, the site is down hard, connection refused on ports 80, 110, 143.

they sent out a message late last night saying they were aware of the sluggishness, and they were going to upgrade to dual xeon servers or some such. and also stating that they still believe they're faster than most email providers out there.

still horrendously bad. 40 seconds from clicking the 'login' button on the main page, to being taken to the webmail login page. it took *seven minutes* after entering login info on the webmail login page for the next page - the actual webmail inbox page - to begin loading. after waiting four minutes for the inbox to actually load - it goes to a blank page just a pure, blank, white, page. in both cases, the page progress stalled at 39% for most of the wait - then poof, jumped to the next 'page', if you consider a white screen a page.

it's hilarious. they said they're going to be buying dual xeon servers to address the sluggishness - throwing hardware at what is without a doubt a gross configuration problem.

the site went from "merely" broken in innumerable ways the first few days, to suddenly - dramatically - everything running in deep slow motion. that's not sluggishness caused by growth and load. i've run enough tens of dozens of servers in my career, i know a wedged server when i see one.

this is more like ren & stimpy run an email server on the planet gronkamus.

They're upgrading tomorrow night...have patience...

you're missing the point. right now, the system is functioning at normal speeds. that's because whatever has been wedging the server isn't wedging it now. they can upgrade to quintuple dual-core super special xeon processors - all it means is that when they wedge again, which they will, it'll be wedging quintuple dual-core super special xeon processors. but it'll still wedge.

without a systems administrator who knows and has experience with how the hardware and software work - at a fundamental level - this kind of thing will continue to happen.

this is the big bugaboo out there on the net with a lot of providers. they buy off the shelf hardware, and an off the shelf software
'solution', have no idea how it all really works, so when there are problems - all they can do is throw more hardware at the problem in hopes that it "fixes" it.

it's real simple. i'll be monitoring things after the big 'upgrade'. and i'd bet folding money that the wedging will continue to happen. instead of seven minutes for a screen refresh, the dual xeons will drop it down to a very reasonable 3.5 minutes. har!

Thanks for the updates, Paul. Vince was a chump when we busted him in January and it looks like things have yet to change. Chumpy McChump-Chump can't figure out how to keep a machine going...

mailnation.net went offline late yesterday evening for the 'upgrades', just as they said (i believe it went offline around 8pm or 9pm my time - PDT).
it's now quarter to noon my time on sunday. about 15 hours later. and they're still offline.

As i've mentioned, i'm an email service provider myself. I've been a unix (solaris) sysadmin for more than a decade. my current company - http://www.smileglobal.com - is run by me, my business partner, and just a couple of other employees (in billing and accounting). i maintain the servers myself. no outside help. on call 24x7x365 - cuz i'm "it".
my last unscheduled outage was February 9th, 2004. on that date, while working on a different (non-critical) server, i made a rare 'boo boo', and caused the main pop/imap/webmail server to reboot. that caused 3 minutes of downtime. the server had been up 358 days at that point.
on May 1st, 2004, I shut down the server to perform a cpu upgrade. I also replaced a faulty stick of memory (ECC, so it had not caused any problems), and did a little minor maintenance. The server was down for 8 minutes, between 10pm and 10:09pm, on a saturday night.
On September 25th of this year, I performed another CPU upgrade on the server, after 512 days uptime. The total downtime was six minutes.
That's the sum total of outages. in 951 days, 17 minutes of downtime. for those doing the math, that's a 99.99876% uptime.
so, i guess that means my previous claim of providing five-nines reliability is incorrect. in the words of Agent Smart, 'missed it by >that< much!'

it is appalling to me that someone/some company can claim to be in business providing service - any service, for that matter, not just email service - with the level of unreliable service these people provide. frankly, i think it should be criminal - they shoudl be fined for shitty service. people like this give a bad name to the profession. their mere existence hurts my business - they make all the same kinds of claims on their stupid website about 'reliable trusted service' that we do. we really provide that - they're merely committing an act of creative writing. how is anyone out there on the net to know the difference between us and them? this is what angers me most. their site is a pack of lies.

pretty close to 24 hours now and mailnation.net is still down, and by down, i mean down hard - no response on ports 25, 80, 110 - times out.

maybe this is a good sign - maybe they got smart, folded up shop, and have decided to move on to something they're better suited for, perhaps a career as carnie barkers.

webpage still down, port 110 still down, port 143 still down - but getting this this morning (it's been at least 36 hours since they went down now):

root-klaatu /% telnet www.mailnation.net 25
Trying 209.59.2.110...
Connected to www.mailnation.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220-www.mailnation.net ESMTP MailNation Solutions; Mon, 17 Oct 2005 09:39:30 -0700
220-*********************
220-Sent from MailNation Solutions
220-FREE 1000GB Email w/ Antivirus & Anti-Spam, IMAP, POP3 and More!
220-Visit http://www.mailnation.net to signup today!
220 *********************

that's a shame. i guess they haven't done the right thing and folded up the tent. still trying to get a windows PC running as a mailserver.

well, they're back up. sometime in the last few hours. so they were down about 40 hours.

*all mail that was in my inbox is GONE*. how great is that! they've conveniently created some additional free space in my mailbox.

vliou has posted some really egregious tripe in the blog - http://support.mailnation.net/mail/wordpress/

most sickening excerpt: "MailNation Solutions is now leading the emailing industry with its extensive speed upgrades, and improved reliability."

what can i say? this is flat out fiction. it is fantasy. it is offensive. i am absolutely baffled as to why this guy persists. if i lost all my customer's existing mail, and had 40 hours of downtime, i'd probably throw myself off a bridge.
this guy has no conscience, and no shame.

oh....dear....god.

i didn't think they could top themselves. but they have. i believe it's a uid problem. if i send a message - it's not saved in the 'sent' folder. but get this - *a different user sent a message a moment ago apparently, because THEIR sent message showed up in MY 'sent' folder!!!!

a few seconds later - gone. this is amazing. after 40 hours downtime, they went live without properly testing/vetting the system. oh my freaking god.

what an incredible privacy violation. utterly, supremely, appalling.

to their credit, they have restored the messages that were in my inbox previously. doesn't excuse the failure to vet the system before going live. one good act amongst a few dozen bad does not balance their karma.

Wow, I just came across this site, and man are you critical. To their credit, they're always on the lookout for increasing uptime and speed. For a free email service, they are taking quite a lot of bashing from you. True, that is no excuse, but you seem to be the only one on this blog who keeps going on and on and on about how bad it is. How about the good stuff then? To their credit, I have been a loyal MailNation solutions customer since the very beginning, and their response time to criticial issues is impressive. Like you mentioned in your previous post, there were issues, and that were fixed in under an hour. Seeing you vent off on this blog shows me the type of person you are. You continue bad-mouthing email services, but disregard the positive aspects. Shows to me, exactly the type of person you are. You need to do something productive with your time, and if you're so good at running servers, then I invite you to go and find yourself another job then.

And yes, their speed is blazingly fast again.

--
Their most recent email:
--
Dear users,

Unfortunately, the downtime took longer than anticipated. We do sincerely apologize to our users for the recent issues. We had encountered severe difficulties with swapping some of our older hardware. The new Dell PowerEdge servers we bought were less than friendly when it came to moving all of the mail folders over. We are intending to ensure that mail will never be lost in the future, so we invested in mounting all our drives with RAID 1. However, we also chose to increase hdd sizes. We had planned to use images and such to do this, but we ended up having to do a full rebuild, which took us lots of hours. Nonetheless, everything is perfect now. Also, we would like to inform you that we ended up not switching to dual xeons, but quad xeon processors as Dell was fortunate enough to cut us a discount after the ram they shipped us was faulty. MailNation Solutions is now leading the emailing industry with its extensive speed upgrades, and improved reliability.

The last bit of downtime will take place tomorrow (Tuesday - Oct 17). This last planned downtime should not take too long (1o minutes). Basically, we are dropping in a Raid 1 card and dropping in some extra ram. The downtime should be the last of this transition and should be relatively unnoticeable.

We appreciate your patience and all of the support you guys have offered us. Running an email service is no easy task, with many individuals who criticize this and that, without realizing how much effort and knowledge the staff we have on board with us know, and how much work goes on at the Netriplex datacenter in Boston. MailNation Solutions customers have always been grateful for our help, and we hope to continue to live up to your expectations.

Quote: what can i say? this is flat out fiction. it is fantasy. it is offensive. i am absolutely baffled as to why this guy persists. if i lost all my customer's existing mail, and had 40 hours of downtime, i'd probably throw myself off a bridge.
this guy has no conscience, and no shame.

Response: He has perseverence and determination, and truly wants to succeed. Something you, Mr. Theodoropoulos, lack. That's what good bosses/ceo's do. They see things through, regardless of what unsupported biased people like you have to say.

If this were the first effort by somebody trying to launch a service, the scorn being heaped here would be entirely unwarranted. Everybody is allowed growing pains.

But this punk has tried this several times while demonstrating that he has no conceivable idea what's required to run a service of this type. "5 Gigabyte email" on a residential cable service? This is completely out of touch with reality, and he'd done this kind of thing before. When your "free service" evaporates, taking user email boxes with it, I'm not sure that "you get what you pay for" grants him a pass.

Vincent has a history of this kind of scam, and though it's certainly possible that he's making a real attempt this time, nobody who has watched this unfold previously is going to grant the benefit of the doubt.

well "aaron" and "robert m." - whom i believe are merely vliou posting under assumed names, based on the three minute difference between the two posts - you still don't get it. you claim on your website to have "Highly Ranked Email System & Server Reliability ". who ranked it? you claim it, but it has *zero truth to it*. you are lying to your customers and potential customers on your main page. Think about that. you are *lying*. that's what i mean when i say you have no conscience and no shame. When i state on my website that we provide bulletproof reliability, i can sleep like a baby, secure in the knowledge that i'm actually telling the truth to my customers and potential customers.

you go 953 days with only 17 minutes of outages, and then i'll stop criticizing your service. deal?

if you can manage that, you won't hear from me again until late May 2008.

You both bring up good points. I'd like to consider Mr. Friedl's point's first. After further examining the owner of MailNation, if the allegations are indeed true, he would be either a bit older or younger than 18 years old. Ok, so let's consider he's 18 years old, plain and simple. For him to do this, is a formidable achievement in my opinion. Some of us have jobs, like me, and Paul, however, he chose to start a small business.

I was also thinking, if he is 18, and his last 3-4 years were spent on running an email service, he has improved each time (although not a lot), and now is his first crack at a professionally hosted and managed email service. Nobody knows how long it'll last, so we can only do what Mr. Theodoropoulos can suggest: give it time. I will hold you to it Paul. Don't criticize until it's down or unbelievable slow, or until you lose your email account. A man should stand behind his word, and i'm sure you will. I have sent "support" this link in hopes that it will proliferate up the ladder and reach Mr. Liou's office, and am hoping for a response...

I think it's completely unreasonable to insist that others knowing the history hold their tongues until something goes bad. After seeing people get burned while the punk gets his servers taken down for violating terms of service, sending up a warning to newcomers seems like a public service.

This is not to say that he's running a scam now, or is not making a genuine effort, but the best predictor of the future is the past.

I've decided not to argue until some official comment is handed down, as I hope so. However, I would like to bring up one kind point to you Mr. Friedl. You use the word "scam". The word scam means "A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle". And of course ,the verb "scammed" means "to defraud". In none of the cases with his previous services, has he ever frauded his customers. This cannot be said for the ISP tos, but he has never engaged in stealing credit card numbers or frauded his customers. The disservice he has done is leaving his customers high and dry, in the past. I do believe this is going to change now, but please do be selective of the language used to describe his actions.

quarter of one in the morning - pacific time - tuesday 18 october. server wedged. hanging at 39% of page loaded trying to log into inbox. been several minutes now. it's late <yawn> so i'm not counting. suffice to say, its just like before.

@Robert re: The word scam means "A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle"

Yes: offering a service - even a free one - where one cannot hope to deliver it (5gb email service on a residential cable circuit) is a fraudulent offering. One not need to take money out of your pocket to defraud you (e.g., "fraud in the inducement").

I don't see how that is fraud. It's just being unwise and hopeful.

9:30am pacific time, trying to log in, server still totally wedged, taking many minutes to progress past authentication. This is exactly what i predicted. a wedged quad Xeon is no faster than a wedged 486DX266. there is a fundamental configuration problem, and no amount of hardware thrown at the problem will overcome it.

Until the main page of mailnation.net states clearly that it is an EXPERIMENTAL system in BETA, rather than claiming that it is a professionally run service with "impressive uptime", the reports will continue.

ah, the mailbox finally opened. again i didn't time it, but it was a minimum of two minutes before the inbox opened. "blazingly fast"? i think not.

Uhh, I think it's your internet connection. It's blazingly fast for me.

By the way, they stopped taking signups (try signing up) b/c they were doing server upgrades. The speed is great for me, so why don't you stop criticizing these guys for their "wedged" server and acknowledge that it is indeed fast. Go to some library or somewhere with a T1 connection, and then complain...

Dear user,

Please let me introduce myself. My name is Vincent Liou, President and Chief Executive Officer of MailNation Solutions. It has been a long seven months since the inauguration of this email service, and we, as a company, have come very far since then. We started as a company running one server off a standard home cable connection, to now, a cluster of servers running at one of most reputable datacenters in Boston. Our user base has grown exponentially since then, and we have, no doubt, had our ups and downs, and that is why I am emailing you today.

MailNation Solutions is the product of many years of failure. Failure has cost us money, a negative image and a negative reputation. However, failure also teaches us lessons. That is the case for myself. As President of MailNation Solutions, this is my first business venture when a profit is even made. Starting an email company is no easy task, and was much harder than I had thought. In fact, I had failed four times before, but failure, as aforementioned, has taught me lessons. That is why I am so proud to inform you that MailNation Solutions is here to stay.

Compliments and criticisms are some of the emails I receive in my office each day. As the seven months have progressed, I have started to receive more and more compliments than criticisms. I was appalled to learn from one of our customers that on a web-blog, MailNation's servers were criticized as being "wedged" and unreliable. This is where I present my case to you. As the world's largest free email service, there is a great demand. We do not have the luxury of having a small clientele of paying customers. People naturally have lower expectations when choosing us as an email provider (because we are free), but we do not use this fact as an excuse. We offer our users the highest level of customer service. However, we are still in the early stages, and downtime does occur. However, we have decreased our downtime and improved our access speed each month, as you may have noticed. Just one month ago, our servers were always 100% loaded, and now, this month, with our quad xeon servers (which we purchsed from our profit), are are now hovering at roughly 40-50% load. Therefore, I want to assure our users that we are always working to improve our company, and build a positive public image. Consequently, while we value new users, we have decided to temporarily suspend new user signups until next week. This will allow us to focus on further increasing speed by tweaking our current servers; basically, we are going to try and increase efficiency. Each criticism has an ounce of truth, maybe more. So we are going to respond to any criticisms that our servers are "wedged", and see how we can improve.

Many have asked, "how is it possible to offer 1000GB of free email space to each customer". The answer is, "we do not". In all honesty, many email service providers, like MailNation Solutions, understand that there would be an incredibly minute portion of the population who will use the whole 1000GB. We expand as we see necessary. If our hard drive space is running low, we add another, and another, and another. That way, we satisfy demand without wasting funds. It is a technologically unfeasable attempt to provide 2 or 3 or even 1000GB space to each user, especially as a free email service, so we increase as our customers demand more.

As a kind reminder, all server downtime information can be found at http://support.mailnation.net/mail/wordpress and the HelpDesk is located at http://support.mailnation.net/helpdesk/.

Hopefully this email has helped you understand our company a bit better. I have always valued a good working relationship with my colleagues. Therefore, I would like to publically thank our number 1 volunteer, Mr. John Taylor. Mr. Taylor is one of the few support staff we have here. His assistance on the HelpDesk is greatly appreciated by many users on our system, and especially by me. Got a question? Mr. Taylor and the rest of the staff here at MailNation will gladly answer you questions.

You can always contact me personally. My email address is president@mailnation.net. As a celebration of our successes these last 7 months, I would also like to announce that effective immediately, all new user signups will have an attachment limit of 20mb. Please feel free to contact me with any concerns, compliments, or complaints that you may have. I would be glad to assist in any way I can.

Kindest regards,
Vincent Liou
-----------
Vincent Liou
President and Chief Executive Officer
MailNation Solutions LLC
president@mailnation.net
Office Ph #: 1(215)-254-3144
-----------

Ouch.

well "Robert M.", you seem to be confused. When an industry professional judges how someone else's systems are running, he does more than just say "it's slow". He also checks his own connection, and his connectivity to other sites, and makes sure it's not something with his PC. He consults the network performance graphs he maintains, that monitor connectivity to the UK, Australia, India, and several states here in the US - and his own connectivity as well.

As an industry professional, I have slightly more than 'comcast cable internet' at home. I have a symmetric 3MB adaptive broadband connection, with 4ms average latency, that is stable enough that i run some of my backup servers here from home.

I suspect that Mr. Liou doesn't understand the term 'wedged'. Perhaps it's more of a UNIX term than one used in windows. There's a popular search site out there on the internet, the name escapes me at the moment, but I think consulting it might reveal more than I care to deliver here in this post.

It's nice that you're trying hard to build an email service. I won't pretend that I've been providing 'five-nines' reliability since i first started managing email servers more than a decade ago. But one thing i've never done is employed 'creative writing' to claim what my service is not. when email was less reliable than i'd have liked back in 1994, we most definitely were not claiming, on our front page, that we had "impressive uptime" or "highly ranked reliability".

I'll say it again: you need to state on your front page that you are still learning how to do this, that your service is experimental, that it is in beta. Because that's what it is.

Just as you, I learned from my mistakes. You might be forgiven those mistakes if you weren't misrepresenting your service on your main page. The letter is nice; it is by no means adequate.

They are reliable though...compared to other free email services that is (like UES). Depends on your frame of reference Paul. He never said...99.99999999999% reliable, he never said 70%. He just said it's reliable. Like how some would argue a car by Daimler Chrysler is reliable, but others would say it's terrible compared to the reliability of a Lexus...

ahem. that's playing word games. "reliable" has a specific meaning within this industry. "five nines" is the goal that virtually all sites shoot for. for truly mission-critical services (where it is truly a matter of life and death), 100% is the goal, and what is achieved.

there are many free email services that are reasonably reliable: hotmail, google mail, yahoo. i don't know their reliability figures, but i'm sure that at least achieve four-nines.

a 40 hour outage pretty much kills the chances of using the word "reliable" and have it have any meaning. if you degrade the meaning of the language to suit your phantasies, then you deserve every brickbat thrown your way.

Quote: industry professional

You seem to think highly of yourself Paul..o.O

Did anybody else get the impression that Vince's comment makes it look like he spend a -lot- of time on thesaurus.com?

that's a bizarre thing to say. i'm an industry professional. i'm an expert UNIX/Solaris administrator. that's somehow hard to believe?

you're bordering on 13 year old trolling.

Quote :Did anybody else get the impression that Vince's comment makes it look like he spend a -lot- of time on thesaurus.com?

He's smart enough to run a business, admit to his previous mistakes, and to running off a cable modem as his first project (Which i see nothing wrong with), i'm sure he's smart enough to use good diction. You and Paul seem to never be able to admit that you might be wrong, sometimes you have to see things at face value, IMO.

Oh my gosh.

I did a bit of surfing around on the internet, and guess what I found...

There's been a rumor floating around that the owner of UES is a 15 year old. (http://www.unitedemailsystems.com)

It's been confirmed. Check out http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/littlebill.htm

Do a whois or http://www.unitedemailsystems.com or check out their forum. He openly admits he's the owner.

Am I seeing something sketchy here between the rough-start up of UES (and constant lying involved --he claimed 100% uptime for a few years when he delivered around 25%) As I understand it, he claimed that the ownership was tranferred over to him (and that v.2 was his), and that v.1 was owne d by Warren Park. Guess that's not the case. Google "rob sandusky" and you'll see that he claimed he was CEO since day one.

Why is it people leave tracks around the internet?

United Email Systems has THE most advanced Mail Distribution System (MDS) on the planet. Our newly launched MDS (launched September 15th) allows you to send and receive mail faster than with any other service. Our MDS is comprised of server clusters in over 32 world wide datacenters, all fully redundant. Our MDS also has the most advanced Anti-Spam and Ant-Virus systems in the world. The MDS features customized Barracuda Networks anti-spam, and anti-spyware firewall appliances. The MDS also features Challenge Response (can be shut-off in webmail settings.)
---------------

So I did a traeroute...umm....somebody find this hard to believe?....

quarter of midnight pacific time. logged in. login time reasonably fast. once in inbox, icons in the top toolbar refuse to fully render, and two of them display the standard 'red x' for missing image. also, the list of folders is missing, only the list of messages in the inbox is displayed. clicking on any of the messages does nothing - no response. sometimes i get a standard browser "action canceled" after clicking on the message. clicking on 'reply' pops up a new tab, but it's just a blank white page.

one day with no problems. that's all i'm looking for. one single day.

followup to last: opened site in firefox, displays 'normally' and without errors. in IE or IE derivative, no go.

attempting to log in to webmail this morning, 9:20am pacific time. 'connection refused'. repeatable. tested in firefox and IE, as well as via command line test of port.

9:30am pacific, can now log in to webmail, but in IE still getting missing icon 'red x' where each folder icon should be. renders okay in firefox. still, it's an unacceptable failure. i have 60 other tabs open in my IE derivative browser, none have any rendering problems.

Maybe it's b/c you have 60 other tabs open, haha.

Your form of public harassment will not work. Your reports can be no farther from the truth.

I sincerely apologize - I've just confirmed from a different machine that this rendering problem is *not* reproducible on the other machine. something is fubar with my IE. Why it's not affecting any other sites i go to, I don't know. But i've now opened mailnation webmail in opera, firefox, 'vanilla' IE, and maxthon on my main workstation, and IE and maxthon have the rendering problem. on the laptop down at my colo, IE renders just fine.

chalk up one point for mailnation.net. it's a start. i'm perfectly happy to be proven wrong on these most recent issues.

By the way, Paul, are you grateful to have him listen to you in the first place? And you seem to have completely disregarded the UES post?...:(

by the way, the suggestion that this is a "form of public harrassment" is ridiculous. one could make a strong argument that a business that represents itself as having an "impressive uptime" and "highly ranked....server reliability" is the entity that's harrassing people with utterly unreliable service.

How is THAT harrassment? Both of you! Come on! Harassment means "To irritate or torment persistently.", how is that irritation?

you don't think having your email hosted on a service that's down for 40 hours is irritating or tormenting?

Well, I find that annoying. But their server speed is incredible now, to test reliability requires time, but man oh man, that server speed is absolutely incredible! And I find the honesty of the CEO refreshing in his recent email! =)

well Vincent, er, i mean Robert M./Allan/Aaron, I'm sure you do consider your honesty refreshing. But the main page still says "impressive uptime" "highly ranked server reliability". That's fiction. Fiction, generally speaking, isn't often confused with Fact. except when preying upon the gullible.

Oh, and regarding UES, i don't give a crap. I'm quite certain there are other services out there that are as unreliable as mailnation.net. Attempting to shift the focus won't work.

If you suffer no further outages for the next 367 years, you'll achieve uptime consistent with mine. good luck to you.

So before you start making assumptions like you always do you nut, talk to Mr. Friedl and confirm your allegations, before this becomes slander.

what on earth are you talking about aaron? mr. friedl has nothing to do with my comments, besides being kind enough to allow me to post them here. there is no slander here, nor - since slander is spoken - is there any libel here either.

what exactly are you suggesting? you're going to come after me with lawyers claiming slander/libel? that would be a hoot! can't wait for the to read right here your admission that you've had terrible reliability problems (for which you do get credit/points, though it should be acknowledged on your main page as i've suggested).

and you're calling *me* the nut. that's hilarious. put your own house in order first mr. liou, rather than wasting your effort here.

Holy cow people....umm, just confirm IP, it's impossible for us to have the same ip...

well, it's a start. the free account now is time-limited - it's only free for 60 days, after which the account expires. The free account is webmail only - no POP3, IMAP or SMTP. If you want to keep your account, and have access to normal mail protocols, you must sign up for the 'Advantage Club', for $19.99, a one-time fee.

I applaud the decision to generate actual revenue from the accounts, although $19.99 is not enough to pay for the infrastructure, and the main page makes the unfortunate claim "All this for only a one-time charge of $19.99USD. One time for your lifetime!" - which leaves them open to liability if the company goes out of business before the user is dead. Might make for a heck of a class-action, though if the company goes under, there likely won't be assets to recover in the first place.

The main page - and other pages - still make unfortunate claims about their reliability, which misrepresents the quality of service. uptime isn't going to be 'impressive' for a very long time.

Quote: uptime isn't going to be 'impressive' for a very long time

Why do'nt you stop making allegations and let time run its course. They're doing really well.

"Holy cow people....umm, just confirm IP, it's impossible for us to have the same ip..."

what the heck does that mean?

The IP addresses of the various posters strongly suggest that they're not all the same person -- Steve

"Why do'nt you stop making allegations and let time run its course. They're doing really well."

so you dispute the contention that their uptime is not "impressive"? yeah, two weeks uptime - woohoo! break out the champagne!

regarding the IP addresses, i agree it tends to suggest they're not the same person, but on the other hand, it's pretty trivially easy to set up access from multiple locations to mask one's true location.

either way, it's a non-issue. i will continue to hammer them with the *truth* every opportunity that arises. i will happily acknowledge that the service has appeared stable for a couple of weeks. that's nice. if they can manage to keep that up for a year or two, then they'll have earned some respect. until then, they're clowns in my opinion.

Ok, well you continue doing that all alone then. I'm done here.

MailNation has definitely come a hell of a way. I take it from you Paul that you agree. Their speed and uptime has been impressive...so far.

look "robert m", also known as vliou, you are not going to get an "impressive" from me for a long, long time. if you think there's any reasonable justification for "impressive" after what - 3 weeks up?? - you're out of your mind. you had more than **40 hours** of downtime recently. i've had 17 minutes downtime in 2.7 years.

get a clue. my uptime is *genuinely* impressive. your uptime is *fictionally* impressive.

that you even consider the use of the word "impressive" as a descriptor for your uptime suggests you are delusional.

Yeah, you continue making accusations then. So darn cocky you are.

see? more delusional thinking. not a single 'accusation' in my last post. simply facts. pure, unembelished facts, which are incontrovertible by mr. liou. so rather than confront the facts, mr. liou resorts to the tried and true response: ad hominem. directing the argument to a perceived flaw in *me*, rather than my arguments.

would *you* trust your important email to someone who is delusional about the quality of service he provides?

Are you blind?! You did make an accusation, claiming that i am mr. liou. Read your OWN statements before denying them. The perceived flaw IS you.

oh, that. okay. i still *believe* you are vliou. based on the posting style, frequency, etc, i believe i'm correct.

interesting that the suggestion bothers you so much. but i can understand - i'd be mortified at the thought of someone mistaking me for vliou.

Wow you two sure like to fight w/ each othher i just came across your site and this blog is just stupid...

STeve, i actually think these two (three) peoplez are ONE! Personality disord3r!

No Kidding -- Steve

Paul - keep up the good work. It's clear to any disinterested reader that you know what you're talking about (and that your opinion is spot-on). Thanks for taking the time to expose this fraud.

Robert, Allan, Aaron - you guys are either all the same person, or you are sadly misguided customers of a dishonest boy (that'll be Vincent Liou, in case there was any doubt after SGIES and Sytrino...).

Hmm, why do I get the feeling that Tim here is Paul? HMM?

well gosh, "allan", with an email address of robert@ac.ca, how are we to tell you apart from "Robert M.", who remarkably enough uses the exact same email address! fancy that!


and here's another funny thing: the fellow who has posted as "Aaron" has listed

aaron@yahoo.co.uk

aaron@mailnation.net

aarpm@ac.ca

as his email addresses. what are the odds that two of the strongest 'defenders' of mailnation.net would have ac.ca email addresses? along with Allan having the same ac.ca address as robert?


my email addresses are paul@anastrophe.com and paul@smileglobal.com, period. i don't hide behind pseudonyms or anonymity. full disclosure. my opinions here are my own, not manufactured under false pretense (imaginary people) like vliou is clearly doing with robertm, aaron, allan. and possibly others.


nice job there allan/robertm, of blowing your own cover. oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we practice to deceive.

I don't know. If you clicked on each of our names you'd see we live in different countries ...

Unless of course you think Paul would be willing to make a whole new website to give credence to his false identity as me.

The fun continues - posted to their 'blogging system' (discovered this after i attempted to log in and was refused access):

Dear users,

Due to popular request, we are going to be overhauling our entire server system. As some of you may know, we have been suffering from a case of missing accounts. We have nailed down the bug in Merak and will be fixing this. What does this mean? At 5:00PM PST tonight (November 5), we will be bringing forth some major changes to the system.

The downtime should take about 1 minute as it is relatively straight forward for us; however, you must remember to do the following. 1) Recreate your account with the same username/domain/password as before (visit http://www.mailnation.net/webmail/) 2) Please recreate your account as close to 5:00PM PST as possible. We will be doing this transition exactly at this time. Doing so will prevent bounced emails.

*Major Change: When logging in Via Webmail and/or POP3/IMAP, your username will now just be...your username (WITHOUT the @_______) part. We have received complaints that the username was too long because it contained the domain portion; therefore, we are getting rid of it. So please, remember to login with JUST your username. Thank you. Once again, it is imperative for you to follow these instructions exactly. Advantage Club Members must email advantage@mailnation.net after following these instructions to have accounts upgraded.

Sincerely,
Allan H.
Systems Administrator

now, admittedly, i've not been wasting time logging in to mailnation.net every day. you know, what with that "impressive uptime" of almost a whole honest to gosh month! but this is just pathetic, once again. no continuity of service - having to recreate one's account because of a bug in the mail software? what the hell kind of a bug is that? a catastrophic one, in my opinion, if you care *at all* about your mail. whether the downtime really lasted 'about 1 minute' i have no idea. i'm going to see now if 'recreating' my account actually restores it *with* the mail that was there before (i highly doubt it, but they'll get .005 positive points if they do).

"My First Email Service, by Hasbro"

hey hey! plus .005 bonus points for mailnation.net! woo hoo! all my old email is there. nice job. of course - we don't really know how long the outage was, as there's no further mention of it - we'll just have to take their word for it that it was one minute.

I think it's unfair for you to be comparing a paid email service (with a smaller customer base), than one that is dealing in the hundred thousands. You probably have no idea what it's like to deal with a service this big.

Plus, I read their most recent email regarding their EDS, and read the website concerning the system. Seems good.

You're like trying to compare running a small business and a corporation (numbers wise). Even the resource requirements for a small business is far less than that needed to run the world's biggest email box size service. Come on. Even you can see the difference. Is that an excuse? NO. Does that justify anything? NO. But you are comparing a mouse and an elephant. Compare MailNation to say...Hotmail, and MailNation would beat Hotmail's reliability anyday, or say...UES, or...some other ridiculously large email box sized service dealing with a large customer base. I am an advantage club member and loving every minute of it. What I don't understand is how users like you can critize. critizing is easy. You will have all the right to criticise without people like me stopping you if you had the experience of running such a big feat as MailNation. So you contact me and try to stay alive once you get one of these corps running huh?

"aaron", (in my opinion, vliou), you are delusional. period. i've run national internet infrastructure, sonny boy. all the while running my own personal servers for friends, family, and friends of friends/friends of family for free, for the last eight years. i've built and managed systems scaling from the dozens of users to the hundreds of thousands.

as to your bizarre comparisons, frankly i don't know which side you're arguing - that mailnation.net is a tiny small business, or "the world's biggest email box size service". comparing mailnation's reliability to hotmail is laughable - and well, another datapoint for your delusional mindset. mailnation's reliability would beat hotmails?? that's not just sad, it's funny-sad.

as you, er, i mean vliou has already admitted in his 'blog' (and it's an admission that is reasonable, i will add) mailnation does not maintain one terabyte of disk space for each customer. they scale storage to meet demand. that's how this business works. all email providers do it. a provider might offer 2 gigabyte email boxes, but that does not mean that if they have 100 customers, they have 200 gigabytes of disk space already in place, reserved for those customers. the argument that offering a one terabyte mailbox in some way changes dramatically how the service is run is laughable. All it means is that from time to time they add another $300 .5T IDE disk to the array. BFD. i'd bet folding money that they use RAID 5 - which will come back to bite them in the ass eventually, as it's poorly suited to the type of I/O that an email service constitutes. in time, they'll start wedging again, this time on I/O rather than CPU.
here's the bottom line: when i wrote "My First Email Service, by Hasbro", i was only mildly kidding. mailnation is built from off the shelf software, off the shelf hardware, and *off the shelf skills*. oh, wait. you can't buy skill 'off the shelf'. you have to learn it, by doing it. and hey, that's where that Hasbro toy comes in, because that's what mailnation.net is -it's where vliou and his buddies are learning how to run an email service. unfortunately, the customers are forced to play this game, when what they signed up for was professional service.

mailnation is a toy. period. how many customers do you have vliou? what's your peak sustained POP3 sessions? how about IMAP sessions? what does your I/O look like? what's your rcache% vs wcache% ratio look like during the day? what's your peak pagein/pageout ratio? what's your average run queue size? what about peak semaphore activity? do you maintain any metrics at all, or do you just scramble to buy 'bigger/faster/better' hardware when things start going wrong?

Hello Paul,

While it will take some time to receive confirmation this is an official post from MailNation Solutions (please check IP and email), I am sure it will only be a matter of time.

I have followed this blog for a while now, and Paul, let me assure you, Aaron/Allan/Robert or whoever else does not speak for our company. Please do not make allegations.

I will address your concerns one by one.

Firstly, we need to establish this. Paul, you are making allegations and saying that we have "this and this" type of hardware and how we lack knowledge. I will have you know we have 2 engineers on staff who have had numerous years of experience with mail servers. Our customer base may not be large (100,000 users) in total, but that climbs each day. Furthermore, your allegations that we just throw money at our infrasture is not at all true. Why? Reason is simple. Our revenue is not great, we have a limited income, and we must ensure that revenue is made. Our servers never peak 50% load, and furthermore, while our servers may be off-the shelf, they are certified Dell PowerEdge Servers with one IBM X-serve acting as a DB server.

I do not understand why you would have so much against our company. Each man is entitled with their own views, so we will not disagree. The facts are simple however. Our servers are well maintained, disk storage is ample, and it may be surprise you that the number of servers we have are actually very very few. The technicians we have working for us are great, and our uptime this past month has been 99.8% (0.2% was taken off due to the implmentation of our EDS system)

I would also like to bring out another point. I have visited your link. It's a decent service, but there are *so* many problems with running a popular free email service. Mainly, SPAM, and abuse are something you may not even have to worry about. MailNation addressed this problem with our new EDS system where spam is scrubbed via 18 servers in numerous locations worldwide even before it hits our servers (visit http://www.netriplex.com) for more information.

Your allegations throughout these few months could not have further off the point. As systems administrator, I oversee all of the server operations and some of the customer service relations. Perhaps, maybe, our CS is even better than your paid services. With a turnaround time averaging 4 hours with support tickets, we can rival most companies. Our support is rock solid, as is our email system. Perhaps one day when you run a large-scale *free* email service, then we will talk. Until then, I am sure your knowledge serves you well, but I would appreciate it if you don't post random allegations that are so untrue it is unfair.

Sincerely,
Allan H.
Systems Administrator
advantage[at]mailnation.net

This IP does appear to be from mailnation.net -- Steve

as you said, each man is entitled to their own views. these are mine. i tire of this 'debate'. i've made my reasons for being so critical of mailnation very clear in previous posts. vliou, and whatever aliases he posts under, and even Allan H who may or may not be a real person - good luck with your business.

here's a proposal: we'll pretend the 40 hour downtime of a month or so ago never happened. pretend you started the business after that was over. you say you're at 99.8% uptime over the last month.

post back again here in three years. if you're maintaining better than 99.99% uptime, i'll offer my hearty congratulations for making a go of it.

until then....

sigh. i knew that couldn't last. check this out, it was delivered nov 12, and if this doesn't give you the creeps, i don't know what will:

"Welcome to MailNation Solutions. It is our goal and our main directive to provide you, the user, with the most reliable email service, coupled with our industry-leading friendly Support Staff. We want you to stay with us, and we want you to not have to deal with any email problems as life is stressful enough as it is. Our 24x7 Support Staff is ready to answer any questions you may have. Please, feel free to drop them an email. Most responses are answered within a few hours, and our staff work 24 hours a day, all 365 days a year, and are here to serve you.

Webmail Access: http://www.mailnation.net/webmail/

Please note that in order to keep this account, you must fill out the form located here (only do this if you live in the US - you should NOT do this if you do not live in the US): http://www.lynxtrack.com/afclick.php?o=445&b=g8cmtphz&p=3053&l=1
-You need only to fill out the first page.

Use the following info:

Area Code: 520
Loan Type: Refinance
Property Value: 740,000-760,000
Mortgage Balance: 110,000-115,000
Rate your credit: Good

If in the US: -If the form above is not filled out, this account will be deleted in 24 hours.
If not in the US: Your account will not be deleted regardless of filling out this form or not.

*Please note that the use of YahooGroups is strictly prohibited. If you choose to receive such emails, your account will be deleted without notice. Thank you.

--

Sincerely,
Allan H
Customer Service of mailnation.net
support@mailnation.net
"

that's just, well, i don't know how to characterize it. sounds like a scam in the making. require someone to post bogus mortgage info to some weird site? or your "free" account will be deleted?

now that i think of it, i recall someone else mentioned this scam before too. frankly, i think the requirement may be legally actionable - it's requiring people to submit fraudulent info. of course, no way i'm clicking the link. i did go there via 'lynx' text based browser from a remote location - the site dropped a half dozen cookies, and identifies itself as "Refinance at Christian Mortgages".

creepy.

"Please note that we have temporarily discontinued signups for the time being. Please check again in one weeks time. We are currently installing new servers due to increased demand. MailNation Solutions prides itself on delivering the best possible access speed and realibility. These server upgrades will mean that companies such as Gmail (R) will be left in the dust when it comes to reliability and speed. We apologize for the inconvienience and kindly ask you to check back within a week. Thank you."

where's that great smiley of the little guy rolling on the floor, laughing his ass off?

Read this:

--------
Dear sir or madam,

With a smile on my face, I write this to you today. MailNation Solutions, this last year, has grown tremendously. As each month passes, our customer expands exponentially and the services we offer increase as well! And that is why, we have expanded. In fact, we just finished our largest expansion in the history of MailNation Solutions – without even 1 second of downtime.

We have setup 2 new servers in a different datacenter. This means we now are operating a total of 4 servers, two in Boston, and two brand new ones now in California! Our load is now hovering at roughly 5% per server, which means, we have got a long way to go before we fill these machines up! You will see a drastic improvement in all our features starting now!

These changes mean a slightly more complex login process. Please visit http://www.mailnation.net for more details. When you click “login” you will be presented with a page. It is critical that you choose the right link to login as clicking the wrong one will mean you are trying to login to a server without your information!

We have also revised our offerings for free user accounts. New users now only have the option of signing up for mailglobal.net (unlike you, who luckily could have chosen between 12 domains). These 12 domains are now only available to Advantage Club users only. Also, a kind reminder that the use of Calendar/Notes/Tasks in the Webmail interface is now available to any Advantage Club Members. You can also sync all of the above with MS Outlook with our newly developed nifty Outlook Sync Tool. To signup, please see http://www.mailnation.net/schedule.shtml.

These changes mark the era of a long term development project here at MailNation. Expect to see more changes and improvements coming soon! But what good are upgrades if uptime is not good? Therefore, we have setup monitoring pages (links will be coming soon so everybody can see our uptime!) which will display our uptime. We are aiming for at least 99% this month!

As a thank you for staying with us during our growing pains, we are offering a remarkably good deal to current MailNation Solutions Customers. If you would like, we can host your personal Website for a mere $3/month. Payment may be done via PayPal, and if you are interested, the details are…

1) 200MB webspace

2) Unlimited transfer

3) PHP support / HTML Support

And that’s it! We, of course, will host your site on our servers. You will receive complimentary DNS hosting using our mission-critical DNS servers. If this appeals to you, please simply reply to this email!

Ladies and gentlemen, I once again thank you for staying with MailNation. These coming months will bring about the greatest improvements on uptime. Our server speeds are now phenomenal, now let’s work together to make it last!

Sincerely,

Allan H.

-----------

Allan H.

Chief Technology Officer

MailNation Solutions LLC

support@mailnation.net

1(215)-253-3144

-----------

Signup for Advantage Club Today! Inquire for more information! Visit http://www.mailnation.net for full upgrade details!

---------

Oh and by the way. Have you even TRIED to login and see the speeds for yourself? Jesus Christ.

i assume you're addressing that last to me, 'robert m'. of course i have. i have an account. how do you think i ran into all the problems i've described above?

login is reasonably fast these days. that's nice, but it's what one normally would never even think about. as i've pointed out, all these claims about their incredibly good uptime are meaningless. the only way any company can accumulate trust in their reliability is by the passage of time. one month of 99.8% uptime is terrible. dreadful. as more time passes without outages, the uptime value implicitly rises, and that means overall reliability has increased. if uptime remains at 99.8% per month, every month, then that's a service that's not living up to industry standards. if uptime increases beyond 99.9%, then it's getting into the realm of 'mediocre'. if it reaches 99.99%, then i'd consider it 'good'.

keep working at in. heck, i'll lower my standard - if you can accomplish 99.95% for a six month interval, i'll say 'congratulations.

Address your comments to support, not me. Is it that hard for you to understand?

i'll address my comments to whomever addressed comments to ME, for crying out loud.

i have no doubt at all that you're vliou, "Robert M". previous evidence posted above very strongly suggests that.

keep your servers up, no outages for six months. come back and let us know. i'll say "congratulations". until then, you're just blowing smoke up people's butts with your flowery, over-the-top "we'll leave gmail in the dust" (with our 99.8% uptime for a WHOLE MONTH!).

sheesh.

just tried going to mailnation.net. main webpage not there - just goes straight to the merak webmail interface, where login fails. so i signed up again.....and it took my old username as the new login. that means either that: legacy mailnation.net free users did *not* get grandfathered, or, my account was deleted because i didn't click through the fraudulent mortgage refinance nonsense.

i wonder what the attorney general's office in Pennsylvania might think of that mortgage refi junk.

either way: it's spelled *lame*.

a few minutes later, regular main page back up. can sign in using the password i used before i 'recreated' the account. okaaaay.

now i'm in my inbox...and guess what's back? page not found! when i click on any message in the inbox, the lower message display area is just the html error page.

exit, go back to main page, click login - 'page not found'.

exit again, try going to main page - takes me back to the merak webmail login page. try logging in, i can get in with the 'new' password i set up. this must be their new highly advanced multiple server setup, a horrible notion, that reflects a basic misunderstanding of how you do stuff on the internet. distributed login servers that use the *same* domain names are going to cause endless headaches for customers, and mailnation. good going on the scalability there, fellas.

good christ this is ridiculous.

Quite simply, we have banned your account for the time being until you learn to give criticisms, not insults without respect. We have tolderated you for quite some time, and you are no longer a welcome user on our system. Your account will be returned in 48 hours, and will be deleted permanately until you learn some respect.

Criticisms are fine, but not unfounded ones.

riiiiggghhht. you don't even have a clue what name my account is under. i just logged in, no problem. gosh, i hope you didn't just delete some poor sap who might have had the misfortune of a userid of pault or something similar. cause the fact is, you're miles off.

oh, so there's no question that i still have my account, here's the latest email from "allan h.", with vliou's telltale syntax and manner of speech, about their move out of netriplex (already?):

Dear users,

Throughout the next week, we will be completing our final datacenter move. Our current datacenter (Netriplex) does not meet our needs fully. With a better pricing (less cost), and much better support, we have decided to move to MultaCom Corporation for our datacenter needs. However, do not fear. We understand that accessing your email is absolutely critical and that even a second of downtime is not acceptable, regardless or not if you are using a paid account or not.

So what differences will you notice?

Firstly, this datacenter move will be incredibly streamlined. Within the next 24 hours, several changes will occur. Firstly, you may notice that some period during the day, you will login and wonder…where did all my emails go?! Firstly, if you get to this stage, it means that you are already accessing our new server. That means, all new emails will be delivered to this account. Within the next week, your old emails will slowly but surely start arriving in your new account. At any time, if you need to access your old emails, that is possible! Simply visit http://209.59.2.110/mail/ to see your old emails. And that’s it!

We kindly ask that users refrain from creating tickets requesting “I need my mail…NOW”. Unfortunately, there is no faster way to retrieve your mail into one account. This move is slow, we understand, but is the only way possible and is a necessity due to expansion. Please also keep in mind that this move brings to us faster servers, and more disk space. This move also ensures that none of your mission-critical emails will be lost, and not even a second of downtime will occur. Please keep in mind the link: http://209.59.2.110/mail/ as the only time you see this link will be in this email. Furthermore, once your email has arrived, you do not need to visit this link anymore.

We thank you for your cooperation and hope you have a pleasant emailing experience. We always strive to achieve the fastest, reliable systems around, and this move will ensure will can continue to deliver the best of the best.

Sincerely,

Allan H.

---------------------------------
yep. a bare IP url. Klassy. god forbid you create a new subdomain of mailnation.net temporarily to give customers something they might actually remember, like, oh gee i dunno http://oldserver.mailnation.net/mail/ ??

a few posts back i stated that i 'tire of this debate'. apparently not enough. as long as bozos misrepresent themselves as professionals, with the gullible at their mercy, i feel no need to temper my comments.

and i still find it amusing (or is it pathetic) that - in this entire lengthy thread, where vliou has had numerous opportunities to come clean about it - the whole 'submit this fraudulent mortgage refinance info or your account will be deleted' scam has never been addressed.

this is hilarious:
http://mailnation.helpserve.com/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=8

and

http://mailnation.helpserve.com/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=6

now, what's hilarious is not the content. it's who the messages are shown as having been posted by, and who they are signed by. check it out.

the first message was posted by "John Taylor" - but the message body says it was written by our illustrious "Allan H.".

but here's the kicker, and for me the confirmation that all these identities are nothing more than vliou:
the second message was posted by "Vincent Liou"....but the content of the message is signed by "Allan H."!

come clean vincent.

Be careful, Paul.

http://mailnation.helpserve.com/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=4

Don't wanna get hit with that "Can the Spam Act 2000", do you?!

i love canned spam. it's a delicious meat treat. if it weren't canned, it would be all, you know, rotten.

More mailnation hijinks!
here's the latest letter to all users from vliou:

------------------------

Dear users,

Just wanted to let you know our uptime tracking page. Please visit http://www.mailnation.net and then click on “FAQ” at the top. You will see it at the bottom of the page!

After a long and tiresome month, MailNation Solutions is finally done all its upgrades! This means that uptime and reliability now are our primary concerns. You have seen how we fast we handle your email, and how fast our interfaces have now become, now you will see how reliable we remain. Our uptime pages are not run by us, and are run by a 3rd party (unlike some email providers which forge their own uptime). So each time we are down, you will see. But rather, you will see, in the coming months, that our uptime will remain >99%, maybe even 100%!

Thank you.

------------------------

so, sounds like a nice idea, right? ha!

1. they're only checking http. last i checked, email is transported over POP3, IMAP, SMTP.

2. They're only checking every five minutes! man, that's handy. siteuptime sends a ping to their servers, which takes less than one second - meaning you can be down for four minutes 59 seconds or so, and it'll never show up! how great is that!

3. but here's the biggest problem, the most egregious, the most laughable, and the most bothersome, all rolled into one. i visited the lovely uptime pages late last night. at that time, it was showing the uptime stats for the server used for free users as having had one outage out of about 1100 checks - which put the uptime at something like 99.1% i believe. now, this morning - like magic! - it shows 100% uptime, no outages! again, how great is that! they can game the system apparently by either using a rolling statistical window, or some other means. but the fact is, last night it showed one outage, this morning, zero. so much for accountability.

the real problem is that they're representing these statistics as having meaning. they have none. siteuptime is a service for sites that don't know how to set up their own monitoring systems. siteuptime is an *alerting* service to let the site know there's a problem - they are NOT a true measure of actual uptime.

beyond that, "uptime", alone, is also essentially meaningless. a server can be up for years - if it's not doing any work, then the uptime means little more than "this server has been burning electricity continuously for years, for no apparent purpose".

in the schema of providing services, there's a triad of concepts that must work together, and they're known as RAS: Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability. Here's a reasonably good definition nabbed from the net: "Originally an IBM term, it refers to a computer system's overall reliability, its ability to respond to a failure and its ability to undergo maintenance without shutting it down entirely."

for example, the reboot of my pop server that i mentioned, on may 1 2004, to add another cpu and replace a stick of memory - that memory had been faulting for months. but it didn't need to be replaced immediately, because the ECC was able to correct the errors. i waited to service it until i could roll other service into the same outage - to reduce disruption for customers - and to perform it at a time of low usage.

...you know, i'd completely forgotten that i was participating in the uptimes project. bearing in mind what i pointed out - that uptime alone is not a true measure of the reliability of a service - here's stats for a small cross section of my servers:

hostingwired uptime stats

the main difference is that these stats can't be 'gamed'. the upclient reads the kernel's uptime value, which can't be monkey'd with. still - it only says that's how long the server's been up, and that's when an outage occurred. it doesn't say how long the server was down. it also has no way of reporting on protocol uptime - the server could be up, but if the SMTP daemon isn't running, your customers will be screaming nonetheless.

ah well. i look forward to watching the forged uptime for mailnation.net continue to say 100%!

looks like i buggered up the link to the hostingwired stats in that last post.

http://uptimes.hostingwired.com/stats.php?op=all&user=anastrophe

Hi,

I just thought you may be interested to know that Mailnation is now running at a Boston Datacentre and for people who have been trying to login recently, I know there are currently teething problems since accounts were physically moved severs, and I mean all the hard disks with users emails were manually moved from one datacentre to another.

Also on the subject of these Helpdesk posts, I have copied them from then emails the admins have sent out and simply pasted them in the helpdesk. No editing has been carrried out to these emails.

Also, I am the main face of the helpdesk since my involvement almost all new tickets have been answered in 20 minutes or less but the maximum time a reply to a ticket takes is a very short 4 hours, this is shorer time wise than Lycos gives it beats Hotmail and all the other providers, and it gives everyone a friendly face who they will know will most likely answer tickets.

It is only overnight when the tickets are dealt with by Vincent Lou and that is normally the us daytime, so there is always someone on the helpdesk 24/7.

Also, it is not often an email provider can say there will be full Christmas support when support departments normally shut down for Christmas, Mailnation will still have support available even on a delay period possibly with replies within 3-5 hours instead of the usual 20 minutes during the day on Christmas day itself.

So if you can see Mailnation is trying to be one of the best service providers arond and I do have full admin control, and if anything goes wrong over Christmas, including server going down the hosting company will be informed directly, as there will be nobody else about.

So, I will be in full control over Christmas, and I can assure you if anything goes wrong, all attempts will be made to fix it, as quickly as possible and one thing which email providers don't normally offer is phone support, in the US and UK, and I am looking at getting something set-up myself so UK Phone support is dealt with in the UK, and not outsourced to somewhere like India or diverted through to the US as is the case at the moment.

I trust Mailnation so much that I have given them two of my own domains which I wasn't using johnt.net and johnd.me.uk and this when they came live suddenly caused a spurge in signups but since then Mailnation has constantly tried to improve and get better all the time, and at present a heavy effort is being made to try and improve helpdesk support and such like even more.

All abuse of the system is being picked up and dealt with, and even one spam email which managed to get out to Mailnation users was picked up and in the hands of the admin within 25 minutes or so of it being recieved.

As well as this the spam filter EDS, which we are using is proving a very successful spam blocking software and although some legitamte emails have got stuck this has all been sorted out, but I do want to say whilst I'm involved, I can assure you things will continue to improve, and all efforts will be made to keep Mailnation one of the best email providers around and all the old reputation should be gone very soon due to the vast improvement in the service which are being made all over the place and since I have been involved the helpdesk response time has become possibly the fastest of all paid and email providers around.

John Taylor

Director of Customer Support @ Mailnation

it's good you're working to improve the system. no place to go but up.

STAY AWAY FROM THIS "SERVICE"!! I was suckered in and actually paid these people. Fortunately it was only a $20 lesson! It was never functional for me for more than a few days in a row, and when I complained about it, I got banned.

After my account was AGAIN not working properly and my emails went ignored for a few days I sent a slightly heated (but NOT abusive) email. (I mean really, I PAID for advantage service, and no one answered in 3 days, you;d get heated too) Things were resolved and again working properly then I get notified this morning they have disabled my account. I know I only was suckered in for $20 but this is unacceptable - they cant give me even 1 week of consistant service (I kept full documentation of every email and help desk ticket, and while it may or may not pan out, I am calling a family friend who is an attorney to see if this guys history and my documentation will allow me to at least cause him some grief) and they cancel my account for being abusive? PLEASE!

Go ahead and call this slander John or Allan or whoever you really are - I HAVE THE TICKETS AND EMAILS to prove how shoddy the service was.

Paul,

Please email me direct: john(d0t)taylor(at)mailnation(dot)net and I will personally look into this matter for you, to my knowlege all tickets have been responded to, it could be a simple case if you submitted your ticket via email it got stuck in our spam filter system, but I can asuure you this matter will be resolved promptly, but I do believe it could just be one of those tickets which disappeared or did not turn up on the system.

If you did not use the submit ticket form, this may explain why you did not get a response as if you use the comments form on knowlegebase articles, this is not the way to get support, and I have actually sent an email out to Helpdesk members indicating this. I do apologise though, and I can assure you this matter will be resolved promptly.

John, if the message above is directed at *my* last post, I am NOT Paul. I cannot email you at that address, as you have blocked my IP (YOUR WORDS from YOUR EMAIL TO ME) and a message sent yesterday to try and resolve this was bounced back. Yes, all tickets were closed - you and I resolved the problem and everything was fine from my end - until the NEXT day when my account was terminated, per an EMAIL FROM YOU!

If you truly want to resolve this, give me an UNBLOCKED email to reach, or contact me directly. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out who I am - how many accounts did you terminate or block yesterday?

However, if this was indeed intended for PAUL, I apologize for butting in.

Hi,

I think it is time, to ask you to contact me at a different address, and I'll investigate this, can you please send an email to: johntaylor(at)pumapost(dot)co(dot)uk - I know this is a different provider, but I will get this matter checked out as I have just become the Vice President, and I can assure you this matter should be solveable somehow.

I will say this much - for whatever aggrevation I had over the past few days, John certainly kept his word, and rectified the problem. I am once again a mailnation user.

I thought it only fair to share my positive experience in response to the bad.

that's certainly good to hear, and indeed it is fair that any positive experiences be shared.

in the balance, short term gains don't carry as much weight as the long term picture. it's not uncommon to see a cluster of 'splashy' short term gains occur when a business is trying to compensate for longer term, endemic problems (or to compensate for a colossal fubar, such as the 40+ hour downtime in october).

those short term gains are all well and good, and they do get 'brownie points' for trying to make good with dissatisfied customers. what will be more important will be if mailnation gives no cause for anyone to comment on them for - say - a year or more. or if only praise finds its way here (and shills are so darned easy to spot in that regard!).

time will tell.

Exactly the same happened to me, I couldn't log in to the supportsite, I couldn't use the wap function and I couldn't get the outlook syncing working. They gave me 4 suggestions, which didn't work, and now I can not login anymore at all! And no response whatsoever from the helpdesk...for 3 days now! so much for an average of 20 min. response time...

Paul,
I tend to agree that long term results are what will tell the final story here! Since my account was restored, everything has been working fine, which leaves me (guardedly) optimistic. We'll see how it goes...

Rummut,
Hopefully John will see your post here and be able to get things fixed for you the way he did for me.

Hi,

I did reply to the ticket, I think it could be it is taking a while for tickets to get through to the helpdesk, but the best aim I have is to reply to all new tickets as they come in but it seems as though this users tickets have not been appearing.

For the subject of the outlook sync, this is a problem, and even I can't get it working, and this is even when I have tried re-creating my account and such like. Please try and avoid the outlook sync system, and for the subject of importing contacts the simplest option is to export out from Outlook in a windows csv file format and import it into Mailnation.

With the wap system it is a case some phones are not complaint with our webmail system which I am afraid is unavoidable. Although using http://mail2wap.com may help and logging in through that method should work on all phones.

John Taylor
Vice President
Mailnation

Okay, well if you have replied mr. Taylor, I might wel be possible that I can no see the reply. I can not login to the emailadres anymore.

And as you own email says:
-----------
Hi,

Can I please remind all users that we operate a very strict one account per person policy. If more than one accoiunt is detected per user, then the extra accounts may be deleted without warning, also the emails in these accounts may not be restored either as we are only offering such facilities to Advantage Club Members.

If you would like to join the Advantage Club and want to usr the domains such as mailnation.net and such like, please use the signup link at http://www.mailnation.net as you will also benefit from pop3/imap/smtp access, pirority helpdesk support and email support as well.

Thanks,

John Taylor
Vice President
Mailnation
---------------

I AM an advantage user.
I tried everything possible to contact you, so could you please try to contact me? So far the email-adres rummuter@mailnation.net still works...

Rummut

As stated at http://www.mailglobal.net. You need to reregister...

the comical saga of mailnation.net continues. barely two weeks ago - the week of November 21, they completed a move to a new colocation host - leaving NetriPlex and moving to Multicom. this was characterized as "our final datacenter move". now, today, a new message reports "Mailnation is on the move, due to recent server problems and a revcent spam attack from one of our servers, Mailnation is moving this will be happening at the weekend,".


not to mention, a message to all users from vliou, on december 1, stated that their uptime was 99% for the previous month, which just goes to show the silliness of uptime as a *truly* meaningful measure of availability - there were days and days where one's past saved mail was unavailable, while they physically moved the disks from one datacenter to another. crippled service for days, but because you could log in, they were 'up'! now there's going to be another couple of days of saved mail from one's account not being available while they move elsewhere again.

oh, and the mail about this next datacenter move contains the same horrible, customer-hostile blather as during the last server move - i quote, with no spelling or grammar corrections:

"I would like to litterate that any users demanding acccess to their old emails now, will be simply have their ticket deleted and account suspended for the 48 hour period, this is because we need to allow the weekend to allow all the hard disks to be moved to the enw datacentre. I am just trying to make it clear, that after tickets almost demaning acces to old emails during the last server move, any such tickets this time will have consenquences with a 48 hour account suspension period, so this way when you login again all your emails should be there and you won't have anything to complain about and thus saving us time and effort whilst we try and reply to your tickets about other more important questions and such like, as all datacentre move questions should be answered in this email, so please don't just submit tickets at the weekend, saying you can't access your old emails, as I have explained in this email why this won't be possible."

!!!

if this guy worked for me....well, he'd cease to be an employee thirty seconds after sending that mail. problems caused by the provider's shortcomings are not a good reason to "precomplain" to customers about their complaints!!

Hi,

I am afraid, but I have had to do this, as with the previous datacentre move, these tickets just annoyed me, I was working so hard to help users these kind of tickets were just making me think they did not kind of care, I was trying to do the best that I could, and as explaiend in the email sent to users it completely explained thaqt access would not be possible, and they simply did not take notice that we had already notified thme, so now, I am taking the step, of warning users that demand access to old emails that their account login will be disabled until the end of the server move, when all emails will be restored and hopefully this way they won't try and get to us, and simply waste our time, by posting random letters as some helpdesk users have done, and by this have simply been banned from the helpdesk and as such they have been blocked access from it so they can't do it again.

I am afraid for the harsh tone, but I have tried to make sure this kind of incident does not happen again and thus if people do this they simply get a warning their account login could be disabled until the end of the move, so they won't have access and need to complain unless at the end of the mvoe the new emails haven't been restored and simply making life easier for us.

It's a shame for the $29,99. But it is kind of funny to watch the entire show. It's like watching 2 little goldfish trying to tame a shark. I have kept trying to reach the helpdesk, finally, I get this:
--------
Hi,

I would firstly like to apolgoise for the delay in responding, I have had to spend a few hours last night sorting my computer out, as the virus killer plus other programmes was giving me some bother, and could have meant emails could have been sent out without virus checks, which was not acceptable in my eyes.

....

John Taylor
------------
Vice President
Mailnation
Email: john.taylor@mailnation.net
--------------

Need I say more...

For those still questioning the multiple names of vliou, check this email-conversation I received...
--------

Hello,

All of the Advantage Club functions DO work. We don't actually do refunds,
but if you tell us what's wrong, we can fix it!

-----------
Allan H.
Chief Technology Officer
MailNation Solutions LLC
support@mailnation.helpserve.com
1(215)-253-3144
-----------

-----Original Message-----
From: John David Taylor [mailto:johntaylor@pumapost.co.uk]
Sent: December 7, 2005 2:06 PM
To: 'Vincent Liou'
Subject: FW: Please answer my helpdeskproblems!

Vincent,

Please can you deal with this.

Thanks,
John

-----Original Message-----
From: -censured-
Sent: 08 December 2005 05:17
To: johntaylor@pumapost.co.uk
Subject: Re: Please answer my helpdeskproblems!

Hello,

I understand now that none of the advantage functions I wanted to use work
out for me. And I understand that my advantage account has degraded again to
an free account.

Will you be so kind to refund the $29,99?

---------
I'm curious to see the end :o)

Dear users,

Due to overwhelming criticism for our "move after move after move", I have made the ultimate decision to stop moving.

There are several additional reasons.

1) GTSMicro (the datacenter we were going to move to), simply does not deliver. For example, we have several servers on order, they promised it would be there by tomorrow, now they're saying Tuesday! Furthermore, I have been trying to get ahold of my account manager, who is nonexistent now...so much for his "personal cell phone number".
2) To be honest, we were going to move to Gtsmicro due to the attractice pricing. However, to us, support is important. But firstly, to our clients, such as you, UPTIME is important. So we'll just make some less money, but keep you happy. Sounds good right?

:IMPORTANT NOTICE: UPTIME GUARANTEE:

We have a mission, and that is to simply provide the best uptime possible. But promises are only promises, and statements are useless. So, we will promise you this.

We will guarantee 99.5%+ uptime for ALL our users. If we fall short, for any reason, then we will offer ALL our users complimentary 1GB of webhosting space and file storage space. We know this email service is watched by many blogs, and we know this bold statement will be posted, and that we will have to live up to it. That's right. Guaranteed 99.5%+ uptime!

For our Advantage Club Users, we will guarantee 99.9%+ uptime. If we fall short, not only will we offer you 5X the amount of webhosting space (making a total of 5GB), we'll also give you FTP access to those accounts so you can use it as a second hard drive.

-The only stipulation to our uptime guarantee is "planned downtime". Humans need to sleep and regenerate. Servers need maintence, and this is a fair statement. Keep a track of our uptime by visiting http://www.mailnation.net/faq.shtml

I'd like to see other email services match that. And even though some users opt for our free services, it's not an excuse to dismiss it as a free service.

The next year brings on a new era for MailNation Solutions. So to all our users, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

Best of luck for the upcoming year,
Vincent G. Liou

----------------
Vincent Liou
President and Chief Executive Officer
MailNation Solutions LLC
president@mailnation.net
Office Ph #: 1(215)-253-3144
----------------

99.5% is execrable. 99.9% is merely horrible.

99.9% means more than *eight HOURS* of downtime per year would be considered acceptable. that's about 40 minutes per month. absolutely horrible. i won't even extrapolate out 99.5%, hopefully you get the idea.

'guarantees' are a copout. it's a way of buying your way out of providing reliable service. people who rely on their email don't want guaran