I've been catching up on my backlog of Risks Digests...and since some of you may not see it, I thought you'd like to know that we're not the ONLY folks with problems with the demons at Demon. o-) cheers, and happy holidays cyclops RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Monday 13 November 1995 Volume 17 : Issue 45 FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator Date: Fri, 10 Nov 95 16:22:36 GMT From: Mike Ellims <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Internet Demon: A "demon"? Anger over e-mail jam By Richard Grant [Excerpted from an unspecified British Sunday paper a week or two ago] BRITAIN'S biggest Internet service provider has been attacked by furious customers after 60,000 electronic mail messages went astray or were delayed. Fast growing Demon Internet was valued at 26.7 million (pounds) last week in a City fund-raising exercise backed by venture capitalist Apax Partners. Yet at the same time it was advising some of its clients with the right equipment to by-pass its mail relay service to avoid electronic traffic jams. Angry Demon customers also reported e-mail messages becoming lost or being bounced back to them after trying to send them after trying to send them across the Internet though Demon's electronic gateway. Some said they would quit Demon as they had lost confidence in its service. Many of the delayed messages, which are transmitted from computer to computer across continents for the price of a local phone call, have taken up to five days to arrive. The industry standard is under 60 minutes. ... Demon's Todd said: 'When you double in size every five months things don't degrade gracefully, they suddenly go bang catastrophically'. ... What I find amusing is that the company I work for uses Demon as its service provider. If your reading this then the mail got though! We have recently been getting mail messages that have been bumping around in the guts of the system (Demon Internet)for up to a month. I myself have been getting a lack of response to mail message I've been sending out but I expect that because no-one wants to talk to me :-) Other people have performed experiments where they mail each other and third parties, the third parties received the mail but it was not seen here. This seems like a good example of things not scaling up well. Actually something that happened moments before I was about to send this is that I have just re-received a mail message sent to me 2 weeks ago. The views expressed here and the fact I've copied something from a newspaper source are my own doing and do not reflect the views of my employer or my cat. Also all spelling errors are due to the cat playing on the keyboard. Mike Ellims - Pi Technology - [log in to unmask] - +44 (0)1223 441 256 Dan Lester, Network Information Coordinator Albertsons Library, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho 83725 USA [log in to unmask] http://cyclops.idbsu.edu/ How can one fool make another wise? Kansas, "No One Together," 1979