Cringely has an interesting story about Earthlink in his column this week: [link]

A good friend of mine noticed last June a sudden and precipitous decline in his volume of incoming e-mail with the numbers dropping by 80-90 percent. Was he less popular, less interesting than before? Or maybe some Bayesian filter had been imposed by his ISP (Earthlink) to suddenly spare him completely from spam. No such luck.

The trend continued so my friend, who has long been in the networking business, himself, started running experiments. He sent messages from other accounts to his Earthlink address, to his aliased Blackberry address, and to his Gmail account. For every 10 messages sent, 1-2 arrived in his Earthlink mailbox, 1-2 (not necessarily the SAME 1-2) on his Blackberry, and all 10 arrived with Gmail.

Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink's mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn't bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn't mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain. The two groups affected are those who get their mail with an Earthlink-hosted domain and those with aliased e-mail addresses like my friend's Blackberry.

Were they thinking these thousands of affected customers simply wouldn't notice? And what about those customers whose livelihood depends on e-mail communication? There are both ethical and business questions here and Earthlink doesn't look good on either scale. Fortunately the company says it is installing new software and hopes to have the problem resolved before the end of the year. Lucky us.

This sort of ISP dissembling happens more often than many of us might guess as companies play the odds and pray that their faults aren't noticed. These mistakes, by the way, typically aren't actionable thanks to our blindly clicking on those Terms of Service agreements that we never read. In Earthlink's case, if they don't deliver your e-mail, well that's just tough.

Glad I'm not one of their customers anymore.

Yikes! I used to have an Earthlink account so I'd have dialup when traveling, but I never used the e-mail for anything. It was a frelling spam magnet.

Not news to anyone here, but I highly recommend using email services that are *not* your ISP. They're more portable, for starters.

In fact, that's all the reason I need.

I used to have an Earthlink account so I'd have dialup when traveling, but I never used the e-mail for anything.

Yeah, Earthlink's my ISP, but I've never used the email account. Sounds like a good move!

Okay, as I was reading the Ubuntu documentation, it seems that I do not have a disk management utility of any kind, which the documentation tells me I should use under certain circumstances. What should I do to fix that?

I picked the right time to ask this question (thanks Sean!)--if a girl was thinking about ditching Windows on her Dell laptop and installing Ubuntu, what steps would she need to take? Obviously there's the backing up of all her stuff on her computer, and trying to retain all the 20 gigs (gulp) of music and the browser stuff. Does anyone have suggestions from doing it before, or a guide for switching your machines over? Does iTunes have a linux version?

Anyone want Parallels for Mac? As a previous customer, I can get $20 of new copies for myself or others. So it'd be $59.99 instead of $79.99. Parallels is the software that lets you run Windows, Linux, etc. on your Intel Mac at the same time you're running OS X. And the various virtual machines can communicate with each other and OS X, as each has its own IP address. So you can run a server on one OS and client software on another... so it's great for web developers who want to test multiple OSes at once. It is made of awesome.

You can also download a free trial. [link]

edit - I think I figured it out.

Anyone know what's going on with AOL? Every email I've sent to an AOL customer since yesterday has failed. Since I send out a monthly newsletter and a lot of my people are on AOL, I got a lot of failure notices, but it's also happening with family and friends.

Thanks for the info on Earthlink. I knew something was fishy. I'm glad I changed ISPs.

I wonder if this has anything to do with it:

As a holiday gift to consumers, AOL announced that on Saturday, December 2nd, it will offer a selection of movies for free download through the AOL Video portal! Beginning this Saturday, December 2, at 6:00 AM ET until 6:00 AM ET on Sunday, December 3 or while supplies last. (Limit one movie download per person.)

[link]