Have you ever waited for an email that never came?  You know your friend sent it, but you didn't get it! It could have been that your ISP (internet service provider) just didn't get it to you!

In a column by Robert X. Cringely of PBS, he reports:

"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."