"Robert X. Cringely, compu-columnist for PBS, reports on a hidden e-mail problem at Earthlink: They're losing up to 9 messages out of 10, found as a result of a friend's testing."

From the article: "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."

Well, I run Earthlink for some of my e-mail addresses, and there sometimes are large 'gaps' in my receiving anything of note, so I suspect I'm one of the 'affected' users.

Looks like I need to change the forwarding of my more important accounts from Earthlink's mail servers to one of my other available choices.

I'll probably end up with at least one of 'em forwarding to my gmail account, even though I detest the propensity of Google to store everything forever, even after it has been allegedly "deleted." At least it arrives.

Tomas