Web Mail Blog

UPDATE - see solutions at bottom

In the past week or some some users are reporting that they are frequently prompted to log in again when using Web Mail. This is not a timeout, but happens immediately after starting a new session, when the user clicks on certain tasks.

What this probably means is that the session cookie that keeps you logged in is not being presented by the browser when it makes a request to the server. Sometimes this can be caused by security software running on your computer. Right now we don't know why several users are suddenly seeing this problem, but the most likely cause is that something changed in the browser or web security software that those users are running.

If this has happened to you, please provide the following information to help us pin down the cause. You can either post the information here, or send it directly to email-guy at earthlink dot net.

• Does this happen only when performing certain tasks in Web Mail?
• What is your exact browser version (Help / About)?
• Have you done system upgrades recently, for example Windows SP3?
• How are you connected to the Internet when the problem occurs?

• What security software is running on your computer? Can you temporarily disable it or close it to see if the login problem goes away?
  
  
• Do you have access to another computer where you can try and see if the problem does not occur while using your same account?

• Does the problem occur on any other web sites that require you to log in?

Thanks for any information you can provide.

UPDATE
One user reports that Microsoft support was able to fix the problem for them. We don't yet have details of how they fixed it. We also know now that the problem is definitely that Internet Explorer is losing the session cookie that keeps you logged in to a web site, and the problem is apparently not something we can fix on the EarthLink side. But we don't yet have enough information to tell you how to fix it. Hopefully I'll have that soon.

My research shows that one thing which can definitely cause this problem is if you have your Internet Explorer home page set to open a local file on your computer and not set to a remote web site. A bug in IE will then cause it to lose session cookies from remote web sites.

Another user has some helpful information in the comments below.

More info soon....

UPDATE 2
Some users have discovered that resetting the Internet Explorer settings fixes this problem. Go to Tools / Internet Options, click the Security tab, click the "Default Level" button (Internet zone), then click on the Privacy tab, and click the Default button. Click OK. If that fails, do it again but click the Advanced tab, and then the button at the bottom that says Reset. That puts everything in IE back to its default state, and it definitely fixes the problem for all users who have tried it.

We're still trying to narrow this down further to a specific setting so that you don't have to do the reset, but this appears to work. Also, there is definitely more than one setting in the Security and Privacy sections that will prevent you from staying logged in to web sites, so it may not be the same specific setting for all users.

Please report if this works for you.

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For the past few days users have been reporting timeouts or retries sometimes when attempting to send messages in Web Mail. Because of your reports, we found and fixed this problem today.

The trouble started a week ago on 9/9. We found the cause and it is now fixed. Sending should now work normally and quickly in Web Mail for all users.

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I was out of the office last week and I'm catching up the pending comments now. I should have them caught up tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.

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Yesterday we added a new option to allow Ad-Free Web Mail for any account.

Click on MyAccount at the top of any EarthLink page and log in there using your master account or primary email address. Then on the left side of the page click on "My Plan Details".

You'll then see all your upgrade options displayed on the right, and Ad-Free Web Mail is the first one at the top. Just click on Enable or on More Info and follow the instructions.

Regular readers of the blog know this is something I've been working on for a while but didn't have specifics of how it would ultimately come out. Many users have asked for this option and have been eagerly waiting for it. I got you the best deal I could (details below), and I know many users will find it attractive. EarthLink allows you the freedom to access your mailbox using any email software of the your choosing, and Web Mail is one convenient way to manage your email. Web Mail doesn't require you to install any software and it can be accessed from any computer and any browser. But Web Mail has always displayed banner advertising and some users object to that. See the FAQ for more discussion on that topic.

If banner ads cause you any trouble or slowness when using Web Mail, or you just find them annoying, or you have a small display and would benefit from recovering that extra screen space, now you can. For 99 cents a month, all Web Mail advertising will be turned off for all your mailboxes, no matter how many mailboxes you have on your account. Most users have 2 or 3 mailboxes, many have 8 or more. The upgrade is just one flat price for all your mailboxes, and it's $0.99. You can make a couple of clicks on your MyAccount page and turn the ads off, and if at any time you want to discontinue the upgrade, you do that the same way.

        Continue reading "Ad-Free Web Mail option now available" » »

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Thanks to everyone who participated in our recent survey.

I received thousands of responses, and statistically the sample size indicates a 99% confidence level that the quantitative responses (multiple choice) fall within +/- 2.5% of the mean for the entire Web Mail user population. That means the answers should fairly represent most users. There was also great participation in the open-ended questions, where you could describe what you need or would like to see in Web Mail. I added all those answers up too (thousands of open-ended answers and I read every single one) and there were a lot of repeated themes that I'll summarize and rank.

As promised, I'm publishing the full results here. We're still digesting all the information internally and formulating plans to try and better meet the top needs of our users. But you can count on a lot of this information leading to specific solutions.

The survey gathered 3 sets of useful data:

• Web Mail usage by tenure, frequency, connection type, browser, and OS.

• Web Mail satisfaction for reliability, speed, features, storage, and ease-of-use.

• Unmet needs and desired improvements.

We asked 8 required multiple-choice questions for quantitative and ranking data, and 3 optional open-ended questions for additional data on user needs and problems. Here's the results, and some comments summarizing what we learned:

        Continue reading "The Web Mail Survey Results" » »

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Some users have reported that messages they want to receive in their Inbox are sometimes being flagged as spam and going to the Known Spam folder. This is called a "false positive" when our spam filters mark a message as spam but you don't consider it to be spam and want it to be delivered. There are several reasons this can happen. I'll describe some of those and then describe a solution you can use to help us reduce the number of false positives.

Some common causes of false positives are:

• You have signed up for a mailing list or announcements from a bulk email sender (a company or organization), but many other users are reporting messages from that sender as spam using the "This Is Spam" button in Web Mail. When a sender has a bad reputation as reported by thousands of users, this can result in their messages being filtered for all users.

• A person that you correspond with may have a compromised computer that has become infected with a virus created by a spammer, and their computer is sending out thousands of messages unknown to that user. When that happens, that sender can get listed as a spammer and all their messages might start getting flagged as spam.

• In a few cases, regular message correspondence that is not spam might be incorrectly flagged because it has similarities to actual spam and gets caught by a filter. Your reports help to refine the filters to be more accurate.

If messages that you want to receive are being flagged as spam, please follow these steps and we'll try to get it cleared up:

        Continue reading "When messages you want to receive are flagged as spam" » »

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UPDATE: the survey is now closed. Thanks to all who participated. We'll publish a summary here soon.

  We want you!

Your opinion is needed! I want to make sure we spend our time working on the things that are most important to you. Please participate in the Web Mail survey to let us know what you think. It's only 10 questions, and you can complete it in less than five minutes.

Access the survey by clicking here.

When I have enough responses I'll publish a summary here on the blog.

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A number of users who are using Norton Internet Security 2008, have reported getting certificate errors when navigating to Web Mail. The error will inform you that "Revocation information for the security certificate for this site is not available".

When using Norton 2008, the problem can also happen on other web sites, not just EarthLink Web Mail. Norton has published a support bulletin on their site here. The instructions say that running Norton Live Update will fix the issue.

A similar problem happened last year with Norton 360, and Norton fixed it with an update to their product. So perform the update function built-in to the Norton software and see if that resolves it. A Google search shows me that it is happening to users of Norton 2008 on other web sites, not just here.

But Web Mail is safe to use. The same certificate check is built in to the IE7 browser (Tools / Internet Options / Advanced / Check for publisher's certificate revocation) and if you allow IE to do the check without Norton running, it will pass and not give a security warning.

Again, Norton's instructions to fix the problem are here.

UPDATE: based on a report from user David Schwartz below, there apparently are two separate problems going on here. If you use IE6 without Norton, this problem can occur if you have changed the advanced security settings in the browser. But if you use IE7 (which has that setting enabled by default), the problem only occurs if you do have Norton (not updated). We're working on the IE6 issue now to find and fix the cause if it is on the EarthLink side. Thanks for the report.

UPDATE: the IE6 problem is fixed.

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We're investigating recent reports of Apple Safari 3.0x crashing when using Web Mail.

UPDATE: I'm seeking more reports of this problem and we need some specific information to help isolate it. Please provide your OSX version, and your Safari version, and describe the action you took that preceded the crash.

When Safari 3.0 first came out, it crashed on many web sites including EarthLink Web Mail. Then Apple pushed out a software update some time in January that fixed it for a while. See this blog article for more information.

In the past week or so it appears Apple may have pushed out another update that created new problems. We haven't changed anything in Web Mail for several months that would be likely to affect the actions where users are reporting crashes. But a lot of reports have come in the past few days where Safari users are experiencing crashes. I checked Apple's support forums and I see that many users are experiencing these problems on lots of other web sites too. Some users say that the more recent updates from Apple caused this. Some users say they have reverted certain updates to earlier versions to clear up the trouble. We're going to do some tests to see what we can figure out.

In the meantime you might find help and information here:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=876&start=0

My suggestions are:

Make sure you have the latest updates from Apple, and see if that clears up the trouble. If you have a new Mac with the first version of Safari 3.0 on it, it definitely has to be updated to stop Safari from crashing. This is a well-known issue not just affecting EarthLink users. Or if you just have the earlier versions of Safari 3.0 and don't have the recent updates, that may solve the problem. It has for some users.

We're working on tracking down any compatibilty problems that we may be able to control.

UPDATE: A little research seems to indicate that these problems might be related to the Flash player used with Safari. There is a discussion thread about the problem here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6631475

Some users have reported fixing the problem by uninstalling the Flash plugin and then reinstalling the correct one from Adobe. Several users on that Apple forum report that this solution works (copied from the Apple forum, not verified yet):

Adobe FlashPlayer should first be uninstalled using the appropriate uninstaller available here: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14157&sliceId=2 and then the latest version obtained from here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash and installed.

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Lately we've had reports of scammers setting up an EarthLink mailbox with an official sounding name like "accountupdate@earthlink.net" or something similar. Then they send out email to all the earthlink addresses they can find (or randomly hit) asking you to "confirm" your account information by sending back your password. They are very clever at making the email look and sound official.

NEVER ever send your password to anyone in an email. EarthLink will never ask any user to do this under any circumstances. If you are ever asked for information like this in an official-looking email, it is a scam, 100% of the time. Do not reply to the message. Once the scammer has your password, they usually begin sending out spam from your account, thus hiding their own identity. This also can result in your own access being suspended due to no fault of your own, and your account can be turned off until you call in and get it straightened out.

When we get these reports or we catch them through our own monitoring, we immediately shut down the scammer accounts. But beware, as scammers are persistent and will keep trying, and we usually can't catch them until after some damage is done. Always safeguard your account information, particularly your password.

If you think you might have been a victim and need to change your password, just click on My Account at the top of any EarthLink web page. Log in there, select the email profile you need to update, and click on the Edit link beside Password. Change it to something new that is known only to you.

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For several hours today (Jan. 29) users were unable to log into Web Mail or to POP using other email software. In Web Mail the attempt would result in either an "invalid domain" or an "invalid username" error.

This problem should be fixed now, and all users should be able to log in to their mailboxes again. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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If you haven't browsed the "Ask Email Guy" pages then you're missing out on the most popular and useful part of this blog. That section is where I give straight answers to questions from users about any Web Mail problem or feature.

Click the "Ask Email Guy" link to the left, and you can read all of the published questions and answers. You'll almost certainly find some information you can use there, and your own questions have probably come up before. Feel free to jump in and comment on anything I have written there, or help another user with your own suggestions.

If you have comments or suggestions that don't need a direct response from me, feel free to put those in the "Tell Us About It" section of the blog. Your feedback is important, both here and in the feedback mailbox linked from your Web Mail page (on the lower left under the folders).

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Since the release of the new Safari 3.0 (beta) browser last month we have had some reports that it crashes when users attempt to use Web Mail, or crashes when performing certain tasks. This is with OSX 10.4.

Thus far we haven't been able to reproduce this in any of our internal testing, and we've had trouble-free testing with Safari 3.0. If you can provide more information to help us pin this down it would be appreciated.

Keep in mind, that browser is a beta release which you use at your own risk, and thus it is subject to problems. On the Apple support site there are many reports and discussions about Safari 3.0 crashing on lots of other web sites, so this is probably not something specific to EarthLink and probably not something we can fix. You may want to keep using the 2.x releases for a while longer until they work the kinks out.

UPDATE - see this comment from user Paul Lustgarten. He says that new updates from Apple should fix the crashing problem, and points out that the 3.0 version is not a beta on the Mac, only on the Windows version. When I went to the Apple web site from my Windows machine, it said beta, so it evidently detected I was browsing from Windows. My mistake.

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I'll be back on January 7. Until then I've disabled new comments so there won't be too many to catch up on when I return.

Happy New Year!

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In the past week a number of users had trouble using the Sync feature in their Total Access Mailbox software, which allows syncing of the local address book with the Web Mail address book. Users were getting an error "The server is not available. Try again later." If you submitted a comment or question on this issue in the past few days, I didn't publish those while I was investigating the issue.

This problem has been fixed. All users should be able to sync now without trouble.

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I'm working on catching up the past couple of weeks of submitted comments and questions now. Recent ones should be published today and tomorrow.

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