Google DNS problems?!?

Wed May 11 00:51:39 UTC 2005

Hank Nussbacher wrote:

> I really like Google.  I like what they do.  But lately, their security 
> team is a joke.  I had a problem with their POP Gmail service and the 
> advise I got from their Gmail team was to turn off my CA EZ antivirus 
> and my ZApro firewall and to try again and see if the problem repeats 
> itself.  For a moment I thought it was an April 1st joke.

While I know exactly what you mean, I run POP service for several tens 
of thousands of mailboxes, and broken antivirus scanners that insert 
themselves between the mail client and the server are now our leading 
cause of "my mail program can't read messages any more" support 
questions. By far.

And the second most common cause is -- wait for it -- broken personal 
firewall systems that have apparently gone insane and decided to block a 
port for no explainable reason (we actually see this with POP, SMTP, and 
FTP).

So when the basic "are your hostname, username and password correct?" 
check doesn't help, we now tell our customers to try exactly what Google 
told you, as long as they have XP service pack 2 (our incoming mail is 
already virus scanned). Depressingly often, doing so fixes the problem.

-- 
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies         http://www.tigertech.net/