An email security scanning company has accidentally deleted thousands of its customers' emails.
GFI, a Microsoft "gold certified partner", is now offering free upgrades to all its customers after it trashed their emails by sending out incorrect update information.
According to GFI, the problem occurred because of a change in BitDefender's technology, one of the products that GFI uses for its email scanning. When the GFI MailSecurity update mechanism tried to install BitDefender updates on customer networks, the service started to delete all emails by default. BitDefender and GFI then rolled back the updates.
"We've learned our lesson," said a BitDefender spokesman. "From now on we'll try to give more support to our integration partners. The other companies that integrate our scanning engine did not have the same problem."
A ZDNet UK reader affected by the problem says a GFI salesman told him the update had not been tested.
"We were pretty surprised this morning to find that all of the email which arrived overnight had been deleted," wrote Jeremy Whiteley, chief executive officer at Promarketing Gear. "Even more troubling was the fact that, according to GFI's US sales manager, they released this update without testing it! I guess they expect me and my IT staff to play the role of tester, regardless of the cost to my business…We're reconsidering our reliance on GFI going forward."
GFI denied not testing the update, but apologised for the blunder and has promised all customers a free upgrade to its MailSecurity 9 product, which is available in two months' time. The company has also released a tool that can tell customers which emails were deleted and when.
"All our updates are tested before issue," insisted Angelica Micalleff-Trigona, PR manager for GFI. "Unfortunately, some changes had been made to BitDefender. We were not aware of this and we did not forsee this problem. We are deeply sorry for what happened. It took us by surprise."
Talkback
The statement of Mr Whitely is not correct. Our sales manager never made such a comment and of course our updates are tested. For a full factual statement from GFI about this issue, please see:
http://forums.gfi.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=000744
Once again we apologize to our customers for what happened. We are very grateful that the overwhelming majority of our customers have shown their understanding in this issue and have supported us.
Well,
if this update has been tested how could it be you missed this bug? It is impossible to oversee such a major malfunction. In fact up till now I have not seen even one statement of GFI how they missed this bug and what they are going to do to safeguard that such an issue never arises again.
Robert Cocker
Yes your sales manager did make the comment that updates are not tested. He even told me that if they were, it would delay the release of virus def files. He told me how it was a two edge sword. I talked to him twice, Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I
Let me tell you my experience with GFI and why I only have very few customer left using their software.
1. Non existing Support. Since version 7 there is a flaw in the virus updater of MailSecurity. It updates twice and than hangs and never updates again. All support does is to ask for troubleshooter files. I sent them these files x-times - but never got an answer. I mean how can a company sell an AV Product and the most essential feature is not working?
2. Censorship of board. Since I never got any answers of support I tried their forum. But it looks like their form is censord. Whenever I asked for help in the forum it gets censored and deleted.
There is one good side of the story. Since their Virus definition updater does not work properly only some of my customer were effected. How ironic that one bug protected us from an other bug.
Obviously they didn't test it enough!
How can any software company that does something like this ever again get any credibility.
I suggest that all customers vote with their wallets and spend their money in well managed software houses that actually test updates properly before they are released.
Hi Dan,
looks like the GFI Software is deleting again customer emails.
http://forums.gfi.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=000752
http://forums.gfi.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=000755
Dont know if you will see these posts tomorrow since during office hours GFI deletes posts requlary.