Xtra traffic problems rebounding

By JUHA SAARINEN

Xtra's email woes have affected other internet providers who complain that thousands of email messages from their customers destined for Xtra subscribers have been delayed, causing a bigger load on their own servers.

The delays continued yesterday, with internet provider Maxnet's network operations manager, Alastair Johnson, saying its customers were experiencing delays of several hours trying to send messages to Xtra's network. Xtra is the country's biggest internet provider.

Spokeswoman Katrina King said the reason for the delays was heavy traffic loads on the network.

She said it was "linked to the significant volume of spam currently in the network", and that Xtra was sorting it out by installing new servers to increase its mail capacity.

Customers have complained for days of delays in receiving email.

Publisher Tony Dominey said Xtra subscribers to his daily email newsletter Travel Today experienced long delays three times last week.

A Wellington-based network manager blamed Xtra's policy of not accepting more than two connections from sending servers.

King confirmed the policy, saying "the non-acceptance of more than two simultaneous connections per IP [internet protocol] address is a standard business rule for Xtra".

At present Xtra was intermittently restricting the number of mail connections to protect the integrity of the total mail capacity.

Whangarei internet provider Igrin also reported problems, with messages "taking anywhere from 20 seconds to one hour to get through", said its systems administrator, Simon Byrnand.

Xtra's network status indicator said an "unscheduled event" at midday yesterday affected connections nationwide and the receiving and sending of email was affected.

In Dunedin, scarfies.net owner Dan Clark said a fellow internet provider had 50,000 messages queued up on his mail servers, waiting for delivery.

Peter Mott, who runs internet provider 2day.com in Auckland, said "this is definitely affecting business", citing an increased number of "trouble-tickets" raised by his customers who had had delays in sending mail to Xtra.

King said the mail problems were intermittent so not all customers would have been caught up in delivery delays.

"No customer should be losing mail. Either it will get through or they will be notified by a bounce-back message if it hasn't," she said.

Xtra was unable to say when the servers would be upgraded.

"We're working very hard on this and did increase capacity through additional server installation at the weekend. But we have identified a need for further capacity and we're working on creating this."