Backlog clearing but millions of emails undelivered

Paradise internet customers are finally receiving new email in normal time -- but several million emails remain undelivered from last week.

The backlog problem, which became evident on Wednesday, was traced to a surge in volumes, mostly of spam junk mail.

TelstraClear spokesman Mathew Bolland said the huge backlog of email was continuing to clear following a 250 per cent increase in volumes going through the internet service provider (ISP) and a problem with its email processing software last week.

The company's engineers had worked "non stop" over the weekend to install new servers and add processing speed to deal with the higher than usual volumes of email.

"Paradise customers should now receive email as normal, with the remaining backlog of several million emails continuing to clear as capacity allows," he said.

Mr Bolland says it was not yet possible to give a time for the delivery of the email backlog given that email volumes had continued to increase.

"We expected large email volumes on New Year's Day, but they exceeded expectations.

"Yesterday Paradise received five million new emails -- the usual volume is one million a day," he said.

The increased capacity meant the ISP was able to handle the volume of new traffic.

"The compromise is that we have not been able to clear as much of the email backlog from last week as we had hoped."

If the company had processed all the emails in the order they were received, it would have simply added new emails to the backlog, and continued to slow deliveries as people returned to work this week, he said.

"We would like to apologise again to our customers for any inconvenience these delays have caused. Those expecting a message from last week can ask for it to be resent or wait for it to arrive as the backlog clears."

Much of the spam volume was from fraudsters attempting to obtain customers' banking details, he said.

"Phishing scams are not unusual, but the sheer volume of them is higher than normal."

Last week the company decided to delete spam rather than send it to customers' spam folders as usual.

However, customers still needed to be wary of email asking for confidential information, he said.

Spam usually accounts for about 60 per cent of all email received by Paradise, however last week's surge saw spam account for about 90 per cent of volume.

- NZPA