KEY POINTS:
Still licking their wounds from the Xtra Bubble disaster which Telecom shelled out an unprecedented $7 million in compensation to customers and donations to charity to try and put right, Xtra customers were this morning again without email.
I've had several emails from people affected. Maurice, who spent 20 minutes waiting on hold only to be told that yes, there was a problem with Xtra email, wrote:
"Maybe its time for all the business that have to waste time calling in when they are aware of the fault should start charging Xtra for the time they waste on the phone. Will the problems ever end? I think the only solution is to get a domain name so you can change your email provider without having to change your email address."
Simon was similarly disappointed.
"I spent two days messing around trying to get my email sorted out last time there was an Xtra outage. I've really had a guts full."
Telecom has this service announcement on its website:
"Currently some customers may be experiencing issues with their email. Our technicians have fixed the problem. However, you may experience a delay in sending and receiving emails."
As the above graph from internet monitoring company Epitiro shows, Xtra email server response times shot through the roof this morning as queries to the server went unanswered.
Luckily it was a short outage this time but the flow-n effects may impact email for the next day or so. It's not a good look for Telecom after the pain of Bubble.
I'm an Xtra broadband customer but I have my own domain for my main internet account, the exact scenario Maurice suggests above.
Because my mail is hosted on the server of a third-party company, The Kiwi Webhosting Company, I'm not affected by any Xtra email outages.
If Kiwi's mail server goes down I'm in trouble, but I haven't had any problems in the three years I've had my own domain. Being a smaller company, Kiwi also offers better customer service.
Seeing as hosted domains are so cheap now, getting your own one is well worth looking at, especially if you're in business. These days, sending customers information from an @xtra.co.nz domain isn't going to do much for your company's image.
