Blacklisting blues for Telecom email business customers
Some Telecom Broadband business customers are still experiencing problems related to technical foul-up that struck yesterday.
"At 11am on Monday, our Xtra and Officemail services came under heavy load with overloaded email queues," a spokesman said.
"Two of three of our Mail Transfer Agents [a router for mail out to the internet] were blacklisted with Sorbs [spam filtering agent that sits in front of ISPs to block unwanted spam]."
"Customers [numbering in the thousands] would have experienced outgoing mail delays."
The spokesman said service has returned to normal for "the vast majority of customers".
However, "some Officemail customers may still be experiencing outgoing email issues".
He added: "We are working to fix this issue as fast as we can, and apologise for any inconvenience this has caused our customers."
The Telecom spokesman confirmed "the majority of both Xtra and Officemail is hosted by Yahoo". The balance is hosted inhouse on Telecom servers.
Telecom's broadband business (formerly branded as Xtra) outsourced its webmail services to Yahoo's Australian operation in 2007 - a move dubbed a fiasco at the time amid ongoing technical problems and customer confusion over the transition.
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Comments and questions14
As one of those affected by this issue, yet again things could have been more readily resolved if Xtra had shown a willingness to admit that there was a problem and brief its own call centre staff.
Nothing more infuriating than being talked through a series of changes to my own computer only to find that the issue lay elsewhere.
My xtra email has been hacked as of yesterday. I don't sign up for things online. I think Xtra has some issues they don't want to make public...
idiot your Password must be too easy!
Pretty sure the only idiot here is you pal.
hows that throwing stones in glass houses going for you?
Telecom email is still broken. Telecom relay my email throught their MTA servers to my server. I can send email but have not received any incoming email since Saturday. So its not only Business customers having issues
If your outgoing mail server is smtp.xtra.co.nz then call Telecom and ask them to talk you through changing this to send.xtra.co.nz. It worked for me - I did this on Tuesday and it's working fine - same for my parents home PC.
Interesting that our business is still experiencing ongoing mail problems both incoming and outgoing yet Telecom's website gives no indication that there are any issues.
The switchover to Yahoo was and still is rubbish. As soon as a problem becomes too technical (ie requires you to count over 10 with your shoes on), Telecom tech support for emai pass it up to Yahoo who ignore it.
And gods help you if you try to send emails to an xtra.co.nz account with financial or recruiting data in it - odds are very high it'll end up in the recipients spam folder and Yahoo's trusted mail sender service is incomprehensible poorly supported gibberish.
From a pissed off user. Changing the outgoing server to send.xtra.co.nz. does not fix the problem if you have a domain. We sent out 71 emails to clients and have so far received over a 1000 notications of returns. This is still ongoing and has been since the 5th may 2012
Yep, bullsh*t long delays or emails not being received at all today. Down to phoning people to confirm whether emails have been received. What a shonky system.
And still the problem persists, with no information being given and the message on the Telecom Help page dated 11 May. And this is 'service'?
I'm not sure if it is a coincidence or not but our IP address has ended up on a number of anti spam lists and we are still having issues.
This sort of thing is so common it raises bigger issues. Even aside from the switch from engineers to marketers running the company a while back. Wouldn't it be neat if the company (a) read these sorts of comments, and (b) actually did something about them. Yes, outages happen but the repetitive nature of issue/response is telling. Culture shift please Mr Moutter...Not so much the people, many of whom are excellent, but some systemic stuff that will better support their excellence is long overdue
I quite agree with the sentiment re it is supposedly our problem, not the Telecom's
Would it be too much to expect, especially as we are paying GOOD MONEY for a supposed service, that Telecom emails/ txts whatever, even a simple news brief via Radio waves, to advise their PAYING customers that there is a problem, and not the individual's own apparent system meltdown, with the related worry, time trying to fix a non existent problem, literally hours trying to deal with Telecom IT people, let alone the actual cost to US of our time value mucking around with this rubbish