Webcentral Response - to Email Down

By Christopher Hire On June 22nd, 2007

If I have not responded to your email in the past 3 days, it’s because I didn’t get it! I believe (but have no way to be sure) I may be still missing some mail, as some newsletters haven’t arrived. If you got a bounce this is also why.

Here’s Webcentral’s response to ‘email down’. I am interested to see what the cause was, I hope it’s open and honest. I think to be honest, this is about the best response I have had from any ISP or webhost over these issues. By industry standards it’s fairly good.

In comparison an example of industry standards: I have had 3 ISPs/hosts shut down services or change server settings (like IP address) without notification before, Independent Service Providers and those in the IBurst industry being the worst. More than one ISP changed a Fixed Ip business connection, without notice.

So by Australian industry standards, this is a good response letter. I would like to see a fair compensation offer for the inconvenience and potential business effects.

Thursday, 21st June 2007

Mail Issues - Update

As you are aware, our mail platform has experienced some performance issues this week, with customers seeing significant delays in receiving emails as well as some intermittent connection issues. Our call centre has also been under pressure due to the large number of calls we have received from customers whose mail was affected.

We are pleased to advise that the work performed on the mail platform last night seems to have resolved the performance and connection issues and the platform has been stable throughout today.

There are still two outstanding issues that are affecting a minority of customers:

1. Missing Mail

A server failed on the mail platform last night while other work was being undertaken and in order to ensure that affected customers could send and receive new email this morning, these mailboxes were migrated to a temporary server. As a result, some customers are not able to view email that was stored in their mailboxes prior to this failure and this mail should be restored tonight.

2. Distribution Lists

Some customers may also have experienced issues sending email to distribution lists and the restore that is being performed this evening should also address this issue.

Further Updates

We will provide another update to our partners tomorrow and a summary of the full incident will also be available to partners next week.

We appreciate that email issues such as these create significant pressures for our partners and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience these issues have caused. Our technical teams have been working around the clock to resolve these issues and will continue to work on and monitor the mail system 24×7 until all outstanding issues are resolved.

Throughout this incident, we have been updating Partner Control & Mission Control with status reports each morning and afternoon. This will continue until the incident is officially closed.
Kindest regards,

The WebCentral Partner Team.

This email was sent by WebCentral Pty Limited, ACN 084 429 318, PO Box 930, Fortitude Valley QLD 4006 to