Telecom says sorry to business customers as Officemail suffers third day of problems

UPDATE Fri Nov 2: Telecom's Officemail email service continues to suffer problems - but the company says they are not its fault.

The company is still trying to clear a backlog of email following an outage on Wednesday.

NBR continued to receive complaints from readers this morning.

Telecom sent NBR the following statement at 1.30pm:

Telecom is apologising to business customers for delays in the receiving of emails through its Officemail product over the past two days.

Telecom technicians have identified and resolved the cause of an Officemail issue which has been causing delays over recent days in the receiving of emails for customers.

The problem was caused by unprecedented congestion after a significant number of emails were sent by a third-party mailer on behalf of their customer.

Telecom identified the problem immediately and took steps to allow for this increased traffic volume.

Customers should now be able to send and receive emails but some may experience delays as backed up email traffic continues to clear.
Telecom apologies for the inconvenience this issue has caused some customers.

The company says while the root cause was out of its control, it is doing all it can to prevent a reoccurrence including adding additional capacity to  prevent this type of incident from occurring again.

Telecom declined to name the mailing company, citing customer confidentiality, but did tell NBR, "The volume involved was significant. Our average daily traffic was sent in one email distribution."

Asked when the backlog would be cleared, the spokeswoman said,  "At this stage we’re unsure external parties that have sent customers emails will automatically resend if they were not received. The timing of the resend depends on different ISP’s and it can be anywhere from one hour to one week. We’re hopeful however that the bulk of the backlog will be cleared in the next day."

On the question of compensation, she said "Our present focus is working to ensure the problem is resolved satisfactorily and it’s too early to talk about any potential compensation."

Telecom says the Officemail problems are not related to Telecom's YahooXtra email service.

Thurs Nov 1: Telecom's temperamental Officemail has suffered more problems.

"There was an issue with some network maintenance carried out yesterday which caused delays to some email traffic," a spokeswoman told NBR this afternoon.

"The problem was fixed this morning but there is unfortunately still a backlog of emails."

One affected business client told NBR, "I'm tearing our hair out here. I normally get around 120-140 emails a day. I'm not looking forward to the surge."

A spokesman added "The Xtra maintenance outage wasn’t the only issue we’ve had today with email services. 

"There has also been congestion on the Officemail system.  The problem arose with abnormally high number of bulk emails being distributed by a third party provider on behalf of its client which effectively caused a dose of indigestion  on the Officemail server – around 2 1/2 times the usual daily traffic.   We’re currently clearing the backlog and will be working with the provider to avoid a recurrence."

Telecom's email system suffered major problems in May and June this year.and again in September.