Unfortunately for some, the damage is done, as Brian illustrates:

Bloody 1and1 have about dun for our business we have had the best part of a week with no email into our holiday company this has crippled our CRM system and more or less stopped us from conducting business on any level. recently their domain registration service was 'out of order' returning domain not available to any .co.uk searches forcing us to register them elsewhere and bear the extra costs.

I have emailed them relentlessly to no avail. Further to the email thing, we have spoken to people in India and been made timescale promises that have not been met. I'm looking for a new provider.....any suggestions? Regards, Brian

Our hearty sympathies. Apart from teeth grinding apoplepsy, the theme of much of the correspondence was decidedly itchy feet:

It is now Friday and the email service is still inaccessible. Don't suppose you could recommend a good hosting service? Regards,

Andy

P.S. I wouldn't bother replying to this email, you'll get a faster response with the Royal mail.

Sadly, we can't Andy. Our own email provider, who shall remain nameless, is about as reliable as Pete Doherty after three weeks in Hackney crack lounge. Over to you, readers. ®

Update

1and1's press chief Richard Stevenson responded to our request for a call this morning with the following email:

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your media enquiry.

Following an important update to our mail server software and the subsequent restart of the mail servers, there have unfortunately been delays in the delivery of incoming email to 1&1 mail boxes.

Email messages are stored safely in a queue, but are subject to delay. Whilst on Thursday morning there was no delay, as of 11am today, Friday, there is an average mail delivery delay of 2 hours. Spam mails are being delivered with a lower priority and hence remain longer in the mail queue.

Many email users waiting for delayed mails currently access their mailboxes at a high frequency. Thus, in peak times there may also be delays in connecting to Inboxes.

The SMTP service (outgoing mail) is not affected and runs without delay.

Due to planned updates of software and hardware systems, some disruptions to email delivery to Inboxes may continue throughout today, Friday 19 January.

The delay in incoming emails will decrease as full service is gradually restored and emails are delivered.

We sincerely apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused due to the queuing of emails and thank them for their co-operation and understanding while we continue to resolve these issues.

Many thanks,

Richard

So it looks like there's going to be bother for some time yet.

Update 2

Reader Alan has come up trumps with a workaround. We'll let him explain it:

Normally we just read from the POP boxes directly. However we found that if we add a second forward destination for incoming emails addresses but to a non-1and1 email address then this bypasses the queues and enables the emails to arrive very quickly. This was quite easy for us as we have an effectively private email address from our broadband ISP that is rarely used. If this is done then people must be careful not to delete the POP box because that will loose emails already in the queue. Emails already queued only come throup the POP box but after setting up the forward address new emails come via both routes.

The downside is that all emails now come through twice but to us it is much better than having delays of many hours and at times during this week - next day. The other interesting thing is this gives a very good feel of the delays as we can see when the 1and1 email finally comes through. At the moment the "pairs" are coming through pretty much together so it appears to have settled down but that also happened for a while yesterday!

Sorry for not mentioning this earlier but I have only just read your article and have been spending quite a bit of time this week deleting double spam.

Hopefully this will help some people if the problem is still there.

Alan