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ClaraNet email falls over

You haven't got mail

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ClaraNet customers have been without email access all day, after the business ISP's POP3 system took a lie down this morning.

Engineers are battling to fix the snafu, which struck just after 9 this morning. ClaraNet said it hoped to have a partial fix in place by 6pm this evening.

"It will not however be fully functioning with webmail settings and stored e-mail prior to 09:05 unavailable. Customers will be able to send and receive new emails as they would normally," it said.

According to ClaraNet's support site, incoming mail has not been lost, but is queued waiting to be delivered. The firm apologised for the inconvenience and targeted 6pm tomorrow for the restoration of full service.

We couldn't get hold of ClaraNet to find out what went wrong. ®

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Latest Comments

Crap Service

I had several emails prior to 3/4/09 in my Inbox - they are now gone! They did manage to recover my Sent Folder - but that's all!

I expect losses on a free email service - not on one I pay for!

Eveb before their massive collapse last week, their email service had been abysmal at times - slow or non-existant! And I still got the occasional rogue empty email thast I could never delete!

Just why am I paying for this? And not even an acknowlegement from them to me as a customer!

Utter crap !! Thank god I still have several free email accounts to depend upon!

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Weak Communications

What irritates me is the weak explanation of what is going on. They didn't have a PR available to the journalist on the Register to explain ["We couldn't get hold of ClaraNet to find out what went wrong"], their Service Announcement is limited and unclear and does not inspire that they are in control of this problem and earlier they made promises that they did not keep nor did they reply to me from support with anything more than an AutoReply that said nothing - not even a holding standard reply. At one point the web-link to support appeared to fail. These guys are communications clowns.

I appreciate accidents happen but this does not fill me with confidence and a failure to deliver a week of archived material on one email (which I look at weekly on PC and delete on blackberry on a daily basis, relying on 'hard' copies later) will mean I go elsewhere - losing a week of communications is a serious matter if it gets that far. Thanks to Facebook, I am getting a flood of recommendations on alternative suppliers and, I hope, that when I check in in the morning (it is UK time) I will find everything in order or the search starts on Monday.

We need an explanation from the company of who screwed up and why, with assurances that it won't happen again ... no assurances and we and others go.

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claranet's email system

Claranet's mail system is just a *leedle* bit more complex than an exchange server ;) My guess is that it was the storage platform that caused the issue, and rebuilding a filesystem on a storage platform that size might well take several hours.

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