Douglas Woodhouse
Toronto

Email Service Bulletin
Posted By: Ross Rader On: 10 Jan 2009 10:45 AM

DetailsAt the completion of the mail maintenance window yesterday evening, hardware issue caused a failure in the mail system for some of our customers.

At the completion of the mail maintenance window yesterday evening, hardware issue caused a failure in the mail system for some of our customers. We are uncertain how many of our NetIdentity and Domain Direct customers have been affected by this failure, but we expect that it is most, if not all, of our customers.

The OpenSRS Email team is estimating that it will take approximately 16 hours to fully restore mail service for all customers and is projecting that this will complete around 10pm EST this evening.

Details are not fully available at this point, so we will report more later when we hear more from the engineering team, but at this point, it looks like one of the Network Appliance servers that houses the mail stores is suffering from some sort of a manufacturing defect (i.e. bad hardware) and will need to be swapped out and the data restored. The OpenSRS team is working closely with the team from Network Appliance to resolve this issue.

During this period, you may be unable to send or receive email and may experience “Service Unavailable” errors if you are using webmail. None of your inbound mail has been lost, we are queuing all inbound mail and it will be delivered to your mailbox when the mail service has been fixed.

Maybe my 25+ years of exp. is useless…

Questions sent to Netidentity support are either lost or take 2 – 4 weeks for a reply. I have sent multiple requests and the response time is measured in weeks.

Ross continues to say they are working on it but we are still waiting for results.

So now I will be andrew@leamail.org (my own domain) instead of being held to ransom as andrew@lea.com

(Incidentally, POP access hasn’t worked today when I have needed to access my NetIdentity account to confirm updates I was making at various websites. It served as a useful reminder of why I am putting myself through this pain so that I can wave goodbye to Ross and the Tucows herd for good.)

The problem with this, for many of us, is twofold:
1) Someone already has the domain names we’d like. My last name, while rare as a last name, has already been taken by a plywood importer for .com, someone else (currently under construction) for .org, and of course NetIdentity for .net. NetIdentity is squatting on tens of thousands of surname-based domain names.
2) Since Netidentity took our surnames, many of us just went ahead and got email accounts with them, years ago (in my case, with Nameplanet). Changing our email addresses at this point would be a big PITA.

“Since registration of domain names is relatively simple and inexpensive – less than US$100 in most cases – cybersquatters often register hundreds of such names as domain names.”

This is exactly what they are doing.
We could register a complaint with WIPO.

http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/studies/publications/domain_names.htm

I could even change this to something like:
Ross W. Rader, NetIdentity [ross@netidentity.com]

With the new mail system, the default looks something like this:
[ross@netidentity.com]

Which, as far as defaults go, isn’t great, but it ain’t bad.
UNQUOTE

No, it “ain’t” bad, uh?

In 1995 I opened a FREE webmail account with Lycos. You could not only choose the name you wanted for the “From:” field but even define more than one and assign them on a per-email basis (quite useful if you use the same account for your business and personal e-mails). And that was 11 years ago.

Anyways for yours I suggest the following:
Krusty the Clown [ross@netidentity.com]

September 23, 2006
Tucows, Inc., is pleased to announce the appointment of Krusty the Clown to the position of Chief Technology Officer. As his first assignment Krusty will be responsible for the e-mail migration of NetIdentity subscribers. Join us in welcoming Krusty to our dynamic team.

Hidden cam takes a snapshot of the pre-migration planing meeting.

Netidentity has failed to provide even a reasonable measure of customer service. e-Mail has been down for about 3 days for many people. The new interface is poor at best.

The ONLY reason the company continues to have customers is they have purchased domains people want to use. The cost has gone up and the quality of service has gone down. The free services provide better spam filtering and up time. Many companies claim “five nine’s” uptime. This means their system is only down 5.26 minutes per year.

This single outage has come close to “two nine’s” uptime. Being up 99% of the time means being down 3.65 days.

Usually web hosting companies will list uptime as part of their service agreement. In the case of Netidentity this is missing. I can not find a single place on the site which states uptime.

As part of the solution to this problem I would expect a guaranteed uptime for their systems. If they have downtime which exceeds the guarantee they should extend contracts free of charge.

By the way, did anyone notice that netidentitysucks.com is available?

I already have an alternative e-mail address lined up, but I have not wanted to go through the pain of getting everyone to change their records. This disaster makes that pain look minor!

All customers of NI/Tucows I know, are disappointed. And that’s a first since over 5 years.

T.