Speednames 'fesses up, admits customers' emails are borked

Customers of Speednames, the subsidiary of domain name registration firm NetNames, have been unable to receive emails since yesterday. On its status page the company said “it is currently not possible to receive emails at present.” Outgoing messages are being sent successfully but it warned that incoming emails sent to …

[Dr Who]

Exactly

Which is why I'm always amazed when someone spends weeks pitching their product and writing, honing and perfecting their proposal, ping it off in an email to the client and don't bother to make the phone call to be sure it's reached its target. Email delivery is unbelievably unreliable and should not be used as a mission critical business tool.

Bring back X.400 that's what I say.

[djack]

Re: Exactly

"Email delivery is unbelievably unreliable and should not be used as a mission critical business tool."

That's almost totally incorrect.

Email is (usually) a extremely reliable transmission method with notification when things go awry. Usually if things just disappear it's because of a fault at the very start of the chain or at the very end - I've seen some mail-servers (not just Exchange) 'successfully' deliver email to a user's mailbox when actually just putting it in the local bit-bucket. This is the email equivalent of the dog shredding your mail after the postie has put it through the door.

When mail disappears in transit, it is usually because some 'intelligent' spam or content filter has taken exception to the message (or error notification) and binned it. This is (IMO) intentional breakage of the system rather than unreliability. It's not the post-office's fault if you deliberately disregard your bills.

If sites or mail servers en-route disappears, then mail will be queued and regularly re-tried. If, after a while (usually several days) delivery is abandoned then an error notification is generated and sent back to the sender.

Mail is designed to be a reliable system. It takes a significant (or extremely unlucky) network and server breakage to just lose mail in transit. What it is not designed to be is instant or even fast. It's a measure of it's success and reliability that many people assume that it is meant to be instant.

If something is business critical, it is likely time-critical and in which case email is not the solution (and should be followed up by a phone call, which is instant) but otherwise it is one of the best methods to communicate in long form.

[Anonymous Coward]

We try to put similar messages across to our customers over their use of VPN's for critical apps and servers. Cheap but you muist be prepared to suffer the consequences of an Internet outage! :)

[Alister]

Last year the company brought in turnaround expert Steve Vaughan as non-exec chair to boost its fortunes

"What's that rack of servers doing?"

"It's storage for all our customers' inboxes, Steve"

"How much is it costing us?"

"Oh, about 2 grand a month"

"Right, get rid of it, go and buy some USB drives".

[AndyMM]

NetBenefit good, Speednames not so good

More than a decade using Netbenefit to host/forward mailbox my domains, never a glitch (or not a noticeable one of more than a few minutes), total reliability/ Speednames arrives bang down goes email within a few months and for hours.

Anyone got any recommendations for ultra reliable alternative, mainly just need them for forwarding to my single collection email address (Gmail)

Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

not delayed

Their servers were not accepting or relaying email. Connections to their servers just timed out or came back with too many connections. Fortunately the outage was probably short enough that no mail was lost as the senders servers would keep retrying.