Email addresses in Address book have become corrupt

[#1]

Just looked at the email addresses in the Metronet webmail address book and instead of ‘fred@isp.com’ they appear to be corrupt and in the format ‘fBJUgsUEpWUINoJCnRr7FQ==:V7k77wMLH5V/V9tY4H7BLPyxRDvTCe7ROoXt5IhAK’
We have not made any changes for some time. What has happened and how can I recover our contact’s email addresses

[#2]

Didn't you have them backed up ?

[#3]

No, but also didn't expect my email suppier to screw them up......if indeed that is what has happened. I will, however, heed what you say and back them up when/if I get them back

[#4]

Would one of the excellent Plusnet staff take a look at this for me please 

[#5]

HI randpwar,
This is a known problem but as we have very few examples we haven't been able to get a handle on it. For future I would suggest saving any new entries in our new webmail here to make sure it doesn't happen again - Just select metronet from the drop down menu.
Jojo

[#6]

Jojo
I’ve logged into the new webmail and none of my addresses are in the address book.
When you say ‘known problem’ does this mean that you’ve irretrievably corrupted my contact email addresses?

[#7]

Quote

When you say ‘known problem’ does this mean that you’ve irretrievably corrupted my contact email addresses?

No, I've just spoken with a member of our networks team and we've found out that the problem is with how the addresses are displayed as it's not decoding them for you, when we view them manually we can actually see then encoded so they're not lost.
As the cause of this isn't what we originally thought and upon appearances may be generic to Metronet webmail I'm now raising a new problem and will do what I can to raise awareness of the issue.

[#8]

That’s good news Adam thank you. Sorry to press but can you let me know when my contact email addresses will be returned to a usable format.

I am able to get some from the ‘sent’ folder but will need the others at some point. I will then do as Midnight Caller suggests and create a document with them in……for the next time you have a little glitch 

[#9]

I've asked if we can export the address book and that can't really be done I'm afraid. As I'm sure you can appreciate I can't give a firm date of a fix but I will do my best to keep you posted when I can see that this has been worked on.

[#10]

Quote from: randpwar

[...] they appear to be corrupt and in the format ‘fBJUgsUEpWUINoJCnRr7FQ==:V7k77wMLH5V/V9tY4H7BLPyxRDvTCe7ROoXt5IhAK’

Is that a real example? I'm wondering if there might be a means to decode it back... but obviously don't want to experiment if that was just a random illustration!
Mathew

[#11]

Hi Mathew....Yes it is a real example, or at least it's about 90% of the line of characters that appear where one of our contact email addessses should
Rob

[#12]

Morning all,
There isn't away to convert or decrypt them I'm afraid, I'll do my best to let you guys know when the problem's been updated.

[#13]

Just a quick update to let you all know that we've identified the cause of the problem and it's been passed to the appropriate queue for resolution. I'll update this thread again when there's been further movement on that.

[#14]

Thanks for the update Adam. I look forward to a resolution being implemented 

[#15]

No problem, I keep checking this every couple of days, I'll update you again as soon as there's been further movement on this.