Problems with Webmail

[#1]

@Townman i dont pretend to understand how the Email server works .

But after 12 months of trying to fix it obviously its impossible , Would it not make sence to BY now make a decison it cant be fixed.

And it would be easier to have built a NEW server from a fresh start ?

[#2]

@rongtw,

Your understandable presumptions about what the service is and how it might be fixed are at the heart of common misunderstanding here.

The "webmail" system consists of more than just "A SERVER".  It is a collective of many services run on multiple servers across a number of data centres.  In broad terms, a mail system consists of the following services...

• File store for the storage of emails
• POP / IMAP server enabling user access to the file store for reading, writing and sending of emails
• Webmail webserver email client to access the above (or user's own email clients)
• A database for holding user account information
• The physical hardware which hosts the above - typically virtualised on server farms - distributed across a number of data centres
• Network interconnections for the above - between services and physical locations
• Load balancers to share the work out across the above

The danger here is presuming that the problem is easy to locate in the above technology and that replacing the "mail" bit will resolve it.  The technology stack here is substantial.  The problem is not likely to be easy to fully profile.  It works some of the time but not all of the time.  To fix this, it is necessary to identify the profile of the failure ... when, where, how, why does it fail? Only then can a resolution be identified.  The other danger here is presuming that there is just one cause - complex systems can have multiple stress points ... fix one and soon after another one appears.

The volume of email being processed is growing year on year ... unfortunately it is estimated that 54% to 70%+ (depending on which research you read) of that volume is spam.  You might recall that with the recent upsurge of spam circulating, performance took a nose dive again.  It also does not help where users "abuse" the email service by setting (or manually causing) their email clients to refresh their local mail boxes every few seconds.

[#3]

@Townman Thanks for your Explanation

Its more than Plusnet have said in way of any excuse and give customers a better insight to the problem .

on a personal thought would you believe that 12 months is a resonable timescale for a fix to have been found ?

[#4]

Difficult to comment here - I am, as a Super User, under NDA constraints: I do have insight into the complexity of the service and the substantial effort / activity undertaken to resolve this issue.  It is though one of those "When the obvious and easy has been eliminated and still not solved the issue, then the cause must be obscure and difficult" problems.

In my professional career I have seen such issues before ... is 12 months reasonable ... difficult question to answer ... a lot of things have been changed over the 12 months, which have delivered some improvements, but not fully resolved the problems, but have helped make clearer where the root cause might be, which is not where (as an ex-professional IT technical manager) I would have considered looking in the first place.

As for your comment on Plusnet's quietness on the problem, I can tell you from personal experience, no professional IT support guy (or gal) feels comfortable saying "I just do not know, I am still looking" - generally management have little insight into the complexity of technology and the difficulty of diagnosing issues.  All too often diagnostics have to be crafted to profile the problem, which is in its self a mammoth job.  All too often when issues are resolved, management's question is "Why is it always the last thing you thought of which resolves the issue ... why did you not consider that first?". 

[#5]

Webmail is running very, very slow at the moment. Still not loading webmail after 15 minutes "Loading..."  just goes on and then nothing, timed out. This is Plusnets Snail email service not a superfast email.

[#6]

Inbox won't load at all here - all I'm getting is the folder list on the left.

[#7]

I wonder if it is possible for the user to run webmail as a multi-process application?

E.g. launch 10 tabs, all trying to download from the same inbox?

It might be worth trying as if the web server is queuing requests for email, you just might get to the front of the queue before being timed out.

Highly anti-social of course, but if Plusnet can't fix it...

Personally, I don't have problems with email but that is because

• a) I don't get much email, and
• b) I use Thunderbird with IMAP to read email, and
• c) All email is archived to my PC and backed up on a daily basis.

So effectively, I don't actually use webmail and I don't leave email in my in my Plusnet inbox for more than a few hours.

[#8]

---

@VileReynard wrote:

E.g. launch 10 tabs, all trying to download from the same inbox?

Whilst the service is experiencing intermittent issues known to be exacerbated by load, then I really don't think this would be to the benefit of anybody 

[#9]

its really slow today

[#10]

Agreed. Same here.

[#11]

Over the past few weeks or months, I find it almost impossible to access my Plusnet emails via webmail on my work desktop computer. Eventually the inbox opens (usually) - but then it hangs, and hangs, and hangs, and hangs till the emails become visible. And then, should I be foolish enough to open one of the emails, again it hangs, and hangs, and hangs, and hangs ... It's not even possible to log out!

This is nothing to do with the computer itself which was new a few months ago and relatively speedy.

In my own experience (and I've been a customer for many years), the Plusnet webmail system has always been clunky. Is Plusnet ever going to sort their webmail out?

[#12]

Moderator's note:

Above post merged.

[#13]

Just tried webmail again out of interest and it was as quick as I've ever seen - around 20 seconds which is OK considering there's quite a lot of emails in the mailbox!

[#14]

Yeah, overnight and most weekends performance is fine.     Yesterday wasn't great (any experience of that on here?) but today it seems to be working ok.

@jelv Got time for a quick login to see how it is this afternoon in comparison?

[#15]

@Kelly Request times out after about 3-4 minutes (it's the mailbox for this forum account) - it has got a lot of messages and I'm expecting to see it archived any day now.