Worse Problems After Email Maintenance

[#1]

You're right, it's not a minor inconvenience at all.

I've been having sporadic problems with webmail for a couple of months but things got progressively worse over the past few weeks...and now I have no access at all.

The bland public service announcements are about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

Is there anybody listening ? Plusnet...anybody there ?

[#2]

Hi all.  I'm new here - even though I registered about 12 years ago!  Could not remember my password and (of course) could not have a 'renew password' link sent to my (plus.com) email address for obvious reasons!  So I've re-registered.  Anyway.... I feel so fed up that I thought I'd join you all in our shared misery (and rage...?)

My only way forward so far has been to install Thunderbird - which is showing me the list of emails if not the content.

I shall now go to my gmail account, email those who have contacted me today and ask them to resend  - but to gmail.

As for PlusNet - I see their address in Sheffield is 'The Balance'.  I wonder if their future is in the balance! 

[#3]

What a waste of time Plus net is, been online waiting for an hour just to be told they are looking into the problems. This has gone on now for far too long, WEEKS now.

[#4]

I have no access at all. I knew nothing of this till this morning when it just stopped working. It's now over 24 hours since e-mail stopped working. Obviously, the planned maintenance didn't go to plan. Ah, what do you know - while I've been typing this it has finally come back on. Let's hope it stays on.

I have worked in technical fields much of my life, and I have to say there is nothing worse than trying to deal with customers when you don't know what's wrong, and most of the time when investigating a technical problem you don't know what's wrong, otherwise you would have fixed it. That's very difficult to explain to non -technical people, who assume you are paid to know, rather than that you are paid to have a clue about how to look. By definition, when a technical fault occurs, the system is not behaving as expected and that means you are dealing with an unknown and unknowable quantity, so questions like "how long will it take?" become unanswerable. You will know when you've found it and then you will fix it (if you didn't do so in the process of finding it) and test again, but until then it will take as long as it takes and there is very little to report except that you're still looking.

Unfortunately, businesses seem reluctant to say "We have a problem. We don't know what it is but we're looking for it and we have no idea how long it'll take, but when we find it we'll fix it. In the meantime there's little we can add except we're looking for it and will continue to do so until we find it." I suppose they think it makes them look incompetent, but then what else can anyone be when faced with the unknown?

[#5]

There isn't a technical hitch!  They've just run out of storage capacity because no-one bothered to do any capacity planning forecasting/management. Any IT company worth their salt would try to become ITIL compliant but I suspect Plusnet haven't evolved that far.  I also suspect that they haven't even got a 'local disaster recovery plan'  or even tested them to ensure that any backups of data can be restored. Basically folks , if one of their data centres (where our webmails servers are located) got damaged they have no fallback to keep continuity of the webmail service.  If one server dies, another 'sleeping'  one should kick in so that we have no disruption to our service. But obviously webmail is a free service and they can't afford to build in storage capacity resilience because it doesn't make them monies. I think I will start removing any dependency on PN webmail  (something I should have thought about ages ago) and then shift my phone/broadband elsewhere. If they cannot do basic IT planning , then what is the risk to the other services being provided. Personally , I cannot afford to take that risk anymore .

[#6]

Got in earlier this morning and thought all was sorted. Tried again just now and we're back to "service unavailable", what the blazes is going on Plusnet - get this sorted!

[#7]

Me too - woke up in night about 4.30 and thought I would just see!!!! no problem at all straight through to yesterdays emails - thought problem had been solved 1!!!!!!!! WRONG -!!!! nothing this morning 

[#8]

Same here .Tried early morning fine .Later on in the day nothing.Come on PN get your act together.

[#9]

having trouble getting on internet as well

[#10]

Hi All 

Email still a bit hit and miss. Can get it OK first thing in the morning,but later in the day no chance.Internet connection 

still OK,so far

[#11]

all seems to be working this morning, better keep everything crossed

[#12]

Failing again. We Are ditching PN next year. Useless.

Moderator's note by Dick (Strat) All caps removed as per Forum rules

[#13]

Managed to login a few minutes ago, but no messages will load, not even a list, just "mailbox empty". Sadly I'm now reaching the stage that I'll be leaving PN as well. I do not like being treated like a mushroom, kept in the dark and a load of  "manure" chucked at me. Utterly pee'd off. This problem is in it's 43 day http://www.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=2 and webmail has been a nightmare for a lot longer. PN USED to be a great ISP, not any longer. 

[#14]

When that annoying bloke comes on the telly in the adverts I am tempted to throw a brick at the screen. 

[#15]

---

@aptprojects wrote:

...The "cuddly friendly idiot" image on the PlusNet advertisements is a sham. In reality they are cynical profiteers who only care about fleecing their customers whilst offering zero service in return....

---

Sadly, they are no different in this respect from any other ISP that I've ever come across. Must of them are capable of appearing caring and friendly when things are going well but none of them can cope when serious problems arise. BT, TalkTalk, Sky and Virgin have all been found wanting in a crisis, and now we see that PN are as bad as all the rest.

It has to be said, though that venting one's anger on this forum is only part of what's needed to get the message across. We need to be saying the same things to our friends and followers on Facebook, Twitter and the rest. Perhaps if PN marketing managers start to see serious damage to their reputation in public, they'll push the engineers to do something about it.

In some ways, it's a shame for us is that it's not such a colossal balls-up as brought TalkTalk onto the front pages a few years ago. Long-term, chronic just-about-usable-sometimes-but-not-nearly-good-enough web-mail isn't news-worthy.