The day before Good Friday, PlusNet chose to carry out entensive rebuilding of our email account, to attempt to fix a long standing problem with the Ironport anti-spam system. The selection of this date was entirely their choice, we were not pressurising them. The maintenance was to take no more than 4 hours, 2pm to 6pm.
Around 3pm it was clear we were losing mail, it is still not clear what we have lost, but some has gone missing. By 6pm, some accounts were again receiving mail, but some were not. PlusNet made a post to us at 6:03, saying it was still in progress.
By 8:45pm, some mailboxes were still bouncing mail. We informed PlusNet of this, giving a specific mailbox as an example. No response was received, and at 2am, we enabled the catchall account, to prevent further messages being bounced.
A reply was received on Good Friday afternoon, saying all the mailboxes had been refreshed (i.e. the maintenance was completed), accompanied by a list of the work carried out. This list was incomplete, and omitted 17 live accounts, incluiding the one previously reported to PlusNet. Looking at the list, it appears that PlusNet rebuilt the email accounts from a list that was at least 8 months old. All the missing accounts were modified or created in the last 8 months.
We again told PlusNet of their error, and have been told that no-one will now look at this until the day after Easter Monday, i.e. three further business days, and four days from when PlusNet caused the problem by their incorrect actions.
On a paid business account, we find PlusNet's indifference to their error to be unacceptable.
Ticket 40633960 detials this issue, and also notes PlusNet's inability to resolve the original Ironport issue over a period of some 6 weeks.
