another NetIdentity e-mail outage

On 13 August on his blog, Thomas Crampton wrote:

the company I pay for email service suddenly shut down without warning.
They still give no estimate of when they will restore service...
NetIdentity: Lousy, unreliable service and bad customer support. Shameful.

Comments from the discussion that followed:

Since the association with Tucows and Domaindirect, it’s been bad.

I recommend forwarding your emails to another service

I’ve had it with their lack of reliability, non-existant customer support, and horrific UI. (They recently changed their UI four times in one day!!!)

I’m dumping NetIdentity and moving to another service.

now nearly 4 days of outage and NO HOPE of it being repaired?

Tucows have been shamelessly milking NetIdentity ever since their purchase. Their customer service level is appalling, the general service is unreliable, they are refusing to improve basic products, and this latest episode is just another normal sorry example of how they are continuing to take peoples money without providing even a basic service.

-- reasons for the outage --

we’ve identified the source of the issues and implemented a fix. Mail service is being brought back online as we speak. What we don’t have an estimate for is exactly when each specific user will start receiving email again.

the issue is affecting less than half of our customers...

we charge for our services, but in exchange for this, we strive to provide the best possible service...

33% of the folks that are having problems should have full service restored sometime overnight.

each restoration will take approximately 24-36 hours (or more)

the average hold time yesterday was approximately 7 minutes

-- reactions to the excuses --

if you think good service is taking 7 minutes to answer a telephone call, I understand exactly what you think good customer service is.

Longstanding NetIdentity clients such as myself know that since Tucows turned Netidentity into a cash cow:

a) There have been no significant improvements in functionality.

b) Some functionality, such as Webmail, is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than it use to be.

c) Your response times to email queries are a joke, with an incredibly laborious process which is clearly designed to stop people raising queries in the first place.

d) When I have raised service issues, you have NEVER resolved the problem.

all I’m getting is “GATEWAY TIMEOUT” errors from Netidentity.com. Can’t even get in to see the latest “update.”

I’m going to migrate over the weekend, send out all my “change of address” notices, and then forget about NetIdentity, Tucows, the lot…

This outage was definitely the last straw for me on netidentity. On my to-do list for this weekend is to find a new provider.

The weird thing is, we have to discuss this on some guy’s blog. There is no forum on the NetIdentity website where customers can communicate with each other. Why not?

Ross, your company stinks and you are damaging your career by continuing to be associated with it.

Since Tucows took over, they have been an absolute disgrace. Any other business would have failed, but I guess the lock-in allows them to stumble on.

Anyway this latest multi-day inability to provide a basic email service is it for me. I am goneburger, despite the huge inconvenience associated.

I emailed/posted numerous messages detailing my problem with no response until finally I make contact with someone or something at “customer service”. Said entity starts offering completely hopeless and useless advice...

That’s really funny that Tucows management is answering customer complaints in this blog but not directly to customers?

Tucows took over the service in 2006 it never worked properly since.

I’m not about to rely on Tucows until they drop me in it again.

Sorry Ross, but something just doesn’t jive with the explanations given for the spam.

Nothing jives with the explanations from Tucows for their failures.