Xtra email problems coming out into the open
November 26, 2007
It’s time Xtra starts to acknowledge they have serious flaws in their systems mostly due to their outsourcing of email to Yahoo. The Dominion Post has picked up the story so hopefully some pressure is beginning to build with Xtra.
Lucid Design 
Maybe you should be a regular reader of our blog site Galen with all due respect. You would have known about your complaint a month ago, and would have been in a position to warn your clients.
Peter
Hmmm, interesting comment Peter – considering that Galen originally posted about this issue the day before you did… Nice try in promoting your blog. Many people have been working on this for well over a month.
You ignore the main issue and say that we don’t trust our hosting service. Massive presumption on your part.
Here is the actual issue with an example of how it affected us yesterday – nothing to do with forwarding emails to our hosted customers themselves:
We host an international accommodation directory for people travelling around the globe.
Yesterday the owner emailed me with an emergency message from a family member of a lady who was staying somewhere in the travel network, either here in NZ or in Australia.
I wrote the email and sent it out from our server to all our accommodation providers (who we contact through the server around once ever 6 months or so – not spam by any means…), BUT Xtra/Yahoo immediately deferred it (ie. they wouldn’t accept the emails in the first place)
I told my mail server to send it again immediately because of the emergency nature of the email. After 3 trys Yahoo/Xtra accepted it – but they will have thrown it into the host’s Bulk Mail spam box.
The only choice we had is to send an email to all the hosts from our own email box – taking xtra (sorry extra) time – but at whose expense? Xtra aren’t going to foot the bill.
We have been through the whole saga of contacting Yahoo and Xtra multiple times. Their service is worse than useless – at least they are consistant I guess. Xtra have continued to be this way for years now.
We filled in the form at Yahoo to have our server removed from their greylist, which they did for a couple of weeks, and now we are right back where we started without any notification of why – and Xtra Complex Technical Support have not emailed me back about this latest issue.
It is interesting that in the Dominion Times article Telecom spokeman, Nick Brown, blames the web-hosting companies for forwarding mail without filtering it first for spam. I happen to have an old Xtra account which forwards mail to my server and guess what… YAHOO FORWARDS SPAM TOO!!! :-) Nice try Nick – stay high and mighty and say the problem is someone elses – an all too familiar experience when dealing with Xtra.
Hmmm, I see that Peter works in the same local market as Galen…
No further comment needed.
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