Provider botches e-mail migration
By Mauricio Freitas, in
Technology, posted: 26-Nov-2007 07:13
Let's say your ISP decided to migrate its rather large user base from their own e-mail servers to a third party provider.
And imagine that in the process people receive mixed instructions, conflicting results, and seemingly loss of e-mails happens?
Are we talking about the Telecom New Zealand's Yahoo!Xtra Bubble problems?
Nope. we are actually talking about the British ISP Sky migration of its one million users to Google Apps.
Users' e-mails were migrated to the Google Apps platform. No e-mails were actually reported lost, but instead of having the POP e-mail option automatically enabled on Google Mail (it is off by default), people had to manually do it. If you didn't then no e-mail for you.
Of course changing the e-mail provider meant changing some settings in the e-mail client. For example users now need to add @sky.com to their login, which they didn't need before, and other minor changes. All in a ten pages PDF!
If you think that ten pages of instructions is not enough, then check the e-mail users received announcing the migration (supposing you actually got the e-mail before the migration, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to receive any without knowing something has changed).
I know there are no reports of terrible things so far, such as the bad spam filtering experience Xtra users felt - when legitimate e-mails were never delivered, being trapped in the spam folders that users didn't even know existed. But I can only imagine how many of those one million users will have no access to their e-mails for days and week to come while trying to reach overloaded help desk people.
Other related posts:
Microsoft Ignite New Zealand, Microsoft Surface Studio
Geekzone data analytics with Power BI
Now with more fibre
And imagine that in the process people receive mixed instructions, conflicting results, and seemingly loss of e-mails happens?
Are we talking about the Telecom New Zealand's Yahoo!Xtra Bubble problems?
Nope. we are actually talking about the British ISP Sky migration of its one million users to Google Apps.
Users' e-mails were migrated to the Google Apps platform. No e-mails were actually reported lost, but instead of having the POP e-mail option automatically enabled on Google Mail (it is off by default), people had to manually do it. If you didn't then no e-mail for you.
Of course changing the e-mail provider meant changing some settings in the e-mail client. For example users now need to add @sky.com to their login, which they didn't need before, and other minor changes. All in a ten pages PDF!
If you think that ten pages of instructions is not enough, then check the e-mail users received announcing the migration (supposing you actually got the e-mail before the migration, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to receive any without knowing something has changed).
I know there are no reports of terrible things so far, such as the bad spam filtering experience Xtra users felt - when legitimate e-mails were never delivered, being trapped in the spam folders that users didn't even know existed. But I can only imagine how many of those one million users will have no access to their e-mails for days and week to come while trying to reach overloaded help desk people.
Other related posts:
Microsoft Ignite New Zealand, Microsoft Surface Studio
Geekzone data analytics with Power BI
Now with more fibre
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