FFS: 1&1 email’s borked again
Big delays on the email front again. This is getting beyond a joke.
27 Responses to “FFS: 1&1 email’s borked again”
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Squander Two on January 18th, 2007
I am rather pissed off with them myself. My email now connects but comes up empty. Since I keep thousands of emails on my IMAP server, this is a Bad Thing.
I don’t think I’ll renew with them next time round.
Squander Two on January 18th, 2007
By the way, the anti-spam word just then was “grrr”. Are you sure they’re random?
tm on January 18th, 2007
Not really related, but on my browser at work (IE 6 on 2K) somehting has happened to make the ‘sidebar’ with the archives etc start display at the bottom of the page instead of at the side.
Stephen on January 18th, 2007
I fargin hates 1&1. Have had no problems with a mailserver from Fasthosts that I run for a client.
I forward mail from my domains onto my Gmail account, and a couple of weeks ago I noticed the forwarding was taking a long time. Days even. So I complained to the hosting company. They wrote back and said “you might want to look at your outgoing mail queue.”
1,256 spam emails, each bcc’d to about a hundred people, sitting there waiting for my poor server to plough through them. Turned out to be an injection attack on a PHP contact form on a client’s website.
If I ever catch those bastards…
Ronnie on January 18th, 2007
tm,
I’ll take a look at it; I still have a copy of IE6 somewhere. Cheers for the heads up.
Alex on January 18th, 2007
Seems like I’m not the only one having problems with their email. Recently, I’ve been getting a load of 500 internal server errors when I try and log in. Trying a few times usually works. I havent encountered any showstopper yet.
BTW Gary, nice redesign but the header breaks under my Opera 9.02/WinXP.
Gary on January 18th, 2007
Hi Alex. Thanks for the info on Opera…
Gary on January 18th, 2007
It’s still goosed. That’s what, four days now? What’s particularly frustrating about this is 1&1 targets business customers. If Hotmail’s down, it’s an inconvenience. If a business’s mail is down, it’s expensive. In my case it means missed deadlines, which has a knock-on effect, and it’s potentially cost me a lucrative contract too. Hurrah.
Ben on January 18th, 2007
1&1 are horrible, I’ve had the misfortune to deal with them recently when they deleted a formmail script from the server (an email was sent five days later to tell me). Problem? It was the script THEY recommend. I’ve also had debt-collection problems with two closed, cancelled, dead, finished accounts – but they just don’t let you go that easily.
I’d hop, skip and jump away from 1&1 tbh. I can never see 1&1 as a business-hosting provider, they are just a shambles from my past experience.
Gary on January 19th, 2007
With the exception of what seems to be annual email outages, I’ve nothing but praise for ‘em actually – I dumped WebFusion because, to me at least, they seemed incapable of keeping servers online for more than a few hours, whereas with 1&1 I’ve never had any site availability problems. They’re a lot cheaper than webfusion are (were?) too.
Stuart on January 19th, 2007
“I’ve nothing but praise for ‘em actually”
So you’d recommend them? ;-)
Gary on January 19th, 2007
Ach sure, the only email you get is hate mail ;-P
Stephen on January 19th, 2007
>If a business’s mail is down, it’s expensive. In my case it means missed deadlines, which has a knock-on effect, and it’s potentially cost me a lucrative contract too. Hurrah.
You could look into having your domains on a different registry from 1&1. That would mean that if this problem recurred, you could simply set up mail forwarding at the registry, to a Gmail account say, and cut out the hosting company till it gets its act together.
There’s also nothing to say you have to have your mail server and your web server with the same host. My client with the Fasthosts mail server has his website on my VPS with all my other sites: I simply edited the DNS records to point the MX at the Fasthosts IP.
Alex on January 19th, 2007
I agree with you on that one, Gary. Apart from the email playing up, they have been a great host so far. I’ve never encountered any downtime on my website, they have great customer support, and even re-sent me the £400 worth of software when I didn’t recieve it the first time round. Not that I use that much of it anyway.
Their control panel is also excellent, great UI. Some people hate them because their data centers are (apparently) in Germany.
BTW the random image anti-spambot thing isnt so random.
Carlton on January 19th, 2007
“500 errors” here too – its about a week since it started. I got a reply from them…
“Our mailservers are having technical problems causing performance issues
on our mailsystem. At the moment incoming mails are received on the
server but they are not delivered immediately to your mailbox . All
received mails are put on queue and will be delivered once the
mailserver is restored to its full functionality. Unfortunately we
currently do not have an estimated time frame for its resolution however
rest assured that our administrators are working as quickly as possible
on a resolution.
We apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for bearing with us.”
dated 17/01/07
*shakes fist*
Ben on January 19th, 2007
“You could look into having your domains on a different registry from 1&1. That would mean that if this problem recurred, you could simply set up mail forwarding at the registry, to a Gmail account say, and cut out the hosting company till it gets its act together.”
That’s exact how I work – I try to keep all my domains away from the hosting company.
Gary on January 19th, 2007
I need to do that – at the moment the only domain whose email is 1&1 is the kasino.co.uk one, which I’m planning to bin at some point anyway (too much spam).
Gary on January 19th, 2007
BTW the random image anti-spambot thing isnt so random.
Fingers crossed, it seems to work anyway :)
Alex on January 19th, 2007
Ahh… here we go:
http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/Contact;jsessionid=E054B3ABE75654D909C678D6C37B9986.TC32b
Strangely, they’ve put this notice on the ‘customer login’ page but no the actual ‘webmail login’ page!
Gary on January 20th, 2007
Why is it so difficult for ISPs and hosting firms to have an easy to find, accurate and up to date status page? It’d save stacks of time for everybody.
Armin on January 20th, 2007
Don’t worry, you’re not alone: Half of Germany was impacted by this, as they are one of the biggest hosters over there. They’re also having a PR disaster, as their customer communication in Germany was almost as bad as for you guys here in the UK.
A lot of people are complaining why all their communication seemed to go through heise.de (probably the best IT news website in Germany) but almost nothing was on their own website. It’s all over the blogs as well.
My sites are with 1und1.de, their German headquarters (I’m German, but live in the UK now). Looks like it’s all the same anyway and everything is hosted in the German data center ;-)
Even more annoying is that I used to be with Schlund.de, until they were merged with 1&1. Schlund had excellent customer communication, often their error pages were updated before you noticed that there was a problem. The good old days…
Squander Two on January 20th, 2007
“the retrieval of e-mails via POP, IMAP or WebMail is now running smoothly again” it says. No, it bloody isn’t. Grr.
Gary on January 20th, 2007
POP seems okay, but of course if I’m missing emails I don’t know about them.
Gary on January 20th, 2007
Hi Armin.
A lot of people are complaining why all their communication seemed to go through heise.de (probably the best IT news website in Germany) but almost nothing was on their own website.
That’s just daft. As the cliche goes, the mark of a company isn’t how it performs when everything’s groovy, but how it performs when things have gone tits-up (or words to that effect, heh). And 1&1 seem to have blown it with this. Had they stuck a big thing on the webmail page or control panel saying “hey, it’s goosed, here’s why, here’s what we’re doing, we’re really sorry” and updated it regularly I for one would have been less annoyed.
Ben on January 20th, 2007
But perhaps someone high above has decided that this would be “bad pr” for new customers, since current customers don’t matter as much as they have already paid, and may be stuck in a contract anyway?
I love the company that’s got an accurate status page – but that’s *rare*.
Squander Two on January 20th, 2007
I used to be with a hosting firm who had accurate up-to-date status pages, hosted on a different server so that they could still give updates when their servers went down. Unfortunately, they were monumentally shit in other ways.
Gary on January 22nd, 2007
That sounds horribly familiar.