Comments on: FFS: 1&1 email’s borked again

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 10:19:09 +0000

That sounds horribly familiar.

By: Squander Two

Squander Two — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 23:28:10 +0000

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.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 21:04:30 +0000

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*.

By: Gary

Gary — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 19:52:44 +0000

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.

By: Gary

Gary — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 19:50:06 +0000

POP seems okay, but of course if I’m missing emails I don’t know about them.

By: Squander Two

Squander Two — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 16:59:23 +0000

“the retrieval of e-mails via POP, IMAP or WebMail is now running smoothly again” it says. No, it bloody isn’t. Grr.

By: Armin

Armin — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 13:49:21 +0000

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…

By: Gary

Gary — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 10:56:25 +0000

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.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:56:52 +0000

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!

By: Gary

Gary — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 14:45:15 +0000

BTW the random image anti-spambot thing isnt so random.

Fingers crossed, it seems to work anyway :)

By: Gary

Gary — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 14:44:17 +0000

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).

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 14:42:53 +0000

“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.