It is a year after your original blog and now Hover aka NetIdentity still has problems with no known resolution. When I type messages sometimes the letters appear on the screen so s-l-o-w-l-y that I am already a sentence ahead before I can read what I have written. Wish my email address were not on 2 years worth of circulated business cards. Hard to believe that this company can be so unresponsive and still live. There should be a recovery group for crazed NetIdentity/Hover users. Jude

The good thing about it, is that there are a lot of email services to choose from. That's what competitions are for. Good luck!

Godaddy.com has announced some of the older promotional codes to expire.. I just looked on a couple of sites and discovered a new list of coupons to redeem these new promo codes throughout 2009 and into 2010 by cashing in the latest list of Godaddy.com codes.

Hot list of the latest non-expiring Godaddy.com codes:
ZINE7 - $7.49 .com domains (and renewals too)
ZINE5 - 10% off whatever
ZINE6 - $5 off orders over $30

The deals up close:
ZINE7 - $7.49 .com domains (and renewals too)
Type this Godaddy discount coupon for all your essential domain name needs. It works great for both new domains and domain renewals at Godaddy. Free private registration when you register at least five domains.

ZINE5 - 10% off anything
This Godaddy coupon code functions well for non .com items like domain transfers, .co.uk domains and anything else that the other promo codes don't cover.

ZINE6 - save $5 on any order of $30 or more.
This "catch-all" coupon is great for when your shopping cart order is between $30 - $50. It's a cool code to get a quick $5 savings.

Reply back to this message and let us know what kind of discount you received with these Godaddy promo codes. Let's get a Godaddy coupon code thread of savings rolling!

Thanks..If U want to create the Domain name U can Use the site http://www.tucktail.com/ For the Domain name Registration

My account is prepaid but I have received e-mails requesting for yearly subscription fees. I get no response from NetIdentityHosting's customer service when I told them that my account was prepaid through April 2013. Recently, I received an e-mail stating my account was suspended for non--payment.

I am interested in a class action lawsuit. Is this there interest in pursuing this?

A disgusted, long-term NetIdentity Customer.

Yes, many people have proposed this, but it's not happening.

How can we migrate to another service provider?
Soooo tired of the company.
Never reply to emails.
They know they have monopolistic advantage from emails so they don't give a 5hit about customers.
Legislation someone?
I am from UK so different legal system over here, I thought you Yanks sued everyone for anything so what are you waiting for? Someone please, please start a test case against this incompetent company. Mailbank, Netidentity or Twocows whoever; team USA sort it out!!!!

They are based in Canada, not in the US. Civil litigation is not something routinely done in Canada otherwise these clowns would be in BIG trouble.

It looks like Netidentity is getting ready for one of its infamous upgrades. Get yourselves ready for another long outage.

Yeah, looks like they've got it scheduled for March 9. Guess I better let everyone I know I might be on e-mail holiday for a while.

Just looked and found "Hover is a service of Tucows." Sounds like an internal reshuffle. Hopefully the service will improve.

Hey friends,
Check your spam filters. I just noticed Netidenty is being transferred over to hover.com -- does anyone know if this will allow us to use a REAL email hosting service with our customer@disgruntled.com emails?

I almost got excited until I clicked on a link to the hover webmail client. Yep, same busted mess that is Netidentity.

You gotta love an email provider that puts its own messages in its own spam filter.

I was once a Netidentity customer, but around the time Tucows took over the service in 2006 it never worked properly since.

Mad as Hell,
what about your lawsuit idea?
I'm in.

Yup, I've reluctantly used Netidentity for some years now. I once stored all my contact details on their (then rather basic) online contact database system. Then one day they corrupted the data when doing some server maintenance. They said they could recover it, but I sent support several emails asking them to do so to which they never even replied to! They are pretty useless.

Apparently everyone who works at Tucows has a 1 inch dick and can't even get that up. And Ross Rader's is half as long and twice as limp as the others. I recommend we club together and pay for a prostitute to go around there and cheer them up.

For at least the past two hours:
Netidentity POP e-mail access...down
Netidentity webmail access....down
Entire domaindirect.com domain...down
(system status news and tcket system is on that website)
Lovely.

After TuCows converted over the mail system, their spam filters on webmail were snagging a lot of valid e-mail. Since I rarely use webmail, I missed out on downloading a lot of my valid e-mails and had to periodically go in the website to rescue them. Even if I deleted the webamail spam filter, this behavior continued. I had to push them several times before they totally disabled spam filtering on my accounts. My local e-mail client is perfectly capable of filtering spam and does a more accurate job. Rescuing e-mails there is much easier as well.

It is not just about outages. A major problem is also the ridiculous webmail interface that looks like a high school project for Programming 101.

- If there is an error on the server side the current message should not be deleted. No excuse for that.

- Where is the button to set the "Important/High Priority" flag?

- The "Spam" button is a joke. It moves the mail to the Spam folder, where you must delete it, it then goes to the deleted folder, where you delete it again. This is NOT what the user wants. When the Spam button is clicked the message should be gone and that's that.

- When reading a mail there should be a "Move" button to store it in a folder. It is missing.

- Why the hell is everything so slow? Compared to FREE Hotmail or Yahoo webmail applications for instance.

- Why are we limited to only 20 Spam filters? This is way too little. My other FREE webmail account has 50.

And so on....

My POP access to e-mail seems to be working again. I received a backlog of e-mail, but have no way of knowing if I'm missing any from the outage period. I totally concur on the redundant hardware aspect. I've spent the past ten years working with trust systems for banks and we not only had robust backup systems, we tested the rollover scripts and equipment on a periodic basis. Extended outage time has a way of losing you clients if their business depends on it. E-mail is supposed to be NetIdentity's specialty. You would think they'd have a strategic business plan in place to prevent major problems and deal with them when they do come up. i just don't get the impression they have the resources or adequate concern to handle either.

It's now 9.26am EST and Netidentity claim that everything is fixed (see my cut and paste below). I don't know about other users, but I most certainly do NOT have access and a test email I sent myself has not shown up yet. I can at least access my webmail but the only emails in there are pre-meltdown. Where is all the new mail? I get over 150 emails a day so I know I have missing messages.

I use my email address for business and every time they mess up like this, it is highly inconvenient and makes me look bad with my clients. So, as much as I like having my name as my email address, I think I'm going to have to switch to a reliable (free) service such as Gmail.

However, being a long term user, having signed up with Mailbank in 1996 for a very reasonable $4.95 a year, I now have 13 years of contacts using my current email address, so moving to a new one is not at all an attractive option - and I guess TuCows know that so can screw around with their customers knowing that we will be unwilling to switch service.

Does it seem odd to anyone else that the outages always seem to be blamed on hardware failures rather than incompetent systems administrators? Very weird that at the precise time they are doing a software upgrade, patch or whatever the hell it is they are doing, it is then that there is a hardware failure? Hmmm, yeah..... It appears to me that Netidentity have no idea, or don't want to spend their lovely profits they re making from their hapless users on redundant hardware systems. This should be a complete no-brainer! Heck, I don't even pay for Google mail and I have NEVER had an issue with it.

Or what about this, let us users enter a failsafe backup email address that mail is rerouted to in the event of a failure? Guys, get a clue and provide systems adequate for the through-the-nose pricing you are charging.

Anyways, I seriously doubt they will bother their lazy asses doing anything different. They've got us trapped and they know it. Well, I for one have had more than enough and will spend the next 3 months before my renewal migrating away from them to Gmail. I would seriously advise anyone contemplating NetIdentity to NOT DO IT. It has now become an overpriced and underperforming service, a sad remnant of what was once the best deal on the web.

Here's the latest update - more lies of course but everything is okay since they 'apologize for the problems that this has had on your business' (sic). Sigh

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All Customers have access to their mailboxes and can send/receive mail.

Our entire mail system has been tested and verified. No mail or data was lost.

Mail that we've been queuing is now being delivered. With just under one million messages to deliver this process will take several more hours. Spam messages will be delivered to spam folders after the main queue has been cleared.

We will continue to diligently monitor until we are sure that the system is handling prime time load (as Europe wakes up).

Once again, we apologize for the problems that this has had on your business.

Updated Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 12:02 AM ET
2009-01-11 at 5:02 UTC - Other time zones

All customers have access to their mailboxes and can send/receive mail.

We have fully tested and restored the previously affected mailstores. No mail or data was lost.

Mail that we've been queuing is now being delivered. With just under one million messages to deliver this process will take several more hours. Spam messages will be delivered to spam folders after the main queue has been cleared.

While services have been fully restored, we will be leaving the status as degraded until all inbound mail has been delivered and we are sure that the system is handling prime time load (as Europe wakes up).

Our technical team will be conducting a thorough root cause analysis with our storage vendor Netapp. We will provide you with an incident summary by end of business day Monday.

Incompetent Tucows promised restored service at 11pm. It's 8am the next day and although I can get into my account, NONE of the emails from yesterday have arrived. So it has been down 24 hours and counting.

I sent a test email to myself around 8am yesterday, so it's not fixed until I receive that. I say we all short sell Tucows stock and send Ross Rader to the poorhouse.

@Fedup: What is your plan?

My blog gets incredible traffic every time they have a shutdown, so this would be a good place to start.

What do you suggest?

Come on people - its time to unite and demand that Tucows/NetIdentity/DomainDirect or whoever the **** these people are, provide some service.

This is ridiculous. Actually you can blame me for the outage because a couple of days ago I was thinking how great it was to get my email so promptly and not sit for days wondering where it had gotten to.
There are often outages which are a shorter duration and which we probably don't know about and the efficiency of the email lately really impressed me. Wow, I thought! After four years, this service is really working! To my consternation I found that I was so wrong!

Well it is past their deadline. Is anyone getting any email yet?

What is happening? After the last outage just a few short months ago, I received an email offering me some kind of extension. But this week I have received three renewal demands.

Now we have another outage! Its is almost 12 midnight EST and still no email!

Are other people renewing their subscriptions? I like my email address but could probably get it again through another source.

Net Identity was incompetent before it was taken over by Tucows.....

So much inconvenience....

"9:15PM - We are currently on track to be restored by 11:00 pm EST." says their support page.

Not so, it is still down. Not that we were expecting that you'd keep your promises. You have shown your incompetence in the past. This e-mail service is much too complicated for you.

It will soon be Day 3 of the outage.

Geez, what a surprise. NetIdentity is having another "massive" hardware failure and they are having a seance trying to figure out which monkey should go into the server room and tinker with it. E-mail hosting is supposed to be their specialty and here we are again with an extended period of no service. I've had two accounts with them for over 10 years and can tell you that everything went downhill when TuCows took over. Mailbank was much more reliable. I think the problem is that we have been dropped into a much bigger pond. Did you notice when the big August outage happened, they took the support forums offline permanently because there was an overwhelming amount of complaints on there as the problem went on and on? I am also irritated they broke off the domain hosting service off to Domain Direct where I now have two providers.

Gene,
Netidentity was extremely reliable.. until it was sold to Tucows. That's when the problems started.
Tucows = Incompetence with a capital "I".

Looks like one of the highly capable Tucows "technicians" accidentally unplugged the Atari 2600 email server while performing an "upgrade." Here is their spin, yet again showing their utter lack of knowledge of the need for REDUNDANT systems and BACKUPS.

Email Service Bulletin
Posted By: Ross Rader On: 10 Jan 2009 10:45 AM
Details At the completion of the mail maintenance window yesterday evening, hardware issue caused a failure in the mail system for some of our customers.

At the completion of the mail maintenance window yesterday evening, hardware issue caused a failure in the mail system for some of our customers. We are uncertain how many of our NetIdentity and Domain Direct customers have been affected by this failure, but we expect that it is most, if not all, of our customers.

The OpenSRS Email team is estimating that it will take approximately 16 hours to fully restore mail service for all customers and is projecting that this will complete around 10pm EST this evening.

Details are not fully available at this point, so we will report more later when we hear more from the engineering team, but at this point, it looks like one of the Network Appliance servers that houses the mail stores is suffering from some sort of a manufacturing defect (i.e. bad hardware) and will need to be swapped out and the data restored. The OpenSRS team is working closely with the team from Network Appliance to resolve this issue.

During this period, you may be unable to send or receive email and may experience "Service Unavailable" errors if you are using webmail. None of your inbound mail has been lost, we are queuing all inbound mail and it will be delivered to your mailbox when the mail service has been fixed.

Wow, i kinda agree.......19 hours and counting, yet i don;t see anything on their website about the outage. I wish netidentity were more reliable.

There you go, another outage.

Disgruntled Customer:
I also experinced this problem more than once. I opened a ticket a long time ago. Of course they did nothing. So now when I finish writing an email I always do <CTRL>C so that it their stupid application earses it I have a copy in the Windows clipboard.

Our only hope is that company from hell goes bankrupt (which it may) and that our domains are sold to a serious and reputable company.

SHAME ON YOU TUCOWS. SHAME ON YOU.

It's completely unbelieveable, but as long as they have my name, my business is held hostage with them. I hope everybody that works there commits suicide soon.

On Friday I noticed the netidentity service was starting to go buggy when it would ERASE any messages after hitting the send button with the message "Could not connect. Try again later." What kind of programmer writes a webmail client that deletes a message in the event of a server-side failure??

Let's hope the recession puts Tucows out of business and Ross Rader into a soup kitchen line where he belongs.

Interesting comment on this blog:
http://working-as-designed.blogspot.com/2008/12...

Where Ross Rader indicates a new service giving Netidenity customers control over their DNS by the end of January. Which if it materializes would mean we could point our Netidenity sub-domain to any one of the thousands of web and e-mail hosts out there.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=netidentity a voice is there who says he runs it .. taking complaints

January 10 2009
netidentity is down again!!! After all the problems in october 2008 I cannot tolerate this. They must be running it on tin cans and wire. Has anyone there there heard of making a backup system?

I just got my self a free Hotmail account. The interface is light years ahead of Tucows Netidentity.

Why do we pay to suffer? Because those a***holes have our domain names.

Tucows is still rated as "unsatisfactory" by the BBB. Less than 1% of the businesses have this rating.

Given Netidentity's inability to keep their servers up and their HORRIBLE customer support...I think it;s time to organize a class action suit!

This is my 'go-to' site whenever I need to know anything about Netidentity because they don't tell you whats going on. After all the other problems I've had with netidentity I find out today my emails are not sending. Anyone else having this problem? Why am I still with this dreadful service. I must be daft...

I left Netidentity months ago because of the type of service you describe. I had used them for many years, starting back when they were "Mailbank" and really liked my address. But when Tucows took over everything fell apart. I just googled "netidentity" this morning on a lark and found your site. My recommendation to anyone planning to cancel: start the process ASAP to cancel your service with Netidentity. It took me months (literally), as the link on their site did not work (big surprise) and (another big surprise) they did not answer any of my e-mails requesting that they cancel my account. (Too bad a customer has to have a blog before Ross will respond. Half their customers out? For four days? And he compares his service to gmail? Who does he think he is kidding?)

In my inbox this morning -- an e-mail from NetIdentity asking me to complete their "Please tell us how we're doing!" survey.

I told them. What do I like best about their service? The fact that I don't use them any more and am now with Gmail. Just SO MUCH BETTER.

Here's some positive feedback: Spam filtering appears to be working well, and the flow of mail has been pretty stable. So AFAIK, the service IS currently functioning as intended. Let's see for how long.

At Tucows, they have two cows; one is mad and the other is being slaughtered...

I've been using mailbank/netidentity/domain direct/ etc for many years - primarily because I wanted the ability to put up a homepage using my name. Things worked well for many years, but a couple of months ago they wiped out my page. I got it back eventually, but now a vanity google search doesn't even register a hit. I posted about it on getsatisfaction.com.

I am wondering about the legality of these guys owning the domain now. Back in the mailbank days this wasn't an issue. But these days, I am wondering if tucows are in fact cybersquatting. In my case,

I managed to grab the gavinterrill.name domain, so going forward I think I will use it and dump domaindirect/netidentity/tucows.

Today, problems again....no incoming mails for almost 4 hours...sending still possible...what a shit!!!!

I am in the same boat as everybody else by the looks of things. I have also been a client with first of all Mailbank and then Netidenity for over Ten years,but since these new owner have taken over,two cows!! I have also had nothing but problems,I am based in the UK and have been without email now for the last THREE DAYS which means nobody can conatct me and I missing emails. I feel very let down, I was going to give a present of domain names to my family,but not with this company.

Not very happy

Mike

I wish they could sell me the domain which is my surname. I'm sure I could do a better job running a server out of my house. Whatever. I was able to buy the domain of my surname with the .me high level domain at godaddy. So I can change from something like firstname@surname.com to firstname@surname.me. Now I can have control on the routing of my email.

Wow, I never used G-mail before, I'm really impressed.

I've used only my netidentity webmail for last 8-9 years.

Thanks for screwing up so hard:
Eliot Noss, Ross Rader, Ken Schafer, Rick Yazwinski... you are all incompetent, worthless scumbags. But thanks!

I would have never realized how superior g-mail is to your crap without this prolonged meltdown.

Yeah, Im starting to think this is part of the economic crisis. Tucows has just bankrupted, and they are pretending to fix this problem, but really they are selling their hardware.
I think there is no option but to change domains, especially for those of us who rely on it for business.

I am so worried that I'm not ever going to get my emails -- any chance that will happen? This whole thing is sickening. Have to bite the bullet and get a new email address after ten years. Fucking sucks.

There's just no excuse for this. Twice in what, 2 months? No update on what's going on right now whatsoever. The video stops just as he's describing the situation on Thursday. Here we are almost done with Friday and no news. Are they still re-indexing? Drinking for Thanksgiving? What?

This isn't a technical problem and it's not going to be fixed. No technical problem I have ever known has taken this long to fix even with hardware replacement. No real world service has ever been down this long without bakrupcy or insolvency. I say goodbye to the service, to Tucows and to Ross. And my out of office service will tell everybody why. The huge irony is they still have the sub-domain that allows me myfirstname@mysurname.com and that really hurts.

Email is still down. This is the fifth day now. I run my own business and I don't think I need to mention the consequences. It's time to move on.

My email started having problems last Sunday, and went downhill from there. Most of last week I got the "Service is Unavailable, please try again later" I'm almost out of patience and very sorry I signed up for two additional years last June. I'm tempted to call them and demand a refund and go elsewhere. But after 4 years of trouble free service, I have a huge number of contacts to get switched over. This too will be a pain. But right now I have very little confidence in Netidentity and Tucows. This is also the second major outage for me in six weeks. My business mail comes through this account and this has been more then painful for me.

Very clearly they don't have the technical knowledge to run an e-mail service. Nor are they willing to spend money on carrier-grade equipment and software.

What a bunch of clowns.

Grrr.! If only it was only 2 days. I haven't had my email for 5 days!

Fortunately it's my personal email address rather than my business one. Sadly, it is a subdomain that I have, so I can't switch if I want to keep the address.

But I agree with other posters. How can Netidentity charge so much and be so unreliable?

WHAT THE!! I've been able log on, but I haven't had any new email for two days since. Now I read my messages are stuck in the que. WHAT THE!!

I'm sent out a lot of resume's this week, and I don't know if anyone has replied or if I'm looking like a dope because I'm not responsive. THIS SUCKS!!

There is some guys video attached to their support post. What I'm hearing is they are using a free version of Linux, running NetApp as their SAN. What I don't hear is they don't have a fault tolerance plan and everything is done LIVE. How STUPID is that?? Are we stuck in the DOT-BOMB era of IT design. DUMB ASSES!

I wouldn't hire this "PRINCIPLE OF ENGINEERING" in my company. He'd kill everyone in the hospital. Those grey hairs of his hasn't helped his experience level.

The best way to "get back" is to simply move your individual service to another provider. Or if you are a provider you will need to make a decision to bring your customer email "in house" or find another reliable partner. This is not a "get back" mentality though. Tucows have left us absolutely no choice but to move on.

Everyone send boxes of dog crap to their offices.

Day 5 of the outage.

How to get back at these bastards?

My brother is deployed in Iraq and has been trying to get a hold of me via email since Tuesday. Thanks asswipes.

I have been a customer since MailBank days (1995) and have had NO issues until TuCows screwed everything up. Ross, I don't give a flying rats behind about you giving up your precious holiday. GET IT FIXED!!!! After having had so many outages, why the hell do you not have redundancy built in yet? Why am I having to pay for the service? Get a clue.

Let's make an exit plan for transitioning from these yahoos to a more stable email provider. Some questions for the group:
- how to export all these emails? should we do POP or IMAP from Gmail/Yahoo, for example? Are there other/better ways for this?
- how to export all the contacts? I currently use thunderbird for my email client.

Thanks

It s a shame....I use the "service" for my business...you may imagine the consequences... :-(

It's a bit like the credit crunch. Every day you think it can't get any worse, it must start getting back to normal, and then it just gets an order of magnitude worse. Who would have thought at the start of the (unannounced) outage that it would last more than a few minutes, not a few hours and certainly not a few days. And just like the credit crunch it just gets worse than our wildest imaginings - surely not a few weeks???

The dude who tried to explain their process of discovery and solutions basicly just told us they have no mirrored test system or back up procedures that enable smooth software updates/upgrades/or migrations. This is a fly-by-the-seat your pants company. Needless to say, if you have a business dependent on a reliable email service, NETIDENTITY is not a service you will want to depend on. In SHORT, this will happen AGAIN! On the maturity scale of technology management, this company is stuck in the infantile stage. I'm outta here. It only takes a few minutes to setup a new account elsewhere and I'm going to setup an autoresponse on my NETIDENTITY accounts to start using the new email. So Long. Maybe I'll look you up in 10 years and see how much you've matured, OR NOT.

We fortunately are an MXLogic partner and have all customer domains filter through their servers. They have a Message Continuity component that allows end users to send and receive email while it is being spooled through a web interface. We had all our customers using that temporarily and seeing that the service stated on the status page that it was running (morning of October 9th) we released all mail from spooling only to have it lost again for now as the service crapped out again around 6:30am EST. Things were fully on line from around 5:15am to 6:30am. I would never have released the email and would have let customers continue on with checking email that way. We even let customer know that email was now back on line. It makes us look foolish. We are all done with Tucows email and have been planning the transition to our own email servers located in our data center since the August fiasco. If we are going to have outages, I would rather be actively working on the issue that waiting for those shitheads to update a status page. What a Cluster F.

>http://blip.tv/file/1341576

For those who don't feel like watching the whole video I'll give you a summary:

"E-mail system are real complicated and costly. So, ahem, err, well, .. so we have outages".

Here's a video of one of the inept douchebags that tucows employs, trying to explain the situation:

http://blip.tv/file/1341576

Tucows needs to DIE. Hopefully a reputable company such as Google, Yahoo, even Microsoft will see the potential and buy out the NetIdentity operations... until then, they will not get one more cent from me!

I agree something needs to be done so that I can retain my name which is the only thing that has kept me with this company since Tucows took over.
The know they have many of us because of the name branding, so they are going to give us the worst service possible until they start losing money.
Seriously, what company can be this piss poor, and still be in business?

I've used this service since the mailbank days. I've also observed the dramatic decline in service since the Tucows acquisition.

I'm a technology professional that uses a "branded" email account through this service. These outages have been very costly and disruptive to my business.

I've not had email service since this latest outage began. Hopefully something will shake loose soon.

Ugh.

Update from Ross Rader:

Email Outage: Domain Direct & NetIdentity
Posted By: Ross Rader On: 09 Oct 2008 07:59 PM

DetailsEmail and Webmail service for most Domain Direct and Netidentity customers continues to be offline.

Hi everyone -

NetIdentity and Domain Direct email and webmail continues to be offline for the majority of our email customers. I cannot begin to apologize for the poor service that we have provided you with.

Tucows has mobilized the entire company to deal with the solving this crisis and we believe that we have isolated the root causes. Our engineering team is in the process of applying the requisite fixes, deploying additional hardware and reindexing mailboxes to optimize performance for when we are finally able to resume regular email service.

I cannot stress enough that all of your inbound email is being queued by our systems for delivery to your mailboxes when we are in a position to restore your access.

I have just cancelled my Thanksgiving weekend plans to ensure that my team has what they need to help our customers through this weekend. I have every expectation that service will be fully restored at some point over the next 24 hours, but I want to make sure that we are able to answer your questions over what would otherwise be a Canadian holiday weekend.

Some of you have asked about compensation for the hassles that we've caused you with this outage. We will be providing everyone with details of a service credit next week. All affected customers will be notified directly.

Again, I am deeply sorry about the inconvenience we caused you and the poor service we've provided. Once we have resolved this issue, we will be taking a cold hard look at what went wrong and how to prevent such a significant outage from ever happening again.

I would also like to thank those of you that have contacted us over the last few days for the patience and feedback. I realize how stressful this outage has been for many of our customers (I'm an email user as well), and I appreciate the restraint and fairness that you've shown to my customer service team.

We will continue to post updates here as this issue evolves. I sincerely look forward to posting a note saying "everything has been resolved" very soon.

Ross Rader
Director, Retail Services
Tucows Inc.

This is disgusting. I haven't been able to retrieve my email for days. I must be stupid to have renewed this so-called "service".

Have you consider using Google Apps?

http://www.google.com/a/

I am using it for all work and personal email accounts, it's great to use your own domain name with all the features of Gmail. The Standard Edition is free.

Like many others here, I've had my email address with Netidentity for almost a decade. I resent that due to their negligence, I have to give that up because they suck so incredibly much. I originally thought it was worth paying for to not have to change emails - now I've got tons of passwords linked to it from years of surfing that I'm trying to unravel. If I ran my business they way they do I would have been sued out of existence by now.

I've had my email address w/ Netidentity for nearly 9 years. I love my address & that is why I kept it; easy for people to remember & I thought it was one I could keep forever w/o going through the painstaking effort of changing to a new one. Like others above, this is the last straw. I am starting the process to switch to a new one, one that does not involve Tucows!

It is so pathetic that I now use GMAIL as an alternative,I will not use netidentity when my renewal comes up,indeed,when I CAN get netidentity I only recieve Spam!!

Not a good service

They are featured on ripoff.com !
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/031/RipOf...

The have also lost a dipsute under URDP - Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy
http://domains.adrforum.com/domains/decisions/1...

Ross caught lying!
http://www.openpr.com/news/11980/Netidentity-E-...

TUCWOS NOW RATED AS "UNSATISFACTORY" BY THE BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU:

http://mwco.bbb.org/WWWRoot/Report.aspx?site=16...

For those who know the BBB you are aware that a company has to be particularly mediocre before earning an "unsatisfactory" status.

According to their most recent update:

"

We thank you for your patience and understanding while we continue to experience difficulty with the Domain Direct and Net Identity mail service.

Due to the increased workload on the system most customers will now notice they do not have access to their mailbox. As each mailbox attempted to login and begin indexing, it was taking up resources on the server and due to the number of mailboxes currently attempting to index was causing a very high load which is stressing the system. Taking these accounts off-line will cause less stress on the system and will speed up index times to allow service to get back to normal more quickly.

Once again, thank you for bearing with us while we attempt to rectify the situation."

WTF???? Are they using hardware from 1985???? Worst Company Ever

ROSS RADER SUCKS DONKEY DICK

It's now October 9, two days after my complaint about no email service. Is there any more clear evidence that Tucows just doesn't care?

Please, anyone who's frustrated by this -- go to online stock sites and make sure people know that Tucows does not care about their customers. Post in comments on relevant websites and forums. Email tech reporters and get them to write about this. Make the stock hurt (AMEX:TSX).

By the way you can complain to the infamous Roos directly:
ross@tucows.com

Day 4 of this outage, no end in sight.

>So perhaps the only way of getting them to improve their performance is to petition ICANN to take away that monopoly..

That IS a VERY interesting thought.

So, so sad. Everytime I consider calling NetIdentity/Tucows to inquire about my service, I can't help but think about the poor soul that will be (not) answering my phone call. Doesn't that person just hate their job? I can't imagine receiving e-mails and calls complaining about service that I don't have ANY control over. I feel really bad for them, I do.
I've been a NetIdentity customer for years now (I think my dad paid for my first two years when I was 15 [I'm now 25]) and am officially changing my service to a more reliable, user-friendly, better looking, and FREE e-mail service such as G-Mail or Hotmail.
As I said before, I have some domain names that I think I might try converting to, but I need to do some more research before I do something like that.
My biggest frustration with this company is the fact that they have every asset they need to make a successful company work. They have invaluable equity (our names), a good business idea (custom e-mail names) and they are guaranteed to get $19.95/year (or is it $30 now?) from customers who appreciate that originality...AS LONG AS IT WORKS.
Let's talk about asset management: Instead of investing (and then divesting) cash/debt into useless or otherwise competition-heavy services (such as domain hosting/domain services) that don't generate any new business, why don't they fire half the people that are obviously not doing anything, liquidate those businesses and invest in the part of their company that actually has potential? This CEO (Can't Execute Originality?) needs to go.

I've been with net identity for the past 3 years, and this by far, has been my worse online experience! My email account fails regularly. I had much better service when I was with AOL (puke) Do what I'm doing, send letters of complaint to:

Elliott Noss, CEO and another to:
Ross Raider, Director
96 Mowat Avenue
Toronto, ON, Canada M6K3M1

After three days their "service' is still down . This is the worst user experience I ever had. This company HAS to be sued. NEVER NEVER send them a penny again!!!

After the August "issue" we made plans to host our own email for our clients and are almost there....now this issue. We are still having trouble this morning as it worked early (EST) and now some IMAP accounts are just hanging. We will still keep domain registration services are all done with email hosting for us and our customers. Also it must just be our domains but when they are restoring mailboxes on Cluster A our domains ironically always seem to come back at the very end of the window. Cluster A should be changed to Cluster F as in Cluster FUCK.

Thursday morning here in the UK, and I haven't had email all week. The error is slightly different this morning - it's gone from "service unavailable" to just getting stuck connecting, so maybe things are progressing(!).

I really sympathise with the other people posting here, but then I wonder, given the outage earlier this year which also caused me huge problems, how I was so stupid to stay with them? I hoped it was a one off, but this is now the third or fourth lost week in two years. Stunningly bad.

I am a realtor and been down from my email since Monday! It is now Wedensday 9 pm. I have contracts held up, virtual tours for new listings, communication with my clients down and probably have over 400 emails backed up- this outage is unacceptable and they OWN MY NAME! I will be taking this up with the federal trade commission! Net Identity is the WORST company in America today- unacceptable service and a monopoly owning our names. I believe owning my name and not allowing me to transfer to another provider is AntiFair Trade and I will be pursuing this.

I am a journalist living in Denmark, who originally joined Netidentity years ago at the recommendation of my newspaper. I use it for my business and is missing important mails for 3 days now. Also in the last weeks I received 80 % spam mails and the filters did not work at all. I can not believe that I have been paying each year for this mail. Doesn't anyone know how to get in contact with the company?

I would almost prefer that all e-mails be marked undeliverable during an outage like this. At least then, the sender would know that our e-mail is down. Right now, I'm in the dark and I could be burning bridges or missing important messages!

I personally am a former Tucows customer, so I am familiar with your struggle.

Unfortunately some of my friends and family are affected by this latest email outage ... ongoing for days ... and of course knocking on my door / email / phone what is up with DomainDirect.

I found the domaindirectnews blog deleted and the domain unavailable, which I think is really sad. Sure many of us used it as a jumping board to vent our frustrations, but many also provided invaluable feedback to Tucows. I at least had a sense that Ross was listening and trying his best to get the right wheels to turn in the right direction.

Sadly it was a little too late for me. Some of the new changes provide less info then we used to have (status page? no history on issues)

I know for a fact that with this outage Tucows is guaranteed to lose some more customers upon renewal time. Unfortunately they renewed multiple years before the ship started to take on water ...

I'm also a long time Netidentity customer (8 years in my case) and have to agree with the others that ever since Tucows took over the performance has been abysmal. I have a number of email accounts and Tucows is by far the most unreliable. Before Tucows took over, it was probably the most reliable.

I notice on Wikipedia that Tucows are boasting how they have reduced email costs from $3 million to $1 million. Sounds as if we're suffering the results of them cost cutting too far.

From experience with the previous outages, they don't really care about the fact that they disrupt their customers. And, despite all the good words we hear from Ross, nothing changes. It's the worst type of PR spin-doctoring.

In fact I found more useful information about the outage from Wikipedia (thanks to Stephen for the tip) than from Tucows.

From all of this, I can only assume that Tucows don't care about how bad their service is as they have monopoly over the domain names involved and customers can't "churn" to another provider without a change of email address.

So perhaps the only way of getting them to improve their performance is to petition ICANN to take away that monopoly and implement an "email portability" requirement like "mobile number portability" for mobile/cellular phones...

I just don't know what to do. I am so dependent upon being able to access my email for my business, and this is killing me AGAIN. Tucows is such a joke, and is so unprofessional it's shocking to hear they are a publicly traded company. Everyone there needs to be fired. I don't beleive their excuses, and I can't understand how this happens. I just want my email to work.

I've also had my account with Netidentity for 10 years. I just can't take it anymore. The sad part is, I'll probably still continue to pay Netidentity for my address even though I will change my primary e-mail to something more reliable. I feel so beat down after all of these outages.. I don't have much strength left to really be angry anymore.

This is the last straw for me - I've had my account for 10 years and it makes me sad to leave - but, I have had it. This is the 3rd day in a row I've been without email and last month I was out a few days too! (and the month before that!) I just renewed in August against my better judgement - I am such an idot. I hope I can get my money back - net identity is terrible.

The worst is that these guys had to go out and buy hardware. How ridiculous. Never heard of spares, Ross????

This is a f***ing disaster.

How can you be so incompetent??

This is day 3 without mail and you can't even tell when service will be restored.

Why don'y you have redundant servers?

I've been with NetIdentity for years and years... it's been great until the last year or so. ONCE AGAIN, I haven't been able to access my e-mail for TWO MOTHERFUCKING DAYS. What the hell am I paying for?? Netidentity can suck a horse cock, I'm switching e-mails as soon as I finish this message

Yes, here we are again and Yes it is unacceptable. All we can do is tell all our friends.

these guys are at it again. email problems for the last 2 days. not acceptable. i will switch to gmail or yahoo.

Well, well, netidentity lets us all down again. We all deserve a full refund for the lack of access we've had this year.

One of the August comments, above, is mine. Beyond pissed off, I said that I would dump Netidentity and move elsewhere. I did. My Netidentity account remains paid-up until February, however, so I have MS Outlook set to check my inbox. And of course, as we know, the service has gone down again, already for some several days. Outlook keeps throwing up "Enter Network Password" dialogs as it fights to get into NI.

I am delighted that I bit the bullet and left this sinking ship. Anybody who gave Tucows the benefit of the doubt back in August should now be thinking long and hard about why on earth they would depend on this outfit... Why they would pay them good money... I urge everyone to take your business ELSEWHERE.

Our only hope for decent service is that Two Cows go bankrupt and their mail service is bought back by a serious company.

Roos, you are so useless.

I too started with Mailbank back in the day. My usual email address, based on my name, I took on as an email for life. Mailbank gave me no qualms about that.

However, Tucows has me wondering how the hell I could organise a class action against them, how the hell I could persuade Microsoft or Google (or anyone that could run a hot bath) to buy Netidenty from Tucows.

If a minor local ISP can provide 99.999% uptime, what's going on with Netidentity suffering all these multi day outages?

Anyone want to start to organise something so we don't just keep sending them a bunch of individual compaints? I'm in Australia, so it would be a tough gig for me.

Thanks to Thomas Crampton for offering an outlet to fellow frustrated Netidentity since Ross shut down the Netidentity blog after the unhappy customer base understandably filled the comment section with negative responses.

I started with Mailbank about 10 years ago and had absolutely no problems with the service until Tucows decided to take a working product and port it to an absurdly unreliable platform with terrible code. This is now the SECOND multi-day outage.

The only consolation is that Tucow's stock (AMEX:TSX) is in the toilet. That makes me feel better. With the stock at 32 cents a share, it shouldn't take too much for all of us to chip in and buy enough shares to fire entire management team at Tucows.

Two Cows' incompetence has been immortalized in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucows#History_of_...

Agreed. Service stinks since "two cows". Does anyone have a good alternative?

@Ross - Service is down again. This week my company just started a new multi-million dollar contract and our email is down company wide. How can you disagree service doesn't suck?

Agree, agree, agree, the service stinks. Mail has been down on and off for 2 days now, and spam filtering is almost non-existent. But I'm stuck, they own the .com domain for my last name. I'd hate to give that up...

What is really annoying here is that I had ZERO problems when NetIdentity was an American company. After they sold to the infamous "Two Cows" the problems started.

This company is a joke.

You can also email the customer service manager erik@tucows.com or call him 416-535-0123 x 1265. By talking to him, you'll see he's about as helpful as Ross

This most recent NetIdentity outage is not an isolated incident, not a quirk of the 'Net, and not due to anything but the uncaring incompetence of Tucows. My own NetIdentity account worked just fine for a long time before the purchase by Tucows, after which the service went to Hell almost immediately, with frequent revisits like this one.
Check my blog, you'll see dozens of negative comments by other NetIdentity users.

@Mike - Some answers for your questions:

a) Since we took over, we've moved you to a 2gb mailbox (from a 100mb mailbox), added full IMAP to all POP accounts (formerly a $15 premium for POP users) and moved you to an entirely new email system with a whole range of new features. Not sure what you mean by "no significant improvements in functionality"

b) I'd love to get some specifics regarding where you feel we're falling short with our webmail. Please send me an email to ross@tucows.com and I'll be sure to get it into the proper hands. All customer feedback goes straight to the development team.

c) Responses to email queries happen within 24 hours. This hasn't been the case historically, but I made a promise to fix the core issues with our response times and I have.

d) I've been using NI IMAP email with the iPhone for over a year without issue. If you can send me specific details concerning the problem you are seeing, I will assign someone to work with you on it.

e) I keep a very close eye on renewal rates, blog chatter, Google mentions, etc. While we have had historical issues, largely related to an email migration issue over two years ago, customers are generally very happy with our service (renewal rates and new signups are generally very strong). I'm happy to work with you directly on the issues that are obviously creating problems for you.

@XR - We are in the process of relaunching our retail services, Domain Direct, NetIdentity and Its Your Domain. Many of the current customer feedback tools, such as our help desk software, blogs, etc. are being shutdown and new tools launched to replace them. I will be sending out more details on these developments to all customers over the coming weeks as the new changes come online. Our new helpdesk application (Zendesk) has great forums, and will also allow us to bring back direct email ticketing support (in addition to the web ticketing that we are using now).

@Paul - There is a complaint regarding a name being "taken away" that is circulating amongst a few forums. The actual story is that we lost the name in a legal dispute and were forced to give it to different owners.

@gehrig - I'm sorry you don't like our spam filtering tools. Most spam filters are not 100% accurate and in recognition of this, we give our customers the capability to review spam that we've "caught" on their behalf just in case something legitimate does get quarantined. Now that the filters have been place for a longer period of time - the accuracy is actually quite good and I've taken to reviewing my quarantine no more than once a month, when I remember.

@all - this will be my last comment on this post. If you have any other issues you'd like to take up with me, please send me an email directly or give me a call.

/r

I've had net identity for approx 7 years and loved it until two cows took over.
Then is was spam city. Their explanation if letting us have more control over our spam was specious.
I've gone on to gmail and am waayyyy
more satisfied. I don't have to wade through hundreds of spam emails in a separate spam folder to see if there is legitimate mail there.
Unfortuanately my sub to net identity is not up for another year. I use it now for giving out email when asked from Circuit city etc.

I also use my automatic vacation notice to inform people of my migration.

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

As of noon today (Friday), my email was working again. I don't think I've lost anything and, in any case, work was coming in to Gmail.

My mind IS made up, however. I'm not about to rely on Tucows until they drop me in it again. They can look after my secondary e-mail account until my subscription expires next February.

Speaking of netidentity, which I also have used for almost 10 years ... I can't seem to make my iPhone 3G connect to my netidentity imap account.
Is that just me?
(My other imap accounts works fine).

Best
Martin

That's really funny that Tucows management is answering customer complaints in this blog but not directly to customers? The power of the blogosphere.

I was once a Netidentity customer, but around the time Tucows took over the service in 2006 it never worked properly since.

The e-mail outages are not new, there is a dedicated blog about it over at http://tucowed.blogspot.com/ some of these are weeks not days!

Ross, is it true that you've been selling some of the name domains that you own, therefore denying other users of their address that they've had for years? If so that's despicable.

A suggested answer would be "We're updating our answer to that question and it should be back on line real soon now."

-Paul

I have been Netidentity customer for about 6 years. Until Tucows took over they provided a reliable, no-nonsense, decent service. 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. My solution, for what it's worth, is getting my own hosted domain name. It's not very expensive these days.

I've done a little googling in recent days and found any number of exasperated and infuriated customers complaining about this hopeless organization. I thought it was unlikely I was alone!

I'll share one specific incident here in the hope of shocking and amusing readers; One of the problems I've had has been that their online payment system simply wouldn't take my money when I tried to resubscribe around last Christmas time. This led to huge stress as I was barraged with automatic emails warning me of impending doom, yet with no means of remedying the situation. 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 - basically pay your bill and we will renew your account.

Here is one of the messages I sent at that time. Believe it or not, the response to this message took 4 months! Not surprisingly the response was useless.

"I can barely contain my frustration and exasperation with your service. I am seriously considering abandoning my account despite the huge inconvenience that entails.

Are you even reading my problem descriptions ?

I quote from your latest response;

"I will need you to update your credit information in the Control Panel so that I have something to charge with.
I will also need your password for authentication purposes."

What on Earth does this mean ? As I have told you already my "credit information" is not working on your site. It works on every other online payment site I have ever used. If I try to renew in the normal way I get "This card can not be authorized". If I try to update my "profile", then I get "Not an American Express card" !!??????????!!?????????!!

Which password do you need ? Surely not one of my Netidentity passwords? (I could complain about needing two passwords - one for the main site and another for this so called customer service center - but I already have enough to complain about). Why do you want me to send you any kind of password - in plain text presumably - surely this is incompatible with all normal security measures.

Please take the time to read my problem descriptions carefully. Please then take the time to send me a useful and relevant response that spells out exactly how you propose to fix my problem and tell me *exactly* what I need to do. If for some bizarre reason you need a password from me tell me exactly which password, and offer some convincing argument why this is necessary."

(Postscript - The story has a semi-happy ending since one of my endless payment retries worked - I went for just one more year not five thank goodness).

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? Every web hosting service that I use, for example, has a forum where people can share usage tips, and also can vent their spleen when there is a problem. (The company blog that used to be at info.domaindirect.com seems to have vanished.) How come Slashdot hasn't covered this outage like they covered the Gmail outage? If anybody here has a Slashdot account, you might submit the news.

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

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.

Granted, Webmail access was possible last (Wednesday) night (PST). But now, on Thursday morning, all I'm getting is "GATEWAY TIMEOUT" errors from Netidentity.com. Can't even get in to see the latest "update."

I'm sorry... while the domain name is kind-of cute to have, the fact is that nobody holds e-mail addresses in their memory. We all just click "Reply". I'm going to migrate over the weekend, send out all my "change of address" notices, and then forget about NetIdentity, Tucows, the lot...

Ross - thank you for your prompt reply. It's the first time I have EVER had a response from TuCows with three days.

I am impressed that you are proud that it only takes 7 minutes for you to answer the phone when huge numbers of people call to complain. Personally, I would be more impressed if either the complete multiple day outage didn't happen in the first place, or if you actually were able to resolve users problems.

But 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. While, at the same time, your competitors offer MUCH better functionality.

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. The latest being problems & incompatibilities between my 3G Iphone and Netidentity. (I can't use my Iphone to pick up Netidentity POP3 emails - it doesn't work).

e) I am not one lone voice wailing about poor service - a cursory Google search shows how many of your users loathe the service. The only reason people stay is because of their domain names. Be very clear - we will all be leaving soon.

You can get away with this for a while & you've taken our money. But rest assured, we will move our business today or tomorrow. Your attrition rate will soar, and the businesss will crumble.

I realise that your business is about creating critical mass so that you can sell the asset on, but don't leave it too long, or the customers you let down will desert you (remember Wang?).

There's a reason why I've spent so long recording the complaint - and it isn't because I've misunderstood how good your customer service is.

I agree 100%.

@davidjwbailey - Please re-read my comments. Mail service is in the process of being restored on a user by user basis. We have fixed the core issues and made accomodations that should allow to start using your email immediately.

@Mike - I'm not sure your assessment is all that fair. While this unfortunate incident is indeed a setback in terms of the reliability that we provide, our customer service levels are actually quite good - for instance, even with the extra call volume that came with this disaster, the average hold time yesterday was approximately 7 minutes, and all customers that are asking questions via our online support are getting answers within 24 hours. Further, your comments about making basic improvements aren't born out by the facts.

If you believe that you are going to get better service from Microsoft or Google, please feel free to try, but I am not even sure that any of them provide live customer service - and how many hours was GMail down on Monday?

If I can help with anything specificlaly, please let me know.

/ross

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.

Everyone should review their accounts and move to much more functional and reliable alternatives from the big mainstream suppliers.

Do NOT buy from subscribe to Netidentity from new - you will regret it.

I agree with you Mike, and what you've said, contrary to Rader's denial, IS borne out by the facts.

now nearly 4 days of outage and NO HOPE of it being repaired? "Probably by 4pm Saturday" is all they say now. Utterly unacceptable. 99.9999% up time is a BARE MINIMUM for simple services like email.

TUCOWS and Domain Direct should be begging customers to forgive them and handing out freebies like sweets to try to keep the inevitable haemorrhage of users.

Problem is HOW CAN WE FORCE THEM TO GIVE US BACK OUR NAMES after 9 years of use?

Ross,
Thanks for the update. I would like to say I now have access to my mail through webmail. I am excited about you last statement that you are changing the interface hopefully soon. An update as to what is being done to prevent this in the future would be great when those discussions are decided on.

Thanks,
Steve

sorry - my email address is ross@tucows.com. I thought it was linked to my comment.

@justin - This is an entirely different issue. As part of our efforts to focus on domain registration and email, we sold our hosting businesses off to Hostopia back in May. They are now running a new service called "IYD Hosting" - although they use our name, it has nothing else to do with us. If you send me your contact details offline, I might be able to get in touch with someone higher-up over their and see what I can do to get you some assistance. I can't help directly, but I will see what I can do for you.

/ross

Damn Netidentity for selling part of their business without even telling us, and more especially since the new owners seem just as incompetent as they are

At least NetIdentity can wash their hands of one problem... like Ross says, "It has nothing else to do with us"

@thomas thanks for the tweet

I was an ItsYourDomain customer, and last Wednesday without any warning my site and e-mail access went down. After 4+ hours on hold, I finally learned that they lost all of my data (thank god I had a somewhat recent backup) and basically had no clue if or when they would ever find any of it. They then billed me for another month (3 weeks early and at twice the price).

I've been promised return phone calls by supervisors/managers three times and haven't gotten a single one. We're already on a new server and will be with a new registrar ASAP.

I would suggest pobox.com for an alternative paid service. They provide email forwarding, along with additional services, including URL redirection. In particular, they have a highly effective spam filtering system that also provides daily email alerts regarding messages that are being held. Though this isn’t surprising given the founder of the company, Meng Wong, was behind SPF (Sender Policy Framework) a method of preventing spam.

Any further news on this issue? I released my debut album "Mister Rogers Swings!" the day before this happened. There was a steady stream of press inquiries flowing into my e-mailbox (holly@yarbrough.com) that forwards to my gmail account. This is a total disaster for me, and I can only hope that the e-mails will be waiting for me when the system finally comes online...

I, too, found this thread by Googling "Netidentity Outage" in the hope of finding SOMETHING about when I might expect to get my e-mail service back.

I work as a freelance translator, and therefore am totally dependent on my ISP and e-mail provider.

I've contacted all my clients (through Gmail) and explained the situation. Although I think I've reacted well and covered all my bases, there's no two ways about it -- I'm dumping NetIdentity and moving to another service. Probably Gmail.

Nothing is infallible, but this kind of outage is just intolerable!

The NetIdentity email service is run by OpenSRS. (A different part of Tucows) I only mention this because it means that I'm not exposed to all of the gory details outlining how this happened and specifically why the restore is taking so long.

From what I understand, the team needs to bring three file systems online - each file system holds the data for three groups of customers (customers are basically randomly assigned to these groups, so its a crapshoot which filesystem you end up on).

Anyways, in order to bring each filesystem back up, the filesystem needs to be reindexed (keep in mind that I'm basically repeating what I've heard in the lunchroom and I don't pretend to understand it all, so I might be getting some of this wrong). The reindexing process that would bring full service back for the first group was supposed to have completed earlier this afternoon. For some reason it is taking longer and is now expected to complete by roughly midnight tonight.

This means that 33% of the folks that are having problems should have full service restored sometime overnight. That leaves two other groups that need to be brought back online - we are discovering that each restoration will take approximately 24-36 hours (or more) and cannot happen in parallel. This means that some customers will not see full service restored until Friday or Saturday.

Not great news, I know.

To soften the blow, the engineering team has figured out a way to restore webmail services in advance of regular email (POP and IMAP) services. Historical mail archives will still not be accessible, but you will be able to send and receive email, and anything that is queued by our system for delivery to your mailbox will start to flow in (in other words, if there is a promising job offer waiting for you in our mail queue, login to your webmail tonight and it will show up as soon as the queue's start clearing overnight).

We've just updated help.domaindirect.com with this news (in slightly less gory detail).

Once full mail service is restored, we'll be sitting down to discuss what happened from a technical perspective and what will need to change to ensure this doesn't happen again (and how to get rid of these obscene restore times). I'll also be trying to figure out how to make it up in some way to all of you.

Finally, we're in the final stages of developing the next evolution of NetIdentity and Domain Direct. Our hideous interfaces are soon to become a thing of the past.

Thanks again for your candid feedback and patience.

/ross

Keywords from Ross Rader himself which say it all ...
"exposed
gory details
its a crapshoot
I don't pretend to understand it all
I might be getting some of this wrong
Not great news
obscene restore times
hideous interfaces"

I'm also a soon to be former Netidentity customer. 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 hope they read this. BTW, I may lose a promising career opportunity because of this. No lie. (Imagine what it looks like to a potential employer to have to explain that your email is down, and that's why you didn't get an important message.)

Sign me
Fed up!

I'm in the same boat as everyone above and like Steve, I'm concerned that the ETA on the fix has now been removed from the site.

I will say that I'm impressed that someone from the company found and posted to this blog - nice work there.

But really, the big question is what will NetIdentity do once service is restored to keep their customers? I'm quite sure I'm not the only one who will need some convincing to stick around after this.

@ross

Thank you for coming onto my blog (along with the hundred of others who found this through search).

The explanations from you help page are much improved (more explicit) and some of my email now appears to be arriving.

@regina

Yes!!! Fortunately I am not working something with a critical deadline today. It would have been a disaster. There must be people for whom this has been highly damaging and even dangerous.

Whether you stay with Netidentity or not, I recommend forwarding your emails to another service so that you have easy access to a backup provider should they go down.

Tom

Ross,
What exactly happened I noticed that an upgrade that was planned earlier that appears will allow for greater redundancy will now be done Aug 30th. If that was done on Aug 9th as earlier planned would that have prevented this outage? Email is data and some of consider it important data and as a customer I still don't have access as of this posting. Thanks for working on it but I see that a note posted yesterday stating ETA of 12noon today (the 13th) was pulled from your news site indicating thats it taking more time than anticipated. Although the problem is not detailed it does sound hardware related. Anyway I hope it is fixed soon and measures are being put in place to prevent it again in the future.

Thanks,
Steve

Im really worried about this outage, 48hr without incoming emails is really dangerous for my business.

Please let me now if all of you have a message "service is unavailable, please try again later"

I cant even acces to my old email!!!

Thomas -

Just a quick note - 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. This has to do with how your email data is stored and how the system re-indexes the mail data after a critical failure such as this.

I was one of the lucky ones - my NetIdentity mail came back online around 9pm last night - of course, this doesn't help anyone whose mail data hasn't been re-indexed yet.

As it stands, the issue is affecting less than half of our customers, and this number gets smaller with each passing hour. Hopefully your account will be brought back online quickly.

Regarding Cam's comments on Gmail's uptime, this simply isn't the case. For example, on Monday, GMail was offline for hours without much of an explanation from Google. A quick search for "gmail outage" will provide all the details. I don't want to slag anyone, but we're offering a much different service than Google. Right now, in the midst of a massive outage, we're still answering our customer service phone calls within minutes and all email/web inquiries are still being dealt with in less than 24 hours. Yes we charge for our services, but in exchange for this, we strive to provide the best possible service, even during outages like this. Hotmail/Google/Yahoo don't even have a phone number for you to call.

Anyways - I hope this shed some further light on things for everyone. We're continuing to post updates to http://help.domaindirect.com under the News tab. If there's additional information that you'd like to see there, please let us know.

/ross

Same problem here. What frustrates me is that Hotmail/Gmail/Yahoo are up 99.9%...and they're free. I'm switch my account as soon as it expires (mid-Sept) and am trying to figure out what service I'll be using (similar to Rick's concern). I own a few domains and am considering paying to get one hosted for cheap, just for POP access.

I feel your pain. Found your comment by googling "netidentity outage." Don't know what a good alternative would be; I don't want Google scanning my email to target advertising at me.

This stinks. I've never had any trouble that I noticed with Netidentity. Since the association with Tucows and Domaindirect, it's been bad. "We'll let you know later how long it will be until we fix this," gets old after a couple days.

Its down again today:

"At the completion of the mail maintenance window yesterday evening, hardware issue caused a failure in the mail system for some of our customers. We are uncertain how many of our NetIdentity and Domain Direct customers have been affected by this failure, but we expect that it is most, if not all, of our customers.

The OpenSRS Email team is estimating that it will take approximately 16 hours to fully restore mail service for all customers and is projecting that this will complete around 10pm EST this evening."