WebMail is still broke...

[ChrisH]

I've been trying for 2 days to get connected, on two occaisions (out
of countless tries) it's connected and shown me my emails, but then
clicking on one drops me straight back to the login screen whilst
saying my session has expired! This is very frustrating, not helped
by your logo 'Always Totally Connected'. Pah! I suggest you take the
damn thing offline until it's fixed - that way I won't be tempted to
waste hours trying to use it.

ChrisH

[Paul Bristow]

Post by ChrisH
I've been trying for 2 days to get connected, on two occaisions (out
of countless tries) it's connected and shown me my emails, but then
clicking on one drops me straight back to the login screen whilst
saying my session has expired! This is very frustrating, not helped
by your logo 'Always Totally Connected'. Pah! I suggest you take the
damn thing offline until it's fixed - that way I won't be tempted to
waste hours trying to use it.
ChrisH

Seconded.

I only use the WebMail service when I can't get into
mail.easynet.co.uk from Eudora/MailWasher - Which for the past two
weeks, has been almost every time I try! Success rate via the Web is
slightly higher, but of course that's not how I want to be managing my
email!

Come one Easynet, wake up and tell us what's happening here! Are you
aware of the problem and trying to fix it, or convinced there is no
problem, or just too bloody lazy to check? The evidence (lack of) in
this newsgroup strongly suggests the third option...


Paul B. =:o{

[Iain Collins]

Hi Chris,

Post by ChrisH
I've been trying for 2 days to get connected, on two occaisions (out
of countless tries) it's connected and shown me my emails, but then
clicking on one drops me straight back to the login screen whilst
saying my session has expired! This is very frustrating, not helped
by your logo 'Always Totally Connected'. Pah! I suggest you take the
damn thing offline until it's fixed - that way I won't be tempted to
waste hours trying to use it.
ChrisH

I'm sorry to here about the problems you've been having with the webmail
service.

Over the weekend we've been having some problems with an auxiliary
service that webmail interfaces with (and is necessary for the 'mail'
aspect of the Easynet Message Centre to function). This was caused by
two separate backend hardware failures at the weekend which were covered
by redundancy, but never the less led to a slowdown of the service while
the equipment issues are resolved.

The problem has been particularly noticeable during our peak periods and
has been - unfortunately, though understandably - exacerbated by users
repeatedly trying to login/retrieve messages (e.g. double clicking)
which has driving the load up higher than usual.

Some of the future changes I talked about on a previous post here (on
02/10/2003) will significantly minimise the impact of this type of
outage in the future (by even further spreading the load on the back end
services), but this work is quite complicated and drawn out due the
level of data we have to manage and as a result it is still on going.

But that's the future, as for now:

I said we'd be doing work in the coming weeks (on 02/10/2003) and I'm
happy to say we've come through on this. Yesterday, we made some
significant changes to the webmail service (which changes how sessions
are handled) and this seems to have made a very noticeable improvement
in the quality of service.

While this isn't the only new improvement we have planned for webmail,
we are very happy with the new software and are confident you'll notice
an improvement too - particularly when viewing messages and navigating
your mailbox (which should be quite a bit faster).

Your comments and feedback are welcome!

Best regards,