Pipex upgrade causes email snafu

Customers cut off by settings change

Some Pipex customers have been without email access for several days due to an platform upgrade that meant their settings were wrong.

The Tiscali-owned ISP announced major work upgrade billing and account management on its website. The changes also include new spam protection and anti-virus for the email system.

Users have been reporting problems since Thursday last week. Pipex sent this statement:

The majority of customers have now been upgraded but as the Pipex platform was quite an old one, it has thrown up some anomalies and we have been working through these. One example being some extremely large mail boxes which are being pulled across manually as well as the transposition of some log in details.

The migration means that Pipex customers will benefit from improved delivery time and free high quality Ironport commercial anti virus and anti spam protection on all of their email accounts.

We did advise customers on our status page of work being carried out and we have been updating the information available to them.

It seems most of the trouble has been caused by a change to the format email addresses must be recorded in client and webmail settings. Pipex posted a fix here. It said yesterday it had restored webmail.

All the upgrade work is scheduled to be completed by 30 November. ®