Web host lunches clients' emails for a week

Hardware blamed for snafu

British web hosting company UK2.net is still trying to restore emails to customers almost a week after it first reported problems.

Currently its live support service is offline too, and customers are still waiting to get their messages back. Apart from losing incoming messages customers are also struggling to send messages out, although things should be improving.

Mail service was taken down for maintenance on Saturday 31 October and it's yet to fully return. On Tuesday UK2's customers lost POP mail, but could still access webmail. On Wednesday online support went down and the company began migrating to new mail servers.

By today, Friday, the web host said its systems were now receiving and sending emails normally. The service page reads:

Some questions our customers have been asking us:

Have you lost all my emails?

No, we have copies of all your old emails on our current storage network and we will be copying them to our new storage network today and tomorrow.

My email is very important to me can you restore them right now?

We are restoring email for all our customers as quickly as we can so we are unable to single out your emails to restore.

Martin Baker, managing director of UK2, told us: "We apologise to all customers hit by this, we're moving the emails across as quickly as we can and should be finished by Sunday evening."

Baker said the problem was caused by a storage array failure: "It was read/write failure so the data is safe."

The company's homepage includes a cosy picture of an autumnal forest scene along with the unfortunate strap line: "Fall for our offers!" - which presumably quite a few customers are wishing they'd never done. ®