More e-mail problems at BigPond - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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More e-mail problems at BigPond

By Patrick Gray, 0
December 11, 2003
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/More-e-mail-problems-at-BigPond/0,139023166,120281840,00.htm

A problem that caused Telstra BigPond mail servers to randomly bounce incoming messages has been fixed, the company claimed today.

The latest technical glitch, which affected in-bound e-mail from non-BigPond mail servers, will no doubt cause headaches for the telco, which is still battling to boost its image as a reliable ISP following a meltdown in its e-mail services in October. That problem saw BigPond subscribers facing delays of several days in sending and receiving e-mail.

Mackay based ISP Easy Internet Services said a "couple of hundred" messages a day -- sent from its subscribers to BigPond -- have been randomly rejected by the BigPond mail servers over the last two to three days. Easy Internet Services managing director, Deon Attard, told ZDNet Australia some of his users have been unable to send to BigPond subscribers for days.

"When we send mail to either a BigPond customer or a domain that BigPond hosts... some of them are returning a 501 'sender domain must resolve error'," he said. "We haven't been able to send mail to some accounts for days."

Theorising the problem may lie in a configuration issue with some of the company's mail servers, Attard believes one or more of the servers have been improperly configured, which would explain the seemingly random nature of the problem.

"I'm assuming it's some sort of configuration problem," he said. "If you keep trying it you'll eventually get one of their servers that's working properly."

BigPond managing director Justin Milne acknowledged the issue, and claimed it had been fixed. "There have been some reverse lookup issues with some e-mails. The problem is fixed," he told ZDNet Australia.

Milne claimed that even with this latest problem, BigPond mail servers were still achieving a "99.999 percent efficiency".