It's not Australia Post, which saw no increase in mail volumes to suggest that business has returned to sending atoms instead of bits.
Nor did courier companies report substantial increase in business. UPS, for example, says that document delivery has long been in decline and that they saw no unusual spike in activity during the email outages. Bicycle couriers contacted by ZDNet Australia also reported no unusual activity during the alleged -spamstorm."
But one company which will shortly see a burst of new activity will be Telstra, as businesses reduced trust in e-mail sees them follow up their electronic messages with phone calls to ensure their safe delivery.
Take Lara Scott of Unhinged Productions, a one-person graphic design business. Scott is an OptusNet customer and experienced no disruption to her own e-mail.
But when she sent a BigPond-using supplier an email asking them to perform a task by -next Tuesday," the mail was delayed in transit for several days. The message eventually arrived the following Wednesday, a delay which made the whole job a week late.
While Scott's client tolerated the delay with good humour, she now places a phone call whenever she suspects an e-mail is moving slowly. -I'm making a lot more follow-up calls," she says. -I call my printer a lot because - I know they are on BigPond."
Garry McKinlay has a similar story to tell. An OzEmail subscriber and proprietor of advertising agency Word Force, McKinlay's first suspicion that something was amiss came when he received several mails six times. But when messages to his accountant started going astray as well, he reverted to using the phone.
-I don't trust e-mail as much now," he says. -I know that my accountant is usually efficient at responding to mail. Now, if I don't get a reply I get on the phone to make sure the mail has gone through."
Email outages have also seen Camtu Pham pick up the phone more often. Pham, general manager of Wollongong-based Web designer CleverLink no longer plans to receive e-mail and only uses it to send documents when absolutely necessary.
Decreased reliability also has Pham thinking that CleverLink may need to change the way it develops sites for its clients. -If email problems continue to occur we won't use as much e-mail on sites," she says. -We are looking at offering forms which can be completed online, then printed and faxed," a reliable method she feels may suit some clients.
Pham has also changed the way she works and tries to make sure that all the information she needs to work is imparted during meetings or phone conversations, a change that permits longer blocks of time dedicated to single tasks without the interruption of e-mail.
Larger companies, however, seem not to have been affected to the same degree and have not seen a need to implement policies that take into account any decline in e-mail reliability.
PKF, a group of chartered accountants and consulting firms with several hundred employees spread across every capital city, was frequently frustrated by the outages, according to partner Grant Saxon, especially when e-mails from clients were slow in arriving as this delayed work. But the company has not formally reviewed its work practises and assumes that e-mail will continue to meet its communications needs. -We're hoping this was a once-off glitch," Saxon says.
Law firms and consultancies contacted by ZDNet Australia all had the same attitude: frustration with e-mail delays had not translated into increased vigilance.
Australia Post, however, may offer an alternate route. A spokesperson proudly told ZDNet Australia that the company's use of multiple redundant systems and overlapping security tools meant it experienced no e-mail problems. This robust approach is characteristic of a company whose commitment to service is such that it delivers 96.5 percent of physical mail within stated deadlines.
Perhaps the Australia Post example will help other government-owned communications companies understand how to increase the reliability of their own services, a lesson that seems reasonable to learn given the bizarre route to profit the e-mail mess appears to have created.
