Customers of all Telstra e-mail services - ADSL and Cable included - have been affected by the problem, while the telco battles to isolate the cause of the interruption and remedy the situation.
The problem struck at 8.30am this morning and was still impacting users at 4.30pm this afternoon.
A notice on Telstra's Service Status page said: -We are currently having problems with Big Pond Mail. This is affecting customers nationally. Customers will experience intermittent impact on clients sending mail with large attachments. Technicians are treating this issue as a priority and are working on the problem."
The glitch is affecting both business and home users of BigPond e-mail services.
Telstra technicians are having problems pinpointing the source of the problem due to the intermittent nature of the outage., according to a company spokesperson.
-It may be restricted to a small area and a small number of people, but we're not even sure of that," the spokesperson said. -We're still trying to determine the problem."
Straight text attachments should not be affected by the glitch, but larger graphics and other multimedia attachments will not be able to be sent, according to the spokesperson.
Will Helstra increase prices or reduce services and claim the customers are abusing the service by expecting delivery of what they contracted for?