-On Monday October 1 we identified a system fault that affected customer mailboxes with usernames A through to C, which meant some customers may have lost some content from their mailboxes," an Optus spokesperson told ZDNet Australia. -That fault has now been restored and all is well."
Optus reiterated that the system flaw, which it believes was live for -several hours", means that some emails may be irretrievable.
The service provider, allowing itself a buffer period of between late afternoon Sunday and 1pm Monday, is advising customers who were expecting emails during this timeframe to have them resent.
-We're recommending if people were expecting special mail to go to the sender and ask it to be resent," the spokesperson said.
With a headcount of around 420,000 subscribers to its dial-up service OptusNet, the spokesperson said she -couldn't estimate" how many emails had gone astray, but said that -several thousand" users would have been affected by the email loss.
The email loss, a first of its kind for Optus according to its spokesperson, follows hot on the heels of BigPond problems, which are still affecting customers with usernames starting with P and F.
Telstra also suffered a -partial failure" of a mail server a month ago, which affected BigPond customers with user names beginning with C and T, and also suffered two similar problems during the past week in which customers with user names beginning with P and F were also left stranded.
However, unlike Optus, the telco heavyweight did not completely lose user email, with customers simply experiencing a "delay" in receiving backlogged email, Telstra advised at the time.
Optus said it was -checking all systems to make ensure there were no other faults".
Dingo Blue, which uses the OptusNet network says it was not affected by the email destruction.
