RM EasyMail Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

[elsiegee40]

"15.45 7 Mar 07 We have identified a number of possible routes towards recovering the service.

The power outage caused faults in both the hardware and stored data. With our partner suppliers, our first step was to recover the server hardware: we identified 8 disks which were faulty and have replaced them. We are currently making slower progress than hoped on recovering the email data.

We have a contingency plan in place in case we encounter unexpected issues. This work is being carried out by a separate team in parallel with the activity described above.

Incoming email is being queued for delivery once the service is available again.

We sincerely regret that the service is unlikely to be available tomorrow (Thursday) and advise that you plan accordingly. We understand that this is causing continued frustration and inconvenience for which we apologise."

"08.30 8 Mar 07

From the analysis we have done, we do not believe that the email service will be available for the remainder of this week.

We are continuing to work on this urgently and will make the service available as soon as we are confident in it's stability

Incoming email is being queued for delivery once the service is available again."

No eMail since Monday evening... and I'm totally p***ed off. Have just had to set up googlemail accounts for the secretary, bursar and head

[plexer]

Yup same story here and for anyone else who's school email is provided by RM Easymail.

If they are queing incoming mail then surely they could redirect it to other privders working accounts i.e google or something as an interim measure.

Trouble is if you just set up secondary accounts now you won't get email thats sitting there.

Ben

[saundersmatt]

Indeed, service not going to be resumed for the remainder of the week! Stupid, but hopefully this will be the stick we need to smack SMT into bringing mail internally.

Matt

[elsiegee40]

I've set up googlemail as it has pop ability. I've just added it to the Outlook for the relevant staff, so it won't be their default email after we get RM back, but at least they'll get everything that drops into that mailbox.

[plexer]

I've just spoken to our lea team to find out if RM can bounce new incoming mail and possibly queued mail to an alternative non easymail email account.

Waiting to hear.

Ben

[elsiegee40]

Hope they can plexer.

Let us know if you hear anything. I failed miserably on the phones yesterday. Couldn't even get the call answered.

[Heebeejeebee]

Power outage; no UPS racks(?); typical RM cockup.

Refund for lost time/emails/agro phone calls from staff who thinks it's our fault please.

HBJB

[CyberNerd]

just can't wait until RM get our BSF contract....

[elsiegee40]

I have a feeling there'll be a few less RM employees in the next couple of weeks. There ought to be!

[PiqueABoo]

Surely they could redirect it to other privders working accounts i.e google or something

That is a bit naive. RM claim to have 750,000 accounts on that system.

Refund for lost time/emails/agro phone calls from staff who thinks it's our fault please

Request denied ;b If you run a network you've definitely got the means to communicate with your users (easiest way for anyone with web filtering would have been to redirect the easymail URL to your own page saying "IT'S NOT OUR FAULT" etc. + a link to RMs status updates).

I have a feeling there'll be a few less RM employees

I wouldn't assume that. Ultimately it's a cautionary tale about putting all your eggs in one big basket. But that's a lot cheaper (serious money) than distributing them between two or three more manageable & recoverable baskets. It's inconceivable that the pros and cons of various arrangements weren't presented to the company gods.

[Sylv3r]

Im not 100% if its the fault of an RM engineer especially if its hosted in an external data centre.

[plexer]

PiqueABoo: 750,000 accounts not a lot really but I really only meant that they should be able to redirect email for the head@school and office@school as a minimum.

They implemented a bounce message yesterday to say that peoples mail boxes are unavailable.

It wasn't a case of no ups's etc... they added more equipment last weekend for their spam and av filtering enhancements which overloaded everything.

There is a statement from the RM CEO on their website. Didn't know RM was an american company and had moved to america.

The answer to my query was that no they couldn't redirect any email anyway.

Ben

[witch]

I'm also hit by this - a real pain as I am in the middle of sorting out licenses for new system (and old software without enough licenses for the new system) and various people will only communicate by email.
I can't imagine what has gone this wrong that it takes a week to fix!

[phil_thebeans]

I love RM easymail! it is often so slow that emails can take up to a couple of hours they (RM) are forever trying to improve it when the reality is that they did not consider the amount of users and the usage when originally providing it for our LEA.

This latest example of RM just goes to show how s**t a company they are they are only interested in the bottom line and sewing up all of education with their products. HURRAH for Easymail, HURRAH for KS3 online testing.

This latest outage (or should that be outrage) will allow me to convince SMT to go with running our own Exchange server and abandoning this highly unreliable service. It is interesting to note that our own LEA at county hall do not use RMEasymail, can't think why not.

[alexknight]

Hi

Looks like it is now fixed, I have just been able to log in.

Alex