Grapevine on the fritz?

I have been getting this message (I have changed the IP address)

“550 Rejected message because 11.2.33.444 is in a black list at zen.spamhaus.org”

Is that consistent with the Grapevine claim, or is it an indication that there is more to the outage than Grapevine are admitting?

My simplistic guess is:

Big ISP takes over smaller ISP. Is only interested in the customer subscriptions and not the staff nor the infrastructure behind the smaller ISP. Sacks some of the smaller ISP staff and leaves those left to man the fort on their own so to speak. Fails to migrate customers of the smaller ISP into the infrastructure and processes of the larger ISP. Defeats economies of scale benefits whilst doing this. Smaller ISP hardware and resources are now considered lower priority by large ISP. Small ISP suffers as a result.

It’s disappointing that another Canberra local ISP and it’s customers have been victim of this too frequent occurrence.

This incompetence never ends! After closing his open cases without due process, Grapevine has now sent my hubby other Grapevine customers’ names and details.

Lazy I said :

I am surprised to see so many people still using ISP provided email addresses.

Simply swapping the frying pan for the fire.

There’s no excuse for Grapevine’s incredible incompetence in this matter (I’m not a customer), but no email or webmail provider is without problems, be they outages or, in the case of webmail, security issues which are unacceptable for those few of us who give a rat’s about such things.

The best solution is undoubtedly to host your own POP server using your own domain. Then, at least, you’d have no-one to blame but yourself for any problems.

I expect Grapevine to be sued out of existence over this.

As the Grapevine outage enters its sixth full day, the recorded message on the Grapevine support phone line says that “some grapevine customers may be experiencing issues with their email,” and that there is currently no estimated time of repair.

My normal email is still not working, and I am unable to access webmail.

Still no information on the Grapevine home page.

On “Network Status” you can read “Grapevine,” but there is no active link.

Fault notice 27057 says’ “UPDATE 23: 21/10/2013 @ 6.00am AEST: TransACT would like to advise that monitoring is still ongoing of Webmail and seems to be stable during our recovery process.

Currently there is 13,195 email boxes restored (37% in total) and we are actively working around the clock in restoring the rest.”

As of 8 am this morning, my Windows live mail isn’t working and now Grapevine webmail is not working properly. I don’t know about anyone else but I am going to ask for some sort of compensation like 3 months free access.

screaming banshee said :

Unfortunately those that host their own emails still need to use the outgoing mail server….fortunately we have two backup options, but still a pain in the SMTP

Not relevant. I was not talking about hosting my own email, I was talking about using a third party provider. My mail domain (keogh.net.au) is currently hosted at Google. My SMTP server is smtp.googlemail.com.

Unfortunately those that host their own emails still need to use the outgoing mail server….fortunately we have two backup options, but still a pain in the SMTP

Oh dear, you fell for Grapevine’s spiel about faster Internet and left Bigpond? Major fail. I fell for it when TransACT was still going and I noticed problems immediately. YouTube videos buffering, pics not displaying properly, not to mention outages for several days over Christmas/New Year. I phoned them up to cancel it despite breaking a bundling contract and having to pay a large fee. When Telstra came to reconnect Bigpond they told me that TransACT had completely trashed the old connection and they had to set up a whole new node and cable connection. It was worth it as I had my old reliable Net service back and there has never been any outages.

Lazy I said :

I am surprised to see so many people still using ISP provided email addresses.

Spot on. I wrote in another place yesterday “The time to move to an ISP-independent email provider is about 5-10 years ago.” I don’t care which one you pick… Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. Well actually there are some question marks around Yahoo, so I’d pick one of the other two. I haven’t used ISP-provided services other than raw connectivity for many years, so if one ISP is not performing I can painlessly and quickly move to another.

Grapevine email still on the blink. luckily I use gmail as my primary email address, but still … why it is taking so long to rectify …. baffling

I am surprised to see so many people still using ISP provided email addresses.

Rep has posted updates here.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=2169277

Even webmail is down again. I’ve tried contacting Grapevine numerous times and have not managed to get through on their helpline. It’s now 5 to 7 and I’ve been on the phone for 20 mins for the third time today trying to talk to a human being. The help desk closes at 7 and still no answer as to what is going on, how long it will take to fix things and why their customer service is so appalling

seems like the availability of webmail is patchy – I got headlines this morning but no content, but tonight I can’t even get in. this is ridiculous and yes I agree with Jaff and Derif – totally unprofessional for such a large internet organisation.

To add to the annoyance I have had to stop using outlook for my other email accounts due to log on pop ups every few seconds for my grapevine addresses. I could delete my grapevine account settings or find a way to stop this but why should I have to bother. I spent about 40 minutes on hold to iinet initially just trying to confirm that there was an outage and it wasn’t just me. Not happy. BTW it seems you should make sure you contact the grapevine number not iinet as they have no idea and have no recorded messages to inform you of the status, just make you wait on hold.

Web mail was back up again when I tried a few minutes ago.

Whilst I don’t use my grapevine email address as a primary one, I am rather concerned about the potential for lost emails. None of my previous emails are available in web mail, and outlook and my phone have both whilst trying to re-sync erased all previously locally cached information in their wisdom.

I don’t think I had anything really important that I hadn’t backed up at the time of the outage, but emails that I may never have had the chance to read disappearing is a concern. I still have the odd important email sent to my grapevine address as despite notifying people of my updated primary email address details, there are still people who click on an ancient email I sent them and just reply to and assume that I’ve got it if they don’t hear.

I have been with grapevine for a long time and never experienced any significant outage. I do not understand why it is taking them so long to fix this. Restoring customers email history my take some time but why does it take so long to get their servers back on line. One failed disk drive does not explain an outage of this length of time.

jaff067 said :

As per their network status page the new estimated time of restoration is now 25 October 2013. It was OK with webmail up and running with POP/IMAP access being down but now that webmail is kaput too it’s a joke. 10 days without email is way too long.

So I did read it right. They expect to have it restored by October 25; which is next Friday.
Ah, is this acceptable ? I seem to remember at work a decade ago that if the system was down for say a half a day or so, someone was hung out to dry. Here we are going to have 10 days ..?

taninaus said :

Yep, one of the disk drives had a major fatality

They only have one disk drive? What’s the deal – is Grapevine running out of some 12 year-old kid’s bedroom? You’d even expect *that* to have some kind of failover provision.

As per their network status page the new estimated time of restoration is now 25 October 2013. It was OK with webmail up and running with POP/IMAP access being down but now that webmail is kaput too it’s a joke. 10 days without email is way too long.

http://www.transact.com.au/en-ACT/support/status/FaultNotice-27057

On the main site scroll down to network status (very bottom of page on the black)

Then click though each of 30 odd tickets to find it. Aka you have to know its there.

Webmail is down again.

Mail died Tuesday was back up for a little bit and then went down. Webmail was back up with copies of mail but went down today. They blame an enclosure failure but don’t explain why mail was back up Tuesday afternoon for a little bit.

Seeing iinet own them probably best to complain to them on facebook

taninaus said :

Yep, one of the disk drives had a major fatality from what is on the website. …

I can’t find that information on http://www.grapevine.com.au.

Even if that is true, how long does it take to switch from one drive to another?

Well webmail was working but appears to have gone down again this morning.

I with Grapevine but it only has affected my email. Normal web stuff is ok!

Internet is working, but Grapevine emails have been out since Wed arvo. Not happy, Jan.

Email has been down since Tuesday. However, you can log onto their webmail page to access any new email.

Internet works fine for me.

Yep, one of the disk drives had a major fatality from what is on the website. emails can be viewed online at http://webmail.grapevine.com.au but only those since it went kaput. if you want anything before that you won’t get it at the moment. the promise is they are working to get them back but nothing yet.

I wouldn’t want to be a business either with this outage, it would be crippling and potentially result in loss of sales etc. If I was GV I would be offering everyone automatic compensation from this.

Like MERC600 I haven’t had Grapevine (i.e. Iinet) email service since Tuesday evening.
This is the longest unscheduled email outage that I can recall in 20 years of using the internet.
The Grapevine website provides precisely zero information about this email outage. which is about to enter its fourth day.
The good news is that webmail seems to be now working. It’s accessible from the right column of the grapevine.com.au web page.