Spark email woes cause client pain

Spark customers are experiencing more pain this week after some email services were hit by an outage.

The email issue, which Spark said affected a small number of users, came days after the company’s broadband and mobile networks suffered a major outage.

One customer said yesterday she had been having problems with her Yahoo Xtra email address, which she had used for more than 20 years, since Wednesday morning.

At first, emails sent to her were bounced back, but later she found she could not send any either, a situation she said was unbelievable. ‘‘It’s such a pain.’’

Other customers have also posted on Spark’s Facebook page asking for updates to the outage, with some claiming it has affected their businesses.

Spark spokeswoman Michelle Baguley said Spark was working closely with Yahoo to fix the issue quickly.

She said the small number experiencing problems should try accessing their email through webmail rather than an email application such as Outlook.

Spark was also upgrading its email security, which meant a few customers could be experiencing problems when using an outdated third-party mail client.

This broadly meant anybody using Outlook email clients more than eight years old, such as Windows XP.

These were no longer supported by Microsoft and were at a far greater risk of security issues.

‘‘Obviously, we apologise to customers for the inconvenience they are experiencing,’’ Baguley said. ‘‘We’ll be updating our website with information as the situation changes.’’ –Fairfax NZ