Telecom says Xtra email alert ‘precautionary’

Telecom spokesman Ian Bonnar says it believes its Xtra email service returned to normal in the early hours of Friday morning but it has retained a warning on its website that email might be delayed, ‘‘as a precaution’’.

The company said on Wednesday ‘‘a good proportion’’ of its customers would have been affected by a fault that delayed the delivery of email but it could not be sure about the total percentage.

NBR quoted spokesman Richard Irvine as saying ‘‘a few customers’’ might still be experiencing intermittent problems on Friday afternoon.

The warning on Telecom’s website – which was still in place yesterday evening – said some Xtra customers might be experiencing intermittent delays to email due to a technical issue but all email would be delivered eventually.

However, Bonnar said Telecom was not seeing any queues of email building up and if customers experienced problems subsequent to Friday morning, it would not be related to ‘‘any systemic issue’’.

Telecom refused to disclose what caused the problem but has said it was not the same as a spam-related issue the week before last that held up email to and from thousands of corporate customers by up to a few days.

Bonnar said Telecom was not considering compensation.

Irvine said there had been no discussion of Telecom dumping partner Yahoo as its email service provider.