Email migration Xtra painful

Spark says it isn’t experiencing unexpected issues with the migration of its Xtra email system from Yahoo to local technology provider SMX despite complaints.

Helena Watson, a small business owner who lives in Loburn near Rangiora, said she was unable to receive email for 11 days after supposedly being moved across to the new platform.

That was despite 12 call-backs from Spark and five ‘‘live chat’’ technical support sessions on the first day of the problems and multiple interactions each day thereafter, she said.

‘‘One person would ring and try resetting the password, and when that didn’t work another person would call and try the same thing, and it went on and on.’’

Matthew Lamb, director of Rangiora computer services company CML Technologies, said Watson was one of about a dozen customers it had who were facing issues with Xtra. The problems varied, Lamb said. ‘‘Some can’t log in at all. Some accounts are locked. Some of it is relating to Yahoo still and some to Xtra. Every case is different with each customer. There are other accounts that I’m sure are working perfectly fine.

‘‘The lack of support that Xtra is offering is just a little bit poor,’’ he said.

Spark chief executive Simon Moutter said in a newsletter to shareholders that migrating Xtra off Yahoo had been ‘‘challenging’’ but the switch was nearing completion at the end of March.

‘‘We know that some of our Xtra customers have had a trying time during this process ... we’re confident that the short-term pain and inconvenience will be well worth it,’’ he said.

Moutter, who earned about $3.7 million in pay and bonuses last year, said last month that he ‘‘cringed’’ on hearing that departing Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer was getting a US$33m payout – given the ‘‘years of hell’’ Yahoo had put Spark and its customers through.

Spark outsourced Xtra to a Yahoo joint venture in 2007.

Spark spokeswoman Ellie Cross said yesterday afternoon that Watson’s problem had been caused by an error in a ‘‘migration status’’ field between Yahoo and SMX.

‘‘One side said she had been migrated and the other said she hadn’t,’’ Cross said.

‘‘It is a pity it took the team a while to get to the bottom of this, as it was a relatively simple error to fix.

‘‘My understanding is that she should now be able to access her email within the new mail environment.’’

But Watson believed that was not the case and she had instead been transferred back to Yahoo.

‘‘We are back to square one. They are going to try and migrate us again. We are very nervous about it. We are scared we are going to have to go through the same thing again,’’ she said.

Cross said there had been ‘‘several issues affecting small groups of customers along the way’’ with the migration, ‘‘which is to be expected from a migration of this size and complexity’’.

The number of customers who had problems ‘‘escalated’’ to higher-level support teams because fixes couldn’t initially be found to their problems was ‘‘very low’’. ‘‘We are working through these cases.’’