back to article Guess who's suffering an email outage. Go on, it's as easy as 123-Reg

Another month, another problem with comedy outfit 123-Reg whose long-suffering customers are this time suffering from an email outage. The biz informed customers this morning that they may not be able to access mail. A spokesman said: "Due to problems with network connectivity this morning we are currently experiencing issues …

  1. Version 1.0 Silver badge
    Coat

    It's POETS day

    Sweet, I'm off home then.

    (Piss Off Early Tomorrow's Saturday)

  2. MJI Silver badge

    So that's why.

    No emails today

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So that's why.

      Just wondering, how much crappy service are you willing to tolerate before you switch away?

      1. MJI Silver badge

        Re: So that's why.

        Because it is more reliable and less leaky than BT emails

        Because it is free with my hosting

        Because I rarely get issues with it

        Google ad fling

        Yahoo leak

        Hotmail RIP

        I have my domain name as my email domain.

  3. Marc 13

    For once, it may not be their issue... (well, their issue may be a single carrier of failure)

    We had issues with Virgin yesterday - apparently an issue with a router in Poplar that ment we couldnt get to a lot of Amazon based sites.

    Then today, Virtual1 /V1 had issues with a fiber break connecting them to a TalkTalk backbone - it took out our MPLS.

    Its entirely possible 123 use one of both of these carriers/services.

    M

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      If 123-Reg don't have AT LEAST two providers for network connectivity, they aren't fulfilling their obligations - even basic DNS nameservers need two IPs from two ranges/providers, and that's a MINIMUM.

      For internal services, etc. I'd expect even more for such a company.

      And if one was down one day and another today, that's entirely irrelevant as they should always have one working, even with the BARE MINIMUM. And I don't see thousands of calls from all the other businesses nearby, so they are obviously doing something to cope, more than 123-Reg are.

      To be honest, at their scale, there's really no excuse.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I've seen worse. I know someone who works at an IT company that , amongst other things, provides backup services. They recently lost all their own financial data due to hard drive failure.

        Not even data recovery specialists could help!

  4. Jim Willsher

    There's your problem

    "Another reported: "My business email uses an 123-reg mailbox,"

    Stop right there, no need to finish that sentence. There's your problem.

    1. Davegoody

      Re: There's your problem

      Every time I see this stuff on here about 123-reg I shudder (and comment again). I moved from them a few disasters ago, They are just appalling, and when 123-reg read my comment on here, they kindly offered me a chunk of free web / email hosting.

      WHY ? Why would ANYBODY in their right-mind sign up for what will inevitably end-up with EXTENDED misery. How these people are still in business at all is totally beyond me.

      To be fair though, they DID refund the remainder of my contracted fees.

      This is a professional outfit supposedly, but I am staggered that they are still in business.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: There's your problem

        They like all such 'big' companies work on the fact a lot of the customers have no clue, that their other customers can't be bothered, that some customer will just shrug their shoulders and they replace any customers they lose from things like this with more new ones from their huge advertising. They don't care. When they had a 2 day dns outage a few years back which is when I ditched them their response was that it was a free service and as such there was no sla. Sadly people go for the cheapest price and don't do a quick internet search before purchasing.

  5. EyePeaSea
    Alert

    Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

    A friend recently setup a new domain+website. She has the Domain via GoDaddy and the website hosted on Wix. She was faced with the dilema - have email via Wix or GoDaddy.

    Slight puzzled look on my face when she asked me. Why not just GMail? The costs for a basic *Google business account are very similiar to the email costs for Wix / GoDaddy and the level of service you can expect is so much higher with GMail. Ok - they aren't perfect, but I can't think of many outages I've noticed over the last 10 years.

    Why would *anyone* use email services from a cheap hosting provider??

    * I'm not connected with Google and am not a Google Shareholder. However, I will happily take any monetary offers they may give me for this gushingly positive forum post.

    1. MJI Silver badge

      Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

      Because nothing looks naffer than a longnamewithnumbers@gmail.com

      1. Adam JC

        Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

        You.. you do realise, you can point your MX records at Gmail/Google Apps for your own domain, right...?

      2. EyePeaSea

        Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

        But...

        <any-name-you-want>@<your-domain-name> looks fine. Which is what you get with a paid GMail account. Or have you time travelled from the 1990's ?

        1. Bronek Kozicki

          Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

          You also get it from FastMail and other competing email-hosting businesses. Some are better and some are worse, but competition is healthy and for that reason I would suggest to refrain from giving even more business to Google.

          1. EyePeaSea

            Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

            You're agreeing with me - the point to my post was why use one of those stack-em-high-sell-em-cheap providers, and I gave GMail as one option, not the only option.

            I don't think Google are altruistic at all - I'm just happy with the service I get from them and am willing to get that at the 'cost' of them pilfering through my emails to send ads my way (and whatever else they do).

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

              "willing to get that at the 'cost' of them pilfering through my emails to send ads my way (and whatever else they do)."

              personal profiling is about a lot more than advertising

            2. Milton

              Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

              "I don't think Google are altruistic at all - I'm just happy with the service I get from them and am willing to get that at the 'cost' of them pilfering through my emails to send ads my way (and whatever else they do)"

              If the post office offered to send your letters free, provided they could read them, and make copies of them, and use whatever they read for any purposes, including building up a profile of you and your correspondents, so that with every delivery you also got a mass of advertising stuff you didn't ask for, supposedly tailored to your interests (but almost always, hilariously wrong and out of date) ...

              ... you would tolerate that?

              I'm beginning to realise there are a lot of people, presumably younger folks, who do not value their privacy at all. You absolutely amaze me. I wonder what rights you'd give away next, just to get free stuff?

      3. Lee D Silver badge

        Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

        Don't even need a fancy Google / business setup.

        Surely every domain provider has email forwarding to the address of your choice, no?

        Just get ANYTHING and point your domain to send all email to that.

        ISP goes off, GMail goes down? Just change the forwarding to your personal account or whatever.

        I own about 20 domains and all emails to them all come into two inboxes - a webmail provider and a personal IMAP server. And I can be sales@mydomain.com or technical@mydomain.com and nobody knows where it actually ends up. Hell, I can even reply from the official SMTP server for that domain host and get it so that it comes FROM those addresses to.

        @provider.com addresses are cheap and amateur, yes, especially if your website is www.company.com and your email fred@freeemailprovider.com. But fixing that is a two-second job from your domain hosts control panel and basically costs nothing.

      4. hplasm
        Facepalm

        Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

        "Because nothing looks naffer than a longnamewithnumbers@gmail.com"

        longnamewithnumbers@hotmail says different.

        1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

          Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

          longnamewithnumbers@hotmail says different.

          But not as different as a longsetofnumbers@aol.com email address :)

        2. Triggerfish

          Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

          longnamewithnumbers@hotmail says different.

          Mines just my name I've been running it that long, strangely pleased about that.

          As for the rest, bet a lot of small business end up on Go Daddy, 123 reg to get a company email. Half these places wont have proper IT support, they won't know better.

        3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

          "longnamewithnumbers@hotmail says different."

          In my case it says spam bin.

      5. EyePeaSea

        Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

        "Because nothing looks naffer than a longnamewithnumbers@gmail.com"

        Puzzled that post got 12 thumbs-up. Are there really that many IT professionals who don't know that you can use your own Domain Name with email providers such as Microsoft and Google?

        <shudder>

      6. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Mystic Megabyte

      Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

      Searching Gmail for two ancient invoices I just entered the cash total in the search box. From 1.5 GB of emails they were found almost instantly. OK I know that Google and the NSA can snoop but there is nothing in there of critical importance.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

        "Searching Gmail for two ancient invoices I just entered the cash total in the search box. From 1.5 GB of emails they were found almost instantly."

        If I want to search old emails I search them locally. It might not be as fast as Google but the emails are right here on my own box. That includes emails from previous providers. I can't see any reason to keep them remotely: it's my mail, not Google's or anyone else's.

    3. Lusty

      Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

      "Why would *anyone* use email services from a cheap hosting provider??"

      Another perspective, why would *Anyone* let Google near sensitive business information? Personally I'd rather suffer outages with a poor provider than give Google any of my or my companies data. Different requirements for different people I suppose.

      Google have pretty poor uptime out of the major public cloud providers over the last year too by the way. The Reg has had many stories of their patching nightmares!

    4. Tom 38

      Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

      Compared to what you get from 123/GoDaddy, Gmail is pretty decent. Having to use it for a reasonable sized company is just painful though. Google are impossible to deal with; it is part of their SLA that if you can find someone to converse with*, that person seemingly had email explained to them that morning and it hasn't quite sunk in.

      Next up is their account management tools, or rather, they should be but they aren't there. Salesdroid calls up because they've left their Out of Office auto responder on, and want you to turn it off? Either it waits for the droid to get to a desktop computer or they tell your their password over the phone...

      Like most of google's stuff, they get it to a point where they can sell it or put ads on it, and then it is "good enough". Contrast with AWS (I know, not exactly like for like), every aspect of their APIs and UIs is polished.

      * Via email, obviously. No phoning people up to ask why Joe from accounts' mailbox has been unavailable for 4 days without any status reports or service failure reports.

  6. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

    "According to Companies House, 123-Reg made £47m for the full year ending 2015 and profit before tax of £13.8m."

    I'm sorry , what? which is it 47m or 13m? probably neither given the "before tax" element.

    Its as clear as the snapchat article.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You know the difference between revenue and profits, right...? Them pesky costs thingies...

      1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge
        Headmaster

        yeah i do , I just dont like people calling Turnover ( aka revenue) profit.

        If you buy a 5 million pound house , and sell it for 4m , you've got huge revenue and turnover - but its not much of a business.

    2. Lee D Silver badge

      The important word is profit.

      The first big number is probably INCOME.

      The second, profit after tax.

      Very different numbers.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "The second, profit after tax"

        It states "profit before tax" so it is not likely to actually be "after tax".

  7. wolfetone Silver badge
    Coat

    In light of current events, and various MP's talking shite, the official cause of this outage and all the other ones will be "The Russians did it".

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not just email

    I have a few domains registered with 123-Reg for historical reasons, set to redirect email and web traffic elsewhere.

    Trying to visit any of those websites just returns "The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred", so I'm guessing DNS rather than SMTP issue

  9. Kraggy

    It's Also The Control Panel

    Their whole site is affected, it's nigh on impossible to get to the Control Panel, many times I'm getting "Server responded with empty page" type messages and once logged in it's hit and miss as to whether you can actually do any management on your domains.

  10. Bucky 2
    Coat

    What's going on with his hair?

    I think somebody just turned his email off until he gets himself to a barber. There are limits to human decency.

    1. Pliny the Whiner

      Re: What's going on with his hair?

      Well, it's a towering bouffant, probably with a little bird cage in the tippy-top (complete with live finches). And since he's a male, it's a butch bouffant.

      Why do you ask?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    customer service FAIL

    "The biz informed customers this morning that they may not be able to access mail."

    They didn't bloody well inform me! Oh, wait - whats the bet they EMAILED me ...

    /facepalm

  12. Rainer

    Is it so difficult?

    OK, we have people who mostly know what they are doing - but here's a way for simple, fast, reliable email:

    - either get physical boxes like HP DL380 Gen8+

    - or run the whole shebang on VMWare

    - get a LB that does transparent proxying

    - do a multi-server install of Zimbra, with multiple LDAP-servers, multiple frontend-servers, multiple mailbox-servers, preferably the Network Edition with Active Sync etc.pp.

    - any issues you encounter, the support usually resolves after a few tries and escalations

    et voila, you've got stable email with almost no trouble.

    Upgrades are a bit tricky and you've got to test them very well (VMWare comes in handy here).

    But it would take a lot of money and time to recreate yourself what you get with Zimbra.

    For a software that has changed ownership as often as Zimbra, it's remarkably stable.

    1. fruitoftheloon
      FAIL

      @Rainer: Re: Is it so difficult?

      Rainer,

      YES!

      Would you be so kind as to explain:

      - what is a HP DL380 Gen8+

      - VMWare

      - An LB that does transparent proxying

      - Zimbra

      - Multiple LDAP

      - Activy Sync

      To someone who runs a small business and has zero members in their IT team.

      I agree 123 are shite, I use Zen, always pleased with them so far.

      Cheers,

      Jay

      1. Rainer

        Re: @Rainer: Is it so difficult?

        We're not a small business.

        We're an MSP. We run 20k accounts on it (which is small, actually - but the architecture is made to scale well and recent improvements have only added to that).

        I was asking (myself) what those 123-clowns are actually doing when it's not really rocket-science to run stable email (and DNS).

        Of course, we're not super-cheap. But most of our customers are SMBs.

        SMBs with no IT-team should ask themselves if they really want to run their own IT or just use Apple Macs or Thin Clients and run Office etc. either in the cloud or at some semi-local MSP where they can actually get someone competent on the phone in reasonable time.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: @Rainer: Is it so difficult?

          Anon, because I used to work for $CompanyThatCreated123-RegAllThoseYearsAgo

          I had a hand in the creation and scaling of the infrastructure for 123-Reg in its early days. By the time I left we had over a million domain names in the system (in a DNS platform that could cold boot in 3 to 4 minutes) and lord knows how many mailboxes. It wasn't without wrinkles then, but it was a number of orders of magnitude bigger than 20k accounts.

          That was >10 years back. I would hazard a guess that the brand is now hedging towards another order of magnitude larger (if not 1.5), and with all the takeovers/mergers/acquisitions/sell-offs/moves etc I've absolutely no idea what the platform it runs on is now. I'd be very, very, *very* surprised if it's the one I left behind!

          TL;DR: as a company they clearly have problems, but they're in a different market to yours, Rainer.

          1. Rainer

            Re: @Rainer: Is it so difficult?

            Thanks for the feedback.

            We don't really look for price-sensitive mass-market customers, admitted.

            As such, we don't really deal with a lot of users - and are not equipped to do so anyway.

            But it's my understanding that Zimbra could scale even to that level. You just need to use enough backend servers and frontend-servers...

  13. MJI Silver badge

    This morning we suffered a technical outage that affected some of our customers’ services.

    I would like to take a moment to apologise to each of you for any inconvenience this caused you and your businesses.

    We are investigating this incident to make sure we understand exactly what went wrong and minimise any future risk of this happening again.

    Over the past year we have been working to upgrade all of our hardware and redundancy systems to ensure that in events such as this, we are able to get your services up and running as quickly as possible. This, along with the hard work of our support teams, has meant that we have been able to restore your services with no loss of data or email.

    We will be continuing to improve our systems to make sure you receive the best service possible from 123 Reg.

    Kind regards,

    Richard Winslow

    123 Reg Brand Director

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Long time 123reg user...

    Of course I'm not stupid enough to use 123's email service.

    In other respects I know they're not great but having tried several alternatives so far I've ended up with "better the devil you know...". I have got frustrated with them in the past. The list of issues is long but usually fixed within a reasonable time frame. A simple example was when they forgot to renew a domain name I'd paid them to renew, well in advance as usual. Their "support" response was that whenever I renewed a name at 123reg I should check they'd actually renewed it at Nominet. I found out when my customer complained that the web site was no longer responding to the domain name. That just shouldn't happen.

    I've tried several alternative providers and found them significantly worse. I expect it's my fault for being too parsimonious, maybe those that charge more do better - but that's not necessarily the case.

    I do have a leased server at 123 (originally through one of the businesses 123 subsequently bought) which is kind of OK but when I asked to upgrade from self managed to their management (adding about 25% to the annual cost) they declined (although I'd not messed with the original config) but proposed that I upgrade to a much higher spec server at twice the price. Needless as my usage is well within the capabilities of the existing box - so of course I'm looking to move away.

    The oddest issue I've had was when they took a small sum (under £5) from my bank by direct debit with no invoice or explanation. They said I must have given someone else my login details (absolutely no way) and that third party had bought the mystery item, they refused to tell me what it related to claiming "the data protection act". I reported it to the bank as a fraudulent transaction and they reversed the payment. (And I changed my 123 login just to be on the safe side). The really odd thing was that I couldn't find any product or service 123reg provide that would have cost the stated amount. Made me wonder if a rogue employee could be taking insignificant amounts from loads of customers - "salami slicing" fraud.

    I've had some good support too like a major hardware failure at 23:00 on Christmas day, new server swapped in within a couple of hours (but maybe that dates back to where I got the server from originally).

    Support suffers the usual big organisation syndrome: front line support is cheap low skilled, presumably low paid, and tasked with avoiding escalation to more capable techies. With persistence you can eventually get to someone who understands the question, knows how to use the diagnostics and find the right fix. Worst case that took 8 hours (after a server reboot one of the services hadn't restarted, all it needed was to start the service manually or a second reboot would probably have worked). I might have been able to fix it myself but I was up a mountain on a flaky mobile connection.

  15. GcdJ

    Customer service fail indeed

    123-reg decided to restore my filing system to an image of 1 week ago and leave it publishing all Sunday. They also set it to read-only, so nothing I could do would upgrade it.

    Meanwhile - they had a message on the status page saying that everything was back up and running normally. We are clearly a post-truth society

    The status updates were rubbish - copying 1 week old data to my live site was stupid.

    The support desk was useless - the support desk told me that there was no way for 123-reg admin to set read-only and I should use filezilla to edit the site. Needless to say their status page said they had enabled read-only, I was using FileZilla, and it was very clear that nothing would write to the file system.

    The support desk is also blaming the service providers to 123-reg. Buck passing in the internet age.

    g

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