You've got mail - but it's someone else's

RETURN TO SENDER: Users where appalled to discover other people's messages in their ihug inboxes on Thursday and Friday.

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A hardware fault hit internet provider ihug yesterday, leading to messages intended for its customers landing in the wrong inboxes.

Business consultant and ihug customer Edith Chan in Wellington says that due to the fault making it impossible to use her usual email program, she turned to the provider's webmail service instead, to retrieve messages.

Chan says she first noticed three empty folders in her account, but none of her messages were in the inbox. However, when she looked in the Sent messages folder, she was "dumbfounded" to discover it was full of emails that weren't hers. The Drafts folder was likewise filled with messages not written by Chan.

Upon reporting the fault to an ihug customer services representative, Chan was asked to open the messages to check if they were hers or not. Chan refused to do so, as she believes doing so would be a serious breach of other people's privacy.

"If other people's mail ended up in our inbox, our mail must have gone into other people's mail boxes," Chan says. She asked the ihug customer representative what the provider would do to prevent the issue from happening again, and was told she could expect a call from a supervisor within two hours. Nobody from ihug called Chan however.

According to Chan, the email messages were mis-routed for some fourteen hours, until sometime after nine o'clock on Friday morning when ihug turned off the webmail service.

Paul Brislen, spokesman for ihug's parent company Vodafone, says that a hardware fault affected ihug's mail storage device yesterday. No messages were lost and those that were delayed have been delivered, Brislen states.

Queried about messages arriving into wrong recipients' inboxes and if any had been read, Brislen says that a small number of "webmail customers" reported being able to see email headers for messages belonging to other customers, in their inboxes.

These customers were however not able to open any of the mis-directed emails or read the contents, Brislen claims. "Our understanding is that only the subject line and headers were available," Brislen adds. A screenshot of the webmail page seen by Stuff shows senders' names, email addresses and the subject lines of their messages.

He says that ihug immediately shut down the webmail service while determining the cause of the problem, and intends to keep it offline until the fault has been rectified.

Brislen says that ihug apologies to customers for the inconvenience.

- © Fairfax NZ News