Some Telecom customers are fuming after yet more problems with the company's YahooXtra email service.

Wellingtonian Suzie Bognar said emails she sent to TelstraClear addresses over the course of a week had bounced back.

"Initially, Telecom told me it was a TelstraClear problem. TelstraClear said otherwise. Another call to Telecom and they admitted the problem. Frankly, it is not good enough."

Another customer reported similar problems.

"For the past fortnight, about half of emails have bounced back days later," he said. "My wife was told it was a national problem and they were working to fix it. It is pretty useless."

That customer said he had had to resort to phoning people after he had sent them emails, to check whether they had been received.

YahooXtra experienced four significant faults between May and August, the last of which delayed the delivery of emails sent through webmail for two days.

Telecom outsourced its email service to Yahoo7, a joint venture between United States company Yahoo and Australia's Seven Network, in 2006.

Telecom spokeswoman Jo Jalfon said she understood the latest problem was "fairly minor and resolved very quickly with a limited number of customer calls which is why no information was put on our website".

TelstraClear has put up a notice on its website to let its customers know YahooXtra users may be having difficulty emailing them, however. The notice advises YahooXtra customers contact their provider.

Gen-i division boss Chris Quin, who takes up the position of head of retail at Telecom next month, said he was concerned.

"We have had a number of outages this year. I think there have been issues in the last week forwarding mail to certain domains. I get that email is critical to our customers' daily lives and it has got to work."

Mr Quin said Telecom's strategy was still to try to fix the service. "We are still convinced we can get this to be operationally excellent and we won't accept a lower level of service than our customers want, so we are going to get it fixed whatever it takes.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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