A simple matter of…

Well after being without email for just about four full business days, it’s finally been resolved.

Last night about 10pm I received a phone call asking if the new mailbox was okay. Well I had a look via IMAP once they told me the details (it hadn’t been enabled) and it was _very_ unhappy. The server was taking about 30+ seconds to reply to each IMAP command. POP3 was fine. I checked further and it was doing this for my new account, old account and even if I tried to access a colleagues account (I didn’t know his login details mind).

I said it must be just the IMAP server that’s got big problems since POP3 was fine (as was webmail). I was told “it can’t be IMAP since webmail is okay”. After saying that whilst yes, the webmail was a seperate box, I strongly doubted that it talked to Exchange via IMAP and most likely used an Exchange only protocol, she tried it via an IMAP account (_finally_ someone who actually _tries_ the same thing I’m doing rather than blindly adhearing to “well it’s okay in outlook/webmail”). She agreed that something was ill. Since it was heading towards my bed time I left it with mi8 and asked for the outcome to be emailed to me at home.

This morning, no update. The IMAP server is back to how it was before - the old account is still screwed (it has never been fixed) and the new account isn’t letting me in. But at least the IMAP server isn’t slow. So phone up mi8 _again_, complain _again_. “I’ll get my supervisor to ensure that it’s looked at when the level2 people arrive at work” - which since they are East Coast USA and I’m in England, that loses most of the day.

They had no record of anythign being changed after about 8pm, no mention of the IMAP server being screwed or anything. Most unimpressed. If I ever stop working on something before fixing it I always send a status report to a) customer and b) colleagues. I also do this when I’ve finished fixing too

Then at 1:50pm an update apologising for not updating earlier, “will contact shortly”. Which turned out to be 2 hours later, but still much better than it was a while ago. I confirm that everything looks okay, they copy the last day’s worth of emails across and we are done.

I’ve lost about 10 emails (that we _know_ about), all “flags” on emails have dissappeared (which since I use this to track what jobs I’m doing it’s a real PITA).

This should have been resolved in a few hours. They should have understood that this is an Exchange problem and if they couldn’t resolve that after a few hours, they should have cloned my mailbox whilst continuing to work on the problem.

Time I first phoned mi8: 08:10 Monday
Time problem resolved: 16:00 Thursday
Total elapsed time: just about 80 hours
Total time I spent troubleshooting: about an hour
Total time spent on phone: about 3 hours (at least it seemed it)
Total time wasted on phone: about 2.5 hours
Total amount of time expended/lost: about a day

I hope to never have to experience this again. The long term goal of bringing email back in house has now been raised several levels in priority. I planned to bring email in house anyway due to earlier dealing with mi8 and earlier outages and general cluelessness. The only reason BTW that we even use Exchange is for calendaring.