Customers face email trauma after a Pipex upgrade

After a recent major upgrade to its platform customers of Pipex (Tiscali) the UK ISP has encountered problems with their email services for several days after the upgrade ran into difficulties.

Part of the new billing and account system for Pipex was being worked on and 30th November 2008 is the date set for the work to be completed. The upgrade on the system apparently included various enhancements including the adding of anti-spam and anti-virus services to protect the email accounts of customers using the IronPort Anti-Spam™ and IronPort X-Series™. It appears, however, that there was an issue with compatibility of the services that they hadn’t expected.

Pipex said in a statement “The majority of customers have now been upgraded but as the Pipex platform was quite an old one, it has thrown up some anomalies and we have been working through these. One example being some extremely large mail boxes which are being pulled across manually as well as the transposition of some log in details. The migration means that Pipex broadband customers will benefit from improved delivery time and free high quality Ironport commercial anti-virus and anti spam protection on all of their email accounts. We did advise customers on our status page of work being carried out and we have been updating the information available to them.”

The problem appears to have been caused by the email address format that is set in Pipex’s systems being altered by the recent upgrade. The provider has advised its customers that when logging into their email they should change to % symbol to an @ symbol. The example they provided was for those users who are currently signing in using username%dial.pipex.com or username%dsl.pipex.com will need to change their login to username@dial.pipex.com or username@dsl.pipex.com.