Is it time for telecom to quit yahoo?

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Is it time for telecom to quit yahoo?

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#793816 5-Apr-2013 12:41

NonprayingMantis:
DigiDog: So it's true... the majority of Xtra customers actually prefer a crap service! ;-)

Many have used an Xtra address for a number of years and see it as an important part of their online identity. We looked seriously at whether we should continue offering an email service at all, and the overwhelming feedback from our customers was that we should.

Hello? I think the discussion was whether to drop Yahoo as a sub-contractor... not to lose everyone's Xtra address.

However dropping email altogether would certainly give Telecom a unique selling point... the only ISP in the world that doesn't offer email addresses. Honestly! As far as PR spin goes this really isn't very good.

those two things would presumably be one and the same decision since Yahoo runs the platform.

Its not out of the question to maintain customers email addresses and migrate them to a new platform - they did that when they migrated to Yahoo 5 or so years ago

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#793818 5-Apr-2013 12:49

DigiDog: However dropping email altogether would certainly give Telecom a unique selling point... the only ISP in the world that doesn't offer email addresses.

Fyx doesn't either.

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#793825 5-Apr-2013 13:08

I think the first thing Telecom should do is change the contract with Yahoo! New Zealand. The first item should be "transparency".

Telecom took a lot of blame in the whole thing. It took Yahoo! New Zealand ten days (from the first post in this thread) to send out a press release confirming 20% of Telecom email customers were affected by a security breach and complaining that the media was spreading a "lot of misinformation".

When I asked if they could tell me exactly what happened then to clear up this "lot of misinformation" the reply was "It’s not appropriate to disclose that information as these details could be misused and may assist a hacker in the future."

So, yes. Make things a bit more "fluid". Add transparency to the contract.

Telecom staff did a great job working days and nights to get this through. Probably some at Yahoo! as well, but who knows? They were pretty much invisible during this whole thing.

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#793833 5-Apr-2013 13:22

From that press release, I get the impression that they had two choices, ditching providing email altogether or continuing to provide email by subcontracting out to yahoo. Doesn't say that they investigated the other providers options, and if they had, I would think that the cost would be huge to switch to another provider. Gmail would possibly be the obvious choice as an alternative provider, and I don't recall them having this type of problem, but I would suspect if they did offer that sort of service to ISPs, that the cost would be high.
I guess they didn't have a choice about keeping email, as what full service ISP doesn't provide email addresses to customers, and other ISPs would use that against them in marketing if it was dropped? Would be good if they were still investigating alternatives, as part of an ongoing review.

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#793835 5-Apr-2013 13:29

Hello? I think the discussion was whether to drop Yahoo as a sub-contractor... not to lose everyone's Xtra address.

NonprayingMantis: those two things would presumably be one and the same decision since Yahoo runs the platform.

Not necessarily. It wasn't long ago when Telecom used to operate it's own mailservers, as most ISPs do. I expected them to drop Yahoo from the equation - not to kill their own email service.

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mattwnz

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#793842 5-Apr-2013 13:44

DigiDog:

Hello? I think the discussion was whether to drop Yahoo as a sub-contractor... not to lose everyone's Xtra address.

NonprayingMantis: those two things would presumably be one and the same decision since Yahoo runs the platform.

Not necessarily. It wasn't long ago when Telecom used to operate it's own mailservers, as most ISPs do. I expected them to drop Yahoo from the equation - not to kill their own email service.

Who else could they subcontract out to at the same price, with 'unlimited' disksapce. When it was run in NZ pretty sure the diskspace was like 20MB

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#793852 5-Apr-2013 13:47

mattwnz:
DigiDog:

Hello? I think the discussion was whether to drop Yahoo as a sub-contractor... not to lose everyone's Xtra address.

NonprayingMantis: those two things would presumably be one and the same decision since Yahoo runs the platform.

Not necessarily. It wasn't long ago when Telecom used to operate it's own mailservers, as most ISPs do. I expected them to drop Yahoo from the equation - not to kill their own email service.

Who else could they subcontract out to at the same price, which 'unlimited' so disksapce. When it was run in NZ pretty sure the diskspace was like 20MB

They had 100MB options you paid for. Any provider today would be able to offer more than that, especially since of that 400,000 customer on average I'd suspect mailboxes would be WELL under 50MB

nickb800

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#793855 5-Apr-2013 13:47

mattwnz:
DigiDog:

Hello? I think the discussion was whether to drop Yahoo as a sub-contractor... not to lose everyone's Xtra address.

NonprayingMantis: those two things would presumably be one and the same decision since Yahoo runs the platform.

Not necessarily. It wasn't long ago when Telecom used to operate it's own mailservers, as most ISPs do. I expected them to drop Yahoo from the equation - not to kill their own email service.

Who else could they subcontract out to at the same price, which 'unlimited' so disksapce. When it was run in NZ pretty sure the diskspace was like 20MB

And most of their customers accessed it via Dialup internet. Technology changes.

Doesn't have to be a household name provider, could even be done in house

mattwnz

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#793871 5-Apr-2013 14:08

networkn:
mattwnz:
DigiDog:

Hello? I think the discussion was whether to drop Yahoo as a sub-contractor... not to lose everyone's Xtra address.

NonprayingMantis: those two things would presumably be one and the same decision since Yahoo runs the platform.

Not necessarily. It wasn't long ago when Telecom used to operate it's own mailservers, as most ISPs do. I expected them to drop Yahoo from the equation - not to kill their own email service.

Who else could they subcontract out to at the same price, which 'unlimited' so disksapce. When it was run in NZ pretty sure the diskspace was like 20MB

They had 100MB options you paid for. Any provider today would be able to offer more than that, especially since of that 400,000 customer on average I'd suspect mailboxes would be WELL under 50MB

Not with IMAP, people expect to store all their mail on the server these days. Most people I know who have gmail accounts have at least a couple of GB in their mailboxes. Although I think telecoms version of yahoo mail is still just pop, but you can opt to leave mail on the server.

DigiDog

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#793873 5-Apr-2013 14:08

In-house is the obvious answer. And disk space is dirt cheap these days.

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mattwnz

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#793877 5-Apr-2013 14:11

nickb800:

Doesn't have to be a household name provider, could even be done in house

Yes, but it has quite a big cost associated inhouse, and inhouse doesn't mean it will be more reliable either, if you look at other ISPs who do it inhouse. It would need quite a big server farm to server those customers. This was different when in dialup days, people probably connected to the server once a day to download their emails. These days people connect to the server every few minutes. The other ISPs I have used who did it inhouse had lots of email outages, and problems with spam. Yahoo mail is really reliable, apart from these particular issues, which aren't really reliability ones. The probelm I see with it is really communication about the problem, and also the fact that they didn't have direct control, as it was a contracted out service. Inhouse would solve those two issues, but could create others.

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networkn

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#793878 5-Apr-2013 14:11

DigiDog: In-house is the obvious answer. And disk space is dirt cheap these days.

Heh you are perhaps thinking of Sata which I doubt they would use. Storage in the enterprise certainly isn't that cheap and they would need to make a substantial investment to get enough, to have it redundant and to keep it backed up.

mattwnz

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#793883 5-Apr-2013 14:15

DigiDog: In-house is the obvious answer. And disk space is dirt cheap these days.

Storage at commercial level is not that cheap. Then they have to have backups, so each drive is duplicated multiple times. Also the larger the drive, the longer it takes to do diskchecks and restorations. If they were giving 10GB accounts, on a 2GB drive, that one drive would only serve 200 accounts. Sure many people may not use all that diskspace, but over time, they do fill up.

DigiDog

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#793899 5-Apr-2013 14:45

mattwnz: If they were giving 10GB accounts, on a 2GB drive, that one drive would only serve 200 accounts.

It's a relative thing. I remember paying over $20k for 6x18Gb SCSI drives back in 1999 - today you can pick up a 300Gb SCSI for around $500. Telecom are paying Yahoo to provide the service so you'd still expect them to save money by bringing it back in house.

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#793916 5-Apr-2013 15:14

don't forgot that between 2001 and 2007 it was XtraMSN and its been over 12 years since they did their own email inhouse

I'm happy with my xtra email being with yahoo, the spam isn't too bad compared with some of my other free email accounts.

A benefit of been with Yahoo is it makes it easy to setup on a new mobile phone, on an iPhone just pick yahoo, it autofills the server settings for you. Android is the same it detects the @xtra.co.nz and does the setup for you. Many other NZ isps you have to know the server settings for, which while fine for us geeks isn't common knowledge for everyday users

just my 2 cents

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