If you are an old fart like me, you might remember a Telus 3 day email outage happening once before many years ago. At that time I was operating my own ISP service complete with email, so I could chuckle at the problem Telus was having. Now it's a different story, as I am totally dependent on Telus for my email, although I use a third party service to filter out the garbage. It is very obvious to most of us that the "90% back in service" number is out to lunch, and whatever bureaucrat thought that one up should be shot with a ball of his own BS.
It is my belief that the problem originates with user authentication. I use the POP3 server, and for about a week before the complete outage that server would occasionally return "internal server error" when I attempted to connect. It would usually only last a few hours, and I could always use Telus Webmail if I needed to read my messages. The outbound SMTP server always worked during these outages.
Like most large email suppliers, Telus probably uses a centralized authentication system. The fact that the Webmail server could authenticate and the POP3 server could not suggests that the difficulty was with the authentication system.
Another interesting fact is during most of this 3 day outage, I could still use the SMTP server for sending mail, although there were brief periods that I would get "421 mtlp000083 cmsmtp ESMTP server temporarily not available".
J.A. Coutts
