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aaa said on 10/12/2008 5:46:59 AM:
Subject: Open Letter To Our Email Service Resellers Dear Resellers, I am writing today to speak to you directly about what happened this week. This will not refer to specific elements of the outage, there are other venues for that. The things I most want to communicate are my deep sorrow, why it wont happen again and what we will do for you. More than anything one thought keeps going through my mind as I think about this, the future determines the past. I will return to this thought. First, and most importantly, we are sorry. I am sorry. I have been in this business a long time and do not know if I have ever been more sad about what we have done to you, to your customers and to how people think about us. An email outage in 1995 was different from one in 2000 and even more different from one in 2008. I know what this does to your reputations, to your customers and to your staff - and I and so many people here are just sad about that. While it seems trite right now, we really define ourselves by how we make it easier for you in your businesses and with your customers and in our deep understanding of those relationships. That means the pain here is that much greater and believe me I know our pain here does not matter, yours does. Just know we are grieving. Second, what will we do about it and why will this never happen again? I know for some of you that doesnt matter, you are done with us, but I want to express this for the rest of you. Let me start here with things that were not the problem, old equipment, people, capacity or redundancy. The equipment is new, the people are great, we have plenty of capacity and redundancy. What this will mean for us is clearly the need to take the other elements of the service to a completely new level. Here I mean monitoring, change management, emergency protocols and procedures and operating efficiencies. We had decided long before this that the most important part of email was reliability, not features, not groupware, not web 2.0 integration but reliability and deliverability. I have been at this a long time and really believe that these people and this service can be the best in the world, better than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft and most importantly the best partner for service providers. We owe you this and will deliver it. Lastly, what we will do for you as a result of this? Let me start here by saying two things, we will certainly be doing something and that there is nothing we can do that will make up for your loss of reputation in your customers eyes. We know that. The people who will participate in that decision are fried right now, as I know even in your anger you can well imagine. I will ask your indulgence that you give us this week to make our plan in this regard. There is one thing that I can offer now. I would like to make myself personally available to any of you who would like me to either reach out to your customers, or to any specific customer, with a letter, an email or a phone call. I know this will not often matter but perhaps in a few cases it might. My message here would be simple, this was our fault not yours and while you are responsible for the suppliers you pick, you had good reason to pick us and it was us who let you down. This offer stands whether you are leaving or staying. In closing, the future determines the past. If we move forward and run the most reliable, service-provider focused, email service the world has ever seen this will be remembered as the few days that turned it around, as being a very important event in forging out mutual future. If we have no change in reliability or in service levels this will barely be remembered. It will just be a point on a mediocre line. I will do everything in my power to make it the former not the latter. Regards, Elliot Noss

ashok said on 10/6/2008 3:14:54 PM:
hi