Postini users furious at email slowdown

Postini, Google's paid for email and spam filtering service, has been suffering from technical problems after customers reported that messages have been taking a long time to arrive.

The service appears to have been down or slow for most of last night, and comments on the Postini user groups operated by Google range from inquisitive to angry.

"Just called them and they basically gave me the finger because I don't have a US$1,500 [$1,639] annual contract with them," said one user. "Might be time to find a new service where you can actually talk to someone. To have a problem of this magnitude and have no way of updating your customers about the status of it all is completely unacceptable."

Another said: "This is shaping up to be a big FAIL on Postini's customer service side. Even Gmail had an update when they went down for a few hours a month or two ago, and Gmail is free! Postini, you are not convincing us that the US$1,500 is worth it."

Postini said in a statement: "We are aware of an issue that's causing a delay in mail delivery for some Postini customers, and are working to fix it as quickly as possible. Outbound mail is fully functional, but inbound mail has been flowing at a reduced rate for affected users.

"We know how important mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and apologise for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Postini Support Portal or the Postini Help Forum."

Postini's own performance traffic light indicator currently shows a green light for both inbound and outbound email traffic, suggesting that the service is back to normal.

Postini customers pay between US$12 and US$25 per user per year for the service.