On Saturday, May 27th, a hardware failure caused substantial downtime to the IMAIL email system. While email services have been restored, a small number of users have reported that their accounts are missing some email messages. Most prevalent in these reports have been missing mail from January through May.
Our engineering team has begun investigating these reports and is currently in the process of diagnosing the cause. Once diagnosed, our team will provide an update on this page. Please note, this process may take several days.
We appreciate your patience.
Update: May 31, 2023
Initial indications are that fewer than 3% of users are impacted by missing email from January through May. Some users have only reported 1 week of mail missing.
Our engineering team is seeking to restore those messages from a backup. Further updates will be provided on this page as they become available.
Thank you.
Update: June 2, 2023
Further analysis shows that there was a data integrity issue in some of the back ups made just prior to May 27th. Our engineering team is working with vendors to see a solution is available to restore messages for those impacted.
As a general reminder, we always recommend that users back up their own important emails.
Further updates will be published on this page. Thank you for your patience.
Update: June 6, 2023
Work continues with our vendors to see whether or not the users impacted will be able to have mail restored. The considerations involve the integrity of the data that is missing and whether it can be restored without causing additional problems to unaffected users. Additional updates will be provided as they become available from engineering.
Update: June 13, 2023
The latest update on this partial mail loss is that currently, data integrity testing is being conducted for impacted users. The process involves testing how reliable the data is and what its impacts are on unimpacted users.
Update: June 26, 2023
Our engineering team expects to have another update by the end of the week with results on integrity testing. Thank you for your patience.
Update: July 13, 2023
We thank you for your patience regarding this matter.
Having analyzed the available backups, our engineering team cannot guarantee the integrity of the data, which unfortunately puts the current data on the servers at risk if it were to be restored. As such, it will not be possible to restore the mail for the subset of users who were impacted by mail loss. We deeply regret sharing this news and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience it is causing affected users.
Our goal is to make our email systems as reliable as possible, and we recognize that we have fallen short. Plans are currently being executed to ensure the integrity of the email services we offer and the data we hold on your behalf.
As a general reminder, we recommend that all customers make backups of important emails. On the IMAIL system, selected messages can be downloaded by going to the Mail Actions menu. If you use a third-party email client such as Outlook or Mac Mail, refer to your program’s documentation for specific instructions on how to back up email.
