POBox.com held to new standard
Customers were baffled by Friday's outage in an otherwise reliable email forwarding service, not knowing the cause was a water main break.
But when it comes to email, any number of natural--and not so natural--disasters can delay delivery.
Of course, delay is relative, and so is the term "swift" when it comes to mail versus email. Where people expect their email to be delivered as soon as they send it, they will wait up to several days for a letter form the U.S. Postal Service.
On Friday customers of POBox.com, an email forwarding service, were baffled by an outage in what they say has otherwise been a highly reliable service. It turned out that the eight-hour shutdown--in which no email was lost--was not caused by a faulty router or programming error, but by the kind of a common building problem that faces "brick and mortar" companies every day: a water main break.
The response contrasts somewhat to the outrage heard in many of the Net's corridors last January when online bookseller Amazon experienced a 12-hour outage. And when online services such as America Online experience even 15-minute hiccups, it can create reverberations across the Net.