FuseMail Email Hosting Has Major Service Issues
On Sunday (April 1) I noticed that my email (hosted by FuseMail) box was rather empty. Now, for some business owners Sunday might be the only day of their week their inbox isn’t flooded with emails, but I usually get a decent amount (mostly newsletter subscriber updates), so to see no new emails was actually unusual for me. After logging into my FuseMail account, it didn’t take long for me to realize that not only was I not receiving emails, I couldn’t send them either! My FuseMail inbox was completely offline! Throughout the day on Sunday I called FuseMail 4-5 times only to get passed to voicemail each time. I went to bed frustrated, but hoped that they were just updating the server (wouldn’t be the first time that has pulled my inbox offline) and that everything would be running again on Monday. I reasoned it was better to be offline on a Sunday afternoon than the last Friday or first Monday of a month.
But guess what? Monday morning (yesterday) rolls around and FuseMail still isn’t working! At 9 AM I called tech support and spoke with a very nice representative that tells me FuseMail had suffered data center outage and they were working to get service restored. He was very apologetic and assured me that FuseMail was moving as fast as they could to get everyone back online. 12 noon rolls around and I still can’t send any emails (only silver lining is that I can now see when I receive an email!), which means that I can’t get any of my first of the month reporting sent to my SEO clients. My staff is also unable to communicate with clients and everything is essentially in a stand-still. I can’t do my job because FuseMail has failed to do theirs!
I took to Twitter to vent my frustration and found I was not the only FuseMail user suffering and angry over the outage. Not only was FuseMail down for 24+ hours, they were hardly addressing the issue at all in a public forum. I got no warning that their data center was down (you have my alternative email address!), nor any idea of how long it would be before they were up and running again. Here are some of the other Twitter comments I saw during the day:
My favorite is probably the tweet that references a FuseMail press release from 2009 that promises a service that “keeps real-time copies of data in two geographically diverse datacenters protecting against natural disasters or other catastrophes.” Looks like they failed that one pretty hard!
The real kicker is that this is not the first time I have been burned by FuseMail. I can understand that every company, even an email hosting company, is going to experience technical difficulties at one time or another, but I kid you not when I say that in the five years I have been a customer of FuseMail, they have experienced major service issues every 5-6 months. Major service issues include things like: inbox folders not loading properly, IMAP email stops working, mobile email won’t synch up properly, emails can’t be sent or received and major latency issues. Just the other week I was getting emails from clients 2-3 hours after they sent them! And while there is nothing so serious in SEO that a few hour delay would cause major issues, it does impact the customer service component of my business—and it’s not even something I can fix! I can’t answer my clients until their emails show up in my inbox. Unless they called or pinged me asking if I got their email, I never knew it was missing.
I realize that I am probably over paying for FuseMail’s services ($150 a month), but I decided to use FuseMail as my email hosting company when I first started Brick Marketing because it was a US-based company with US-based support and they had a pretty good reputation for customer service. I don’t mind paying a little extra each month if it means that I can get a hold of real, live person when I’m having an issue with my inbox (that’s the main reason I won’t switch to Gmail for business.) Brick Marketing is a small business, and we can’t afford the hardware and IT support needed to run our own email server, that’s why I turned to FuseMail for email hosting. It’s so important that your company’s email have a synergy with the rest of your brand, and a free email address is just not going to cut it (even if you’re just starting out you need a branded email address!)
**Update! I called and spoke to them about what I am paying per month and I was able to reduce my monthly business email hosting service fee! Whoo Hoo! This is one good thing to come of this Fusemail issue!
Every time FuseMail has a technical issue I swear that this is the last straw and I’m switching email hosting providers. But here is the catch—I have roughly 15 GB of email in my inbox, all carefully sorted into folders and subfolders. I’ve kept a record of every email conversation I’ve had with any client, vendor, lead and so forth in the past 7 years and that amounts to a lot of email. If I wanted to move from FuseMail to another vendor (which I do!) I was told that the only way to transfer that data would be to move it as a whole, meaning I’d lose any semblance of organization. I’d have to manually sort through 15 GBs of email and rebuild my system—no thanks!
This means that I am stuck between a rock and hard place. I can either stick with FuseMail (and overpay while they under deliver) or change vendors but risk A)losing emails in the process and B)having to rebuild my entire inbox from scratch. Neither looks like a good way out.
How could FuseMail have made this problem (reportedly a power outage in Toronto) any better for themsevles? Here are a few ideas I had throughout the day:
1. Sent a mass email to all their customers explaining the issue right out of the gate.
2. Been updating Fusestatus.com every ten minutes and have it synched to their Twitter account.
3. Get a person in-house personally responding to people on Twitter.
4. Give every one free month as a way of apologizing (especially since this isn’t supposed to happen).
5. Automatically email users whenever there is an update that could effect their inboxes.
6. Be completely transparent and honest every step of the way.
As an email hosting company, FuseMail’s job is keep their customer’s online! They should have had some kind of disaster plan in place for something like a power outage (which isn’t an unheard of issue), especially one that would affect so many users. Personally, I’d rather deal with overcommunication than no communication at all. Don’t leave me in the dark!
I’d love to hear from other FuseMail users. How long was your inbox down? Did you have any luck getting answers from FuseMail? Are you going to be switching vendors because of this?
14 Responses to “FuseMail Email Hosting Has Major Service Issues”
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We got our butts kicked with the fusemail outage yesterday. We have over 350 emails hosted through them for approximately 50 businesses. We had a TERRIBLE time trying to communicate to our customers because we were not communicated with.
I’m confused as to how a company who is offering “mission critical” services could possibly maintain regular 9-5 hours even during a crisis. I noticed this AM (April 3rd) they still seem to be casual about the whole affair. The last message on fusestatus.com was at 5 PM pacific time. I guess it was time to close. I wonder if they left their tools and cables in place half completed and hit the bars.
I sure would have liked to see a much more fervent commitment to communication and rectification.
I can’t see us migrating so many emails. I’m willing to give them one more chance. Of course, I could lose a bunch of my customers making the migration a simpler task.
As the guru’s of MNF would say “Come on, man!”
Last email I received before the outage was on April 1 at 5pm EDT. Then it finally came back on at 9pm EDT on April 2nd. The way they handled things is truly unacceptable. I don’t understand how they stay in business conducting it the way they did. So much for getting a Dedicated Account Representative assigned to you either. I never heard from mine. The whole point of paying them hundreds of dollars per year is to make sure that our emails stay up. I’ve been so patient with them but they just have too many problems with their service, so I’m definitely considering finding another provider.
Hi Rob and Erick,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts about the Fusemail outage and issue. I agree…how a company like Fusemail can stay in business that over charges their customers for business email hosting and treats their customers this way.
Thanks again,
Nick
This is a well written article. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
My email boxes at FuseMail were down probably well over 24 hours. I had a number of business deals going on that day. I don’t even know who might have sent me what. This is totally unacceptable.
My experiences with FuseMail were similar to yours. I have been with them for years.
Outside of this incident, just the latency sometimes of taking several hours to receive emails seems to happen way too often. Often I’m trying to troubleshoot where the problem is. Turns out, FuseMail was just queuing emails for some reason. Then add in SSL certificate problems, disconnects, and other issues.
That’s it for me. I’m moving out. I know it’s hard and a pain – I have several GB of data. Like you, each time I swore this was it. But enough is enough. I’m just copying the messages out to another service. Once it’s all copied, I’m done at fusemail. I started switching over my email around the 20th hour of downtime.
The loss of just a single business deal isn’t worth it. And this isn’t the first incident. It’s the latest in a long string of problems. To their credit, I don’t think they lost any of my stored emails.
I’m not sure yet if everything has yet to be delivered to me that came in during their downtime. On my new email service I’m getting some emails that were sent to me yesterday during the downtime. That means some email may have been received in their queue and was denied connection. The sending email server later retried and it was delivered to my new server.
Good luck to you and all fellow survivors.
Hi Greg,
Thanks for your comment and sharing your Fusemail story as well. If you don’t mind me asking what business email hosting provider are you considering moving to instead of Fusemail?
I have been evaluating Rackspace (who we use for web hosting of this website and others), in the 3 years I have been with Rackspace for website hosting, I have NEVER had any downtime, boy Fusemail could learn allot from them about how to treat their customers!
Thanks again & Take care,
Nick
Hi Nick,
I’m Mac heavy, so I just kept it simple and went with separate iCloud me.com addresses for each person (5 GB each with three additional aliases). I can then upgrade for more space as needed. This was the easiest way since we already use the rest of iCloud for its other synchronization applications. It also integrates well on Mac and iPad / etc. Even pretty well on Windows with Outlook now. Android based mobiles also can work with it using a few different apps for contacts and calendar.
As for a regular business email hosting provider, you might be right about going with a place such as RackSpace. I would run my own server, but email servers have become so complicated to manage these days. I think the lesson here is to go for stability and track record first, then balance features and price second. FuseMail does good with features and price. Not so good with stability.
As an observation today, I forgot just how cool it was to actually get emails within a minute or even a few seconds. I’m getting emails from various places nearly instantly. With FuseMail I had got used to just waiting what seemed like a minimum of 5 – 15 minutes for any email to arrive. Sometimes several hours just to receive a simple auto-responder type email or order confirmation. People would send me an email and say, Did you get it yet? I’d say, no, I use FuseMail. It doesn’t work like that there.
Greg
Hi Greg,
Thanks for the recommendation!
Yeah, I know exactly what you are talking about waiting for Fusemail to deliver emails.
Take Care!
Nick
Fusemail sucks!
Fusemail is one of the worst business email hosting companies out there. After this issue yesterday, I signed up a new account with Rackspace to host my company email.
Thanks for sharing your story!
I am glad that after not having email for a day that Fusemail is finally working properly. Fusemail needs to learn how to have better service and support.
Thanks Kelly and Jason for stopping by and sharing your thoughts about Fusemail.
Nick,
Was it a considerable price drop or was it just like their service, a slap to the face? And did you have to talk to your account rep or just anybody?
Thanks
Hi Erick,
Thanks for reading.
I guess I was under a contract with Fusemail at a higher price point (what the prices where years ago) and based on our usage I was able to cut our monthly fee in half. This is the only thing that I am very happy with and have decided to stay with Fusemail for now (or until the next major outage, which hopefully will not happen again).
Thanks again & take care,
Nick
[...] Below you will find our favorite blog posts that are related to SEO, search engine marketing and social media marketing from this past week. Please feel free to visit each, we hope you find them as helpful as we do! FuseMail Email Hosting Has Major Service Issues Starting on April 1st, Fusemail suffered a data center outage which affected thousands of customers. It took more than 24 hours to get the email service up and running, which frustrated all of its users. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE [...]
I am in the process of writing Fusemail a final thank you note. Had they not gone dark for two DAYS forcing me to completely reschedule my time / communications, I would not have added the IT task of finding a new mail service. And, in the search, I would not have found Office 365. As it turns out, I was able to change my email service to one that works flawlessly and securely with my Outlook 2010 and gain a contact manager and calendar manager that eliminates other third party software and is a much more robust and secure solution for those two business functions as well. So, thank you Fusemail, for being such a poor “business” communications provider. So long. My companies now have an IT package that is much stronger, secure and manageable.