Corporate Blog

Due to a number of factors this month, our invoices are about as late as they have ever been, for those of you who are being invoiced this month.

As is often the case when things don’t go right, there wasn’t any single factor that caused this; it was the result of a number of factors, not the least of which was the considerable amount of time we spent dealing with the block of our mail server implemented by Microsoft. You know how important working email is to you, and it is not lost on us how important email is to you and therefore our business. So we literally dropped almost everything (including this month’s invoicing!) to deal with and mitigate the problem caused by Microsoft. In fact, on 28 June (Friday) we updated our blog post about this at:

NC036: Significant issue with delivery of email to Microsoft-hosted domains

You’ll find the update at the bottom of the post with Friday’s date on it in bold. The situation now is essentially that we are back to where we were before Microsoft started bouncing mail to domains they host on 20 June; in other words, to use the term used by some of you, the situation is “resolved”, and we’re back to dealing with individual bounces as necessary. Email bounces sometimes; it’s a fact of life. It’s the email system’s feedback loop to ensure that you know what has happened to an email you send if it wasn’t delivered as you expect. No news is generally good news, as that means your message was delivered, and now you’re waiting for the human on the other end to reply.

Also in the last two weeks we’ve had to address situations with two clients that were expecting different outcomes on issues they had brought to our attention; one of them has been dealt with as far as we can at this point, and the other will be dealt with right after our invoices go out shortly. We apologise to both clients who had to deal with the fact that we couldn’t give them as much attention as quickly as we usually do when clients need us. As of a couple of hours from now, everything will be back to normal, and we thank those clients and all of you expecting invoices on 15 June for your patience.

The date on our invoices will be 28 June (the most recent business day this month), and the suggested pay-by date is 19 July. However, if you are being invoiced this month please pay close attention to the expiry dates of your services and/or domains, as if they are before 19 July you do either need to pay your invoice before the earliest expiry date noted on your invoice, or contact us to make arrangements to ensure that we are aware that you will pay your invoice so that we renew your domains or services so that they stay online. Those of you who are again scheduled to be invoiced on 15 July will see your June balance carried forward, if you haven’t paid your June invoice yet, but since we don’t charge interest on unpaid balances this will not negatively affect anyone.

We apologise for making you do so much reading lately, and I can assure you that we work very hard to ensure that our systems run as close to 100%, 100% of the time as possible. We’ll never reach 100%, 100% of the time — nobody does, even Microsoft and Gmail — but the closer we can come to that goal, the easier your life is and the easier our life is.

Thank-you, as always, for your patience during troubling times. If you have any questions or feedback, please do contact NinerNet support.