Exchange email outage - Dec 2022
This page contains information for customers affected by the outage of the Exchange email service from Rocketspark and an option for restoring your email service.
Background
Our Exchange email service is provided by Rackspace which is a large international provider of hosting services. Due to a security issue an ongoing outage of the Exchange email service is affecting some customers.
Due to the length of the outage and limited updates from Rackspace the Rocketspark team have been working on an alternative solution and have tested this solution with two customers with successful restoration of an email service for them.
Please be assured that we are treating this as the sole priority for our senior team.
As an affected customer there are two options for you.
Option 1 - Keep waiting for a solution
Rackspace to date have not been able to provide a timeframe for resolution. Due to the long time of this outage we can’t yet be confident of when a solution will be reached but we are assured they are working on this as a top priority.
The only upside of this approach is that you don’t need to do anything so when the service is restored you should be able to continue as normal, provided that the service is fully restored. The big downside is that you won’t have access to emails until restoration.
Option 2 - Move to Google Workspace
We can assist with moving you to Google Workspace as your email solution.
Pros
- We can get you going with an email service again
- We have used Google Workspace ourselves at Rocketspark for many years of reliable service
- We will guide you through the set up process
- The cost is comparable to what you pay now and in most countries is likely to be slightly cheaper.
Cons
- Due to the ongoing outage of your current exchange service we are unable to offer a migration path of your past emails until the service is restored.
- Due to the outage we have not been able to verify the migration options available to you for your email history. The current focus is on getting a working email account for sending and receiving emails.
- When moving to Google we are unable to move any existing Google accounts that are already set up under the same email address. For example, if you have a Google Analytics or Google Search Console account already set up against your exchange email address. If you have an existing login with Google, we need to move the email address to Google Workspace and any existing logins using the email account will be replaced with a temporary email address which can then be changed back to the normal email account once receiving emails again. We will provide you with instructions on how to make this change.
- If you choose to not continue with the Rocketspark Google Workspace solution the account will be deleted and you will then need to add the deleted email address back as a user into your Google Accounts.
Requirements to set up Google Workspace
- We need to be able to access your domain’s DNS settings.
- If your domain is hosted by Rocketspark we can make the DNS change for you
- If your domain is not hosted by Rocketspark you will need to be able to access your domain’s DNS settings via your domain name provider and we will provide you with the settings for using Google Workspace.
- Please understand that the set up is a manual process we are undertaking so it will take time to work through and we will begin the Google Workspace set up process in the order of which the requests are received.
Please complete the form by clicking the button below to confirm your preferred option.
