Wealthy Affiliate Email Hosting Server is Functioning Again - A Bad Experience

Perhaps not many members are aware that our email server was down from 18 Oct to 2 Nov (16 days). Or perhaps I didn't follow enough members to know the shared "pain", since we are all on shared hosting.

Webmail works intermittently where you can still send emails out, sometimes. But for those using email clients like MS Outlook or Thunderbird, any email that you send using your domain email will just not get delivered to the recipient.

I used my domain email account quite frequently and it had been a really challenging time for me.

This is by far my worst experience here at Wealthy Affiliate. Never thought that an email hosting service could be down for so long.

I'm glad that the email service is now available again and my domain emails can be sent via Outlook successfully. Hope it stays that way. Need to monitor.

I am not so happy, however, with the transparency and promptness of our Site Support. While I understand the issue had to be escalated to the senior server admins, the lack of proactiveness and information updates was deafening.

I had to chase Site Support for updates every so often so that I could understand what happened and appreciate why the issue could not be resolved soon enough.

It took me a long time to squeeze out some understanding that it was due to a huge amount of spam sent from WA hosting servers that caused a reputation hit on the mail relays thus affecting outgoing emails.

And every time I tried to follow up for updates, it was very often a standard response of:

"We just wanted to give you an update on this SiteSupport ticket to let you know we are looking into this for you right now. We will respond with more info very soon."

I can take this if the issue could be solved in 1 or 2 days, but 16 days... I think it is only fair for me as a client of WA to know more about what is happening and how is the progress of getting things fixed.

I was also advised to try subscribing to Google Workspace to have better email deliverability. I didn't think that made sense when I had to pay more for a failure here.

I broke my personal record. It took me 85 back-and-forth replies to finally see that the issue is resolved.

And I actually found out the issue have been resolved when I was testing Outlook to try and see if it works. I thought Site Support might update me soon to confirm this and ask me to test it out. 2 days passed, no news. I had to probe Site Support to check and confirm with the senior server admin if the issue was indeed fixed.

No transparency on the issue, a lack of proactiveness, and a lack of clarity. I thought this was pretty bad.

I can only reckon that there are bigger issues that were happening that choked up Site Support's bandwidth to provide better support on this issue.

Anyway, most of these have already been conveyed to Kyle. Hope to see improvements on the service level going forward.

While this post all seems to paint a bad light on our Site Support, I am still grateful for the hard work of the people behind this inbox and for getting the issue fixed.

I'm writing here to vent my frustration, no doubt. But as a community, we should all grow together and I appreciate the openness here to allow us to share our experiences.

I hope things can improve here.