Thousands of emails sent and received over the last two decades by eir customers with eircom.net addresses have been permanently deleted in error by the company, The Irish Times has learned.
While the company declined to say precisely how many of the subscribers to its email service were affected by the system failure, it said four per cent of its user base have had all emails sent or received longer than 45 days ago deleted and these cannot be recovered.
For almost 20 years, the telecommunications company offered an eircom.net email address free to anyone who signed up and it had tens of thousands of subscribers, including many small businesses.
However in the summer of 2020, it introduced a monthly charge which was initially set at €5.99 per month and warned that people who opted not to pay the charge would have their accounts and their emails permanently deleted.
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Many people chose to sign up to the new subscription service because they wanted to keep an archive of their electronic correspondence but now, despite paying up to €9.99 per month for the service, they have had their mails deleted.
“As a result of an IT issue which occurred during a maintenance operation on our eircom.net email webmail servers, you may not be able to access emails you sent or received which are more than 45 days old,” the company told customers this week. “Our IT team has been working to resolve the issue. However, unfortunately, we are unable to recover these emails. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this may cause.”
Users of the service who contacted The Irish Times expressed outrage that their correspondence had vanished.
“Effectively, my entire archive of emails either sent or received since 2014 has simply disappeared,” one such user said. “Inconvenience? It’s an absolute disaster that’s entirely the fault of Eir. And this has happened even though users of Eir webmail are paying €9.99 per month for the privilege of using the service – which surely includes the preservation of an email archive, for obvious reasons.”
The customer said he was “absolutely devastated”. “Yet there had been no explanation of what happened or why it apparently can’t be fixed,” he said.
An eir spokeswoman confirmed that the emails of four per cent of its customers had been deleted “during an IT upgrade”.
She said the “data was being moved to a new server, [when] an issue occurred and emails greater than 45 days old were inadvertently deleted and could not be recovered. An investigation was immediately launched ... and the root cause of the issue has been identified.”
She said that “measures have been put in place to ensure this issue will not happen again”.
“eir apologises sincerely to all affected customers for the loss of this data. eir will provide compensation to those affected, the details of which will be finalised and communicated in the coming days,” the company said.
She added that affected customers could contact eir by email at eirwebmailsupport-gp@eir.ie and the company will “work with them to examine if it is possible to recover lost data that may be held locally on their computers”.
“Some customers will be able to recover lost data through their local email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, where emails may be saved locally on their computers,” she said.
