Shaw email customers are scrambling after an interruption of Shaw’s email services Thursday led to millions of emails being deleted.

About 70 per cent of Shaw’s email customers were affected when the company was troubleshooting an unrelated email delay problem and an attempted solution caused incoming emails to be deleted, a spokesman told The Sunday Province.

Shaw has about 1.9 million Internet subscribers across Canada, with the majority in Western Canada.

Emails were deleted for a 10-hour period between 7:45 a.m. and 6:15 p.m. Thursday, although customers did not learn about the problem until Friday, and only then by calling customer service or accessing an online forum for Shaw Internet subscribers.

Shaw promised to email affected customers some time over the weekend with a list of deleted messages and details such as sender, subject and time sent. The actual content of the emails, however, is unrecoverable.

Glenda Luymes, “Shaw Internet customers up in arms over lost emails during service ‘interruption’”

Count this amongst the many reasons I just don’t trust ISPs to host my email. It’s great that Shaw does this, really, given how it generally interferes with ports used for email: not only are they screwing consumers in how they treat email protocols (you can pay a monthly fee for full port access) but they’re also screwing them by not properly managing their email systems. I bet that Shaw customers don’t receive any restitution beyond an apology.