Dickinson telecommunications firm Consolidated continued to troubleshoot problems Tuesday associated with its conversion to a new e-mail server company in Minneapolis.
Consolidated General Manager Paul Schuetzler said Tuesday afternoon about 30 percent to 40 percent of their e-mail customers experienced problems this week as a result of the conversion.
"Some of the (e-mail) security is called one-way encrypted, meaning you can change your password and we don't know what the passwords are," Schuetzler said. "So when we changed our e-mail servers from ours to this new company, they weren't able to get the new passwords and change them over at the same time."
Customers who were without e-mail service as a result of the switchover have been keeping Consolidated staff busy with calls that require getting the passwords recreated.
"Our old e-mail server was a company that went out of business about three or four years ago," he said. "We had no support on (the servers). Everything we did on them we did ourselves. We had to find a company that would support us and support us for the long term."
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If Consolidated had known the magnitude of the potential problem with the server switch, Schuetzler said it would have insisted that ISPN, the new provider, take more time to try to resolve the issue.
"We would have been up front with our customers and let them know ahead of time," he said. "That, we wish we would have done anyway. It was more of an internal thing to us. Obviously, we had no idea it was going to affect this many of our customers."
People who hadn't checked their e-mail in recent days on Tuesday were having password problems, he said.
"We just encourage them to call us and we'll reset them," Schuetzler said.
