On Sunday we became aware via Twitter that at least one request made to a Government Minister may not have been delivered as expected and immediately began to investigate to understand the cause and scope of the issue.

While we have had isolated incidents of non delivery in the past with other agencies, it became evident that numerous requests were rejected by the Parliamentary e-mail servers which cover both the ministers.govt.nz and parliament.govt.nz domains.

Although we are currently waiting on more details from Parliamentary IT to confirm our suspicions of the cause - an e-mail service provider FYI.org.nz uses - today we confirmed that a total of 39 requests from users were affected by rejected e-mails (this includes follow-ups to existing requests).

As an immediate fix, we have put in place a temporary solution which should guarantee delivery of e-mails in the short term. We have begun resending requests via the site, and this will continue over the next day or two. Unfortunately this is a manual process.

We are extremely sorry that this was not caught earlier. Sadly, due to the limitations of both our core software (Alaveteli) and the other components and services we use, we have been unable to get real time feedback of delivery issues. This has been a long running discussion within our team. Last week we had identified a potential solution which should permanently fix both issues, and we are now intending to accelerate its implementation.

This post will be updated with more information as we have it. In the mean time please feel free to reach out to us at @FYI_NZ if you have any questions.

FYI.org.nz Administration Team