Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : E-Stamp Corporation (ESTM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Will Carson who wrote (32)	5/5/2000 4:34:00 PM
From: Kathleen capps	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 85

Just wondering if anybody has had personal experience with this estamp problem? E-Stamp outages turning customers away 5/4/00 11:58:00 AM Source: Business Wire Customers who signed up for E-Stamp's online postage service are stuck back in line at the post office. E-Stamp, a postage site for home customers and small businesses, has had spotty service and outages since early this week. Customers requesting stamps from the site have received messages that read: "Error Code 12007, the server name could not be resolved. Please contact technical support." E-Stamp's help page states: "You currently may be unable to access some of our Web services, including purchasing postage and E-Service. We are working to correct this problem. Please try again at a later time." "We have been experiencing some technical difficulties on our site. But we are totally on top of it, and the site should be up in the next couple of hours," said E-Stamp spokeswoman Gina Aumiller, who estimated the site's trouble began late Tuesday. The site's hardships come just after the company's chief financial officer, Anthony Lewis, resigned, and as the company struggles to gain market share in a rapidly expanding industry. "The inconvenience for us as a small business is that we simply had to go back to the old way of doing things, sending someone to the post office to stand in line to send out parcels and mail," said E-Stamp customer Bill Thomas. "Its not the end of the world, but it is expensive in terms of time." In recent months, Stamps.com has partnered with Hewlett-Packard to sell stamps to small businesses. Metering giant Pitney Bowes has also announced plans to expand online. E-Stamp missed earnings expectations last month when it posted a first-quarter loss of 73 cents per share. According to First Call, the consensus estimate was 69 cents per share. Shares in E-Stamp, like other e-commerce companies, have nose-dived in recent months, trading at $4 a share, down 91 percent from their 52-week high. Although many customers can access the site, some graphic links are broken and many links result in "page not found" or "server unavailable" errors. "It's not as though the problem is affecting every customer," Aumiller said. E-Stamp's service lets customer buy up to $500 of postage and download it to their "online vault," which lets them print stamps without connecting to the Internet. Customers with a reserve of postage should not be affected by the site's technical problems, she said. "All in all, E-Stamp is certainly not presenting a professional image to its customers," Thomas said.