Xtra (ISP)

The brand was largely retired in 2008, with internet services adopting the name of Xtra's parent company Telecom (now Spark).

[1] Today, the Xtra brand remains active only as the name of Spark's webmail service, powered by New Zealand-based SMX.

Many lobbyists, including Slingshot's CEO Annette Presley, persuaded New Zealand's Communications Ministry to force the unbundling of Telecom's local loop, so as to make fairer trading terms and lessen Xtra's ISP monopoly.

[3] During 2001 Xtra and Actrix (another New Zealand Internet service provider) won a High Court injunction to force Alan Brown, the maintainer of the Open Relay Behavior-modification System (ORBS) anti-spam blacklist, to remove them from the list.

ORBS was a blacklist of IP addresses relating to open mail relays like those run by Xtra, which enable spammers to send unsolicited bulk e-mail.

This had been caused in part by the overwhelming complaints and criticisms Telecom Xtra had received due to under-delivering on the promises of the Go Large plan.

The move to Yahoo!Xtra Bubble caused trouble for many small business owners and website hosting companies in New Zealand.

The Dominion Post brought the problem to the fore on 26 November 2007 and showed that responsibility for the trouble was shunned by Xtra.Xtra pushed the blame back to the hosting companies: "Telecom spokesman Nick Brown denies there are technical problems with the service, and blames web-hosting companies for forwarding mail without filtering it first for spam.

New Zealand Tourism Online's October 2007 newsletter reported that they "found several clients who have not been getting accommodation enquiry or booking emails due to the filter system.

Xtra customers were hit with multiple email spam problems from February 2013 (80,000 affected) to mid April 2013.

[16] Problems continued in November and December, when a Yahoo-operated server went down, affecting thousands of Xtra customers in New Zealand [17]