CTemplar, the highly secure webmail provider, competitor of ProtonMail, has totally lost all its client directory and all their emails on July 2021 09.
Contents
Although no message mention it on the CTemplar webmail portal, logging to you account it totally impossible since July 2021 09.
All accounts have been erased, as well as all their contents. CTemplar had underdone a catastrophic incident, which is terrible for its reputation.
Communication on the incident
CTemplar did not write any post and did not communicate clearly on the incident from its web portal. Just a short message on reddit mentionned the incident:
We recently had a system failure and some of our customer's data were irrecoverably lost. We truly apologize for that. We cannot restore data from backups because we do not keep backups for security reasons. We will be revisiting that policy in the future. We will be happy to process refunds for anyone regardless of when they created their account. If you have trouble accessing your account, please contact support@ctemplar.com. If you need help with anything else feel free to reach out to us. Once again, we apologize for any inconveniences this might have caused. Respectfully, The CTemplar team
Email response
In addition of the Reddit communication, CTemplar has responded individually to emails they received, with a few hours delay in some cases:
Dear Customer, We are sorry for the trouble caused. As you are probably aware, yesterday we had a catastrophic technical failure that caused partial data loss, in one way or another, to most customers. We are doing our best to restore the normal service. For now, it is confirmed the data loss has affected most customers to a higher or lower degree. We are making sure nothing similar to this will happen again in the future by reviewing our backup policy. Please let us know if we can do anything else to regain your trust as a customer. We need your username to restore your access and try to compensate with a membership boost. Kind regards.
Cause of the incident
As of July 11 2021, CTemplar did not provided any details regarding the cause of the incident. CTemplar has just acknowledged all user accounts were impacted, more or less, and some users had lost everything.
Dear Customer, We are sorry for the trouble caused. As you are probably aware, yesterday we had a catastrophic technical failure that caused partial data loss, in one way or another, to most customers. We are doing our best to restore the normal service. For now, it is confirmed the data loss has affected most customers to a higher or lower degree. We are making sure nothing similar to this will happen again in the future by reviewing our backup policy. Please let us know if we can do anything else to regain your trust as a customer. We need your username to restore your access and try to compensate with a membership boost. Kind regards.
Failure of the backup strategy
The only clear element is the absence of an effective back-up strategy as one would expect for a paid service, which is one of the most expensive on the market. The restauration of lost emails is not possible.
CTemplar emergency support team
To get a new account and financial compensation you must contact support@ctemplar.com.
How to ask for help
You need to provide the following information to support@ctemplar.com:
- Main username or email address,
- Payment method for paid accounts:
- the last 4 card digits or
- the Bitcoin transaction ID.
- Payment date.
- Membership type (Prime, Knight…)
CTemplar will share a recovery key so you can regain access to a new account.
When it is possible, CTemplar will assist you to see if some data can be recovered.
Reactivation of your account
After verification, CTemplar is sending you recovery code.
- Navigate to mail.ctemplar.com
- Click on “Reset Password” under the login button
- Click the blue link “Reset password using recovery key”
- Enter you recovery key, login, and new password
- Validate
After reactivation it is highly probable that all your emails are gone.
Compensation
If you are a free customer also experiencing these issues, CTemplar can send you a new invitation code as they don’t have another way to prove your identity.
If you are a paid customer, CTemplar will:
- temporarily upgrade you (example: if you were Prime, you become Knight),
- provide you with extra paid subscription time (most likely until 2023-01-01).
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