Spark completes divorce from Yahoo

Spark's headquarters in Auckland. Photo / File

Spark has completed the divorce from Yahoo and brought its Xtra email service home to New Zealand.

New Zealand-owned email platform SMX is hosting the service and Spark says they have over 800,000 Xtra email accounts up and running on the new system.

"We're really happy to be celebrating this milestone: we're officially off the Yahoo platform and Xtra Mail is now hosted at home here in New Zealand," Jason Paris, chief executive of Spark home mobile and business, said.

"From an overall perspective, the migration project went well. We've moved more than 800,000 email accounts containing 1.4 billion messages, safely and securely, in the timeline we originally committed to. This has been one of the biggest IT migration projects in New Zealand's history," Paris said.

Yahoo's reputation and service has been marred by a series of malicious hacks compromising millions of users. They first admitted a breach which occurred in 2014 which targeted thousands of people's accounts and was carried out by Russian intelligence officials.

Later, they admitted they had also been compromised in 2013 in a hack which affected over 1 billion users, including New Zealanders on Spark's Xtra email service.

Spark made the call to ditch Yahoo last year. The migration took roughly six months.

Paris admitted dealing with the US company had been difficult.

"The migration did have some challenges, particularly when dealing with Yahoo," he said.

"It's great to complete the transition away from an email provider who's been dealing with big issues on a global basis, and has kept us very much at arm's length, to an email partner here in New Zealand that operates with real transparency."