Initially, I didn't even realise Xtra's Great Email Outage was happening. (Maybe I shouldn't have admitted that, since now I've no chance of scoring that free-internet-for-a-week compensation. Whatever.)

After all, Xtra is just the mechanism I use to connect to the internet.

Like most, I have a fistful of email addresses. But I use my Fairfax email address (in the office and at home), my Gmail and the mail account attached to my personalised domain most of the time. I haven't actually checked my Xtra address in a couple of years, and I rarely glance at the Xtra - sorry, Yahoo!xtra - home page.

At the moment, the main question burning through people's minds is simply how Telecom and Xtra could make such a hash of their webmail transition (well, after: where's my money?).

But it's also got to be asked: the Yahoo!xtra portal, and YahooXtra Bubble services: why? Where's the fit?

Yahoo will always want to drive as many people, from whatever ISP, to its advertising-funded free services, ideally upgrading as many of them as possible to paid 'pro' services. Xtra, by contrast, will always have the natural instinct that as many Yahoo services as possible should be restricted to Xtra customers only, and Yahoo pro upgrades doled out as freebies to lure subscribers to its ISP service.

So I can't see the strategic fit. Maybe it was just cheaper for Xtra to shove management of its email services to Yahoo across the Tasman.

But even if I'm wrong, and the portal and services help Xtra retain customers as local loop unbundling, Naked DSL and so fourth kick in, it's still hard to see the commercial point. Even if ad-word revenue starts coming in, or YahooXtra goes gangbusters by portal advertising standards, the revenue will still be a drop in the bucket against Telecom's multibillion dollar core business.

My vote: if Telecom wants people to stick with Xtra in the new, more competitive age, it should forget offering slightly-better Flickr accounts, and provide what everybody really craves: faster, more reliable broadband.