Customers of ISP Legend Internet have been without email since the weekend, following a hardware failure on two of the company's outbound mail relays. 

According to a service update on the Legend website, mail is now up and running but the backlog of messages still needs to be sent and the system is running slowly.

"Some Legend Internet and Vital customer emails will not have been delivered or received. Outstanding email is waiting on one of our servers while we carry out repairs to the affected mail relays," the statement said.

"This is causing an extra load on our operational outbound mail relay resulting in current email experiencing delays."

A statement on Monday claimed that the problem had been identified and dealt with by the Legend systems team.

However, the backlog of traffic affected the load balancing on the mail server and caused "intermittent problems".

Legend assured its users that any queued mail would be transferred onto a new server and that no messages would be lost during the changeover.