Rome technicians were able to recover the city's email database Wednesday afternoon, and city offices are again able to send and receive communications.

Assistant City Manager Sammy Rich sent out a blast headed "We've got Mail!" at 3:30 p.m.

Previously posted:

The city of Rome has been without email capabilities for more than two weeks and, despite late nights and weekend work by its technicians, there’s no real end in sight.

“We haven’t received anything since Sept. 17,” Assistant City Manager Sammy Rich said Tuesday. “I was hoping we’d have it back up by Wednesday, but IT thinks that might not be the case.”

The network linking the government computers with each other and the outside world crashed during a storm, taking out the Internet and most of the departments’ internal files.

The city’s information technology specialists got the network back online and a Wisconsin company was able to retrieve the files last week.

“The good news is, we have our employees reconnected with all of their data files and we were able to rebuild the computer network,” Rich said. “The bad news is, we’ve got a corrupt Microsoft Exchange database and we’re still working to restore our email.”

Communication with state and federal agencies has been affected — and the collection of information posted to the city’s website is becoming out of date — because documents can’t be scanned and sent.

There’s also the inevitable confusion, with some residents and outside officials thinking either their messages are being ignored or their contacts are no longer with the city.

“The only problem is when someone sends us an email and they don’t get a notice of nondelivery,” Rich said. “Right now, telephone is king.”

The city could build a new email system as a last resort, he said, but the files in the old system would be gone for good.

Link to the city's phone directory