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Late last week some RIM customers reported problems retrieving e-mail with their BlackBerry. The outage apparently only affected BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) users, individuals and small businesses, and not the larger companies and organizations that use RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), however.

The outage began late morning on Friday, around 10 a.m., according to Yahoo News. I can say for sure it was before 11 a.m., as I did not receive my usual Tropical Update. Since, I was busy at work and only had time to send out an update on Twitter asking if others were having problems, I called my husband to see if he was receiving e-mails on his BlackBerry, which he was not.

Text, data, and phone service all continued during this time. But not one email came through.

When I got home Friday evening, the first thing I did was resend my service books, which enable services like e-mail and browsing to work on a BlackBerry, to my and my husband's BlackBerrys. It was then that I started to receive e-mails once again.

E-mail stragglers and delayed messages continued to arrive well into Saturday.

While annoying, I would not consider this anywhere near as bad as the BlackBerry blackout in April. Then again, I missed most of this one due to work. I am not sure how long the outage truly lasted as there were reports earlier in the day that sending the service books got the e-mails back on track.

So far the only official information I have seen from RIM states that e-mails were only delayed and not lost. And, as I experienced, phone calls and text-messaging services weren't affected. They have not given a reason for the problem.

There are still some reports of trouble as late as Monday. If you are experiencing slow or no e-mail arrivals, make sure hat you log onto your service provider's Web site and send your service books to your BlackBerry. That may do the trick and get you up and running again. It worked for me.

Click here for some additional advice on what to do when BlackBerry service goes down.