The department in charge of creating a single email system for the federal government says work has been put on hold indefinitely amid technical problems.

Shared Services Canada says work to move civil servants to the new platform was halted in November after the company building the system, Bell Canada, found hardware issues.

The agency says work on the project won't continue until Bell Canada shows it has resolved all issues and can keep the government's email running.

Some 375,000 email accounts in 43 of the heaviest information technology users in the government are supposed to be on the new system by September.

The original deadline for the project had been last March.

Since the email migration began just over a year ago, 12 of the 43 organizations have moved 51,700 email accounts and 12,100 BlackBerry users to the new system.