easyDNS Blog

Why we do not offer Whois masking at easyDNS

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — 2008-11-20T16:29:13Z

We get asked this a alot: Why do you guys not offer whois masking or whois contact privacy?

The brief background on this is: whenever you register a domain name, your contact details are published in a publicly visible database called "whois", where your contact details are instantly harvested by spambots and marketers who proceed to email and postal mail you marketing offers, deceptive "domain slamming" attempts, ads for dubious products, and perhaps even telemarketing calls.

Nobody likes that, so over the years people started resorting to various tactics to protect themselves from the deluge of crap that inevitably comes with simply registering a domain name: throwaway email addresses in whois records, fake postal addresses, fake phone numbers, etc. The problem is, Registrants are obligated under their various end user agreements to provide true and accurate data (not doing so is grounds to lose one's domain), and the US even passed legislation making it unlawful to use fake contact details in a domain name registration.

Our response to this, years ago, was MyPrivacy.ca which protects your email address from being harvested from your whois records, but leaves your other data intact. We didn't see it as a revenue opportunity, in fact we made it free and opened it up to competing registrars, many of whom started recommending it to their customers. We just wanted to drive a stake through the heart of the whois spammers.

It wasn't long though, before many registrars took it a step further and created the concept of "whois masking" or "contact privacy", where all of the domain-holder contact details would be masked from the public whois. Of course, this was heralded as a "value-add" and most outfits charge extra for it.

In today's long overdue post, we're finally revealing why so-called "whois privacy" puts your domains at risk, costs you more and doesn't really protect your privacy.

Continue reading "Why we do not offer Whois masking at easyDNS"

Update: re ns2 timeouts

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-11-12T10:54:48Z

The issues we experienced with timeouts when querying ns2.easydns.com were cleared up as of approx 3:45pm(EST) on Tuesday Nov 11.

We are still working with our provider to determine the root cause of the issue.

ns2 timeouts

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-11-11T16:16:00Z

We have been experiencing intermittent connecvtivity issues with
some of the nodes in our ns2.easydns.com anycast cluster.

We have escalated the issue to our providers and are working with
them to resolve the issue.

More info will be posted as it becomes available.

thank you
easyDNS

MobileMe and easyDNS...

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-11-06T18:03:02Z

A number of customers have been registering domains to point to their new websites published via iWeb on their MobileMe accounts. Unfortunately, while MobileMe instructs how to point "www.yourdomain.com" to their services, they don't have a way to easily point just "yourdomain.com" to their services. This is especially important as not everyone on the internet will type "www" before a domain name when looking for a website (such as "www.google.com" versus "google.com").

Realising this is an issue for some of our customers who have DNS-Only services, we have implemented a work around. Simply follow the instructions on MobileMe to have your "www.yourdomain.com" CNAME point to "web.me.com". These are correct, and are very important. However, one last step is to leave your "yourdomain.com" record in the "hosts" block pointing to the word "PENDING". It should look something like this:

A record (host): yourdomain.com
Has IP: PENDING

...with your CNAME looking like this:

C name (alias): www.yourdomain.com
Points to A record (host): web.me.com

Once entered, click "next" to submit your changes, and "next" again after you have confirmed all looks well. These updates may take a few hours to propagate across the internet before you can see them.

If you have any questions at all, please contact our Support Dept., and we would be happy to assist you.

gmail / google mail forwarding fixed

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — 2008-11-05T21:15:43Z

It turns out the problem sending email to gmail / google was some sort of change they've made on their end which has, in the words of Postfix creator Wietse Venema "screwed up their support for RFC 2920 command pipelining. "

This seems to have affected at the very least, anybody using Postfix 2.x as an MTA. More info, along with the fix see this post, if you're running a postfix MTA you'll need to do this until google fixes their system.

We're in the process of updating our configs and the mail should resume momentarily. No mail was lost, no animals were harmed, everything was just deferred and will be dequeued starting....now.

Gmail currently not accepting email...

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-11-05T18:49:06Z

We have received various reports of delays to Gmail email addresses from our customers. Upon further investigation, it would appear that the Gmail mailservers are deferring most, if not all, email that is relayed to them starting this morning at 10am EST. This has been confirmed via the easyDNS mailservers, and external mailservers maintained by our sysAdmins.

Thankfully, as Gmail is deferring emails, they are not being lost, rather, they are being cached upon the sending mailservers until the admins for Gmail can correct this issue. easyDNS, by default, will retain email for up to five days, and hopefully the Gmail service will not be affected that long.

We shall update this post upon receiving further information, and apologise for the inconvenience.

mailout.easydns.com virus scanning

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-11-05T14:48:46Z

In an effort to enhance our mailout service and ensure its continued reliability , we have added virus scanning. All mail relayed through mailout.easydns.com will be subject to virus scanning.

If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact easyDNS support.

Barracuda Mail Issues

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-11-03T21:34:35Z

We have been experiencing issues with relaying mail to users
utilitizing Barracuda RBLs and SPAM filtering devices.

We are aware of the issue and are escalating with the people at
Baracuda.

More info will be posted as it becomes available.

We do apologise for the inconvenience.

thank you
easyDNS

Renewal notices sent without domains names by registry.

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-10-31T20:15:41Z

There have been several notices sent during the last 24 hours concerning 5 day renewal warnings that did not contain the domain name of concern and were left blank.

--------------------------------------------------------
FINAL NOTICE! The domain(s) listed below are expiring in 5 days.

If you wish to renew this domain, please log into
your easyDNS members section immediately to remit payment for the renewal invoice.

If your domain is not renewed within 5 days, it will be de-activated and service for your domain will cease. At that point, you will have 40 days to renew the domain (at which point it will be re-activated). If it is not renewed within the 40 days, the domain(s) will no longer belong to you and will become eligible to be re-registered by another party.

If you have any questions, please email support@easydns.com.

Domain Name, Expiry Date

--------------------------------------------------------------

This has been caused by a registry error and we have been assured that the notices will be sent again very soon
and they will contain the domain name proper as was originally intended.

we do apologise for any inconvenience.

thank you
easyDNS

New phishing scam

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-10-31T13:59:52Z

A new phishing scam has hit the circuit requesting that domain holders login to correct errors in their whois records.

as example.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear user,

On Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:42:40 -0500 we received a third party complaint of invalid domain contact information in the Whois database for this domain Whenever we receive a complaint, we are required by ICANN regulations to initiate an investigation as to whether the contact data displaying in the Whois database is valid data or not. If we find that there is invalid or missing data, we contact both the registrant and the account holder and inform them to update the information.

The contact information for the domain which displayed in the Whois database was indeed invalid. On Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:42:40 -0500 we sent a notice to you at the admin/tech contact email address and the account email address informing you of invalid data in breach of the domain registration agreement and advising you to update the information or risk cancellation of the domain. The contact information was not updated within the specified period of time and we canceled the domain. The domain has subsequently been purchased by another party. You will need to contact them for any further inquiries regarding the domain.

PLEASE VERIFY YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION - http://www.yourregistrar.com

If you find any invalid contact information for this domain, please respond to this email with evidence of the specific contact information you have found to be invalid on the Whois record for the domain name. Examples would be a bounced email or returned postal mail. If you have a bounced email, please attach or forward with your reply or in the case of returned postal mail, scan the returned letter and attach to your email reply or please send it to:

Attn: Domain Services 14455 N Hayden Rd Suite 219 Scottsdale, AZ 85260

LINK TO CHANGE INFORMATION - http://www.yourregistrar.com

Thank you,
Domain Services

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the link http://www.yourregistrar.com will send you to one of several fake registrars login interfaces and ask you to input your user ID and password.

Please be aware of any email you receive that look similar to the above message in any way and bring them to the attention of your ISP and report them as phishing scams.

thank you
easyDNS

How to explain "URLs" so anybody can understand them

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — 2008-10-28T13:47:14Z

One of our tech support guys just had a conversation with somebody who wanted "to register the URL http://example.com/something.html", where example.com was already registered, the person couldn't understand why he couldn't have that URL with "something.html" after it.

We've heard variations of this one a lot. Like somebody who knows "xyz.zz" is taken "but can I register "www.xyz.zz?", no, you can't.

The easiest way to explain a URL such as this one:

http://www.example.com/something.html

Is to think of it as HOW, then WHERE and finally WHAT:

http://	« how?	The method we are going to use to retrieve or "get to" the document described by the URL. Common ones are "http" (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol), you may also see "ftp://" or "mailto:"
www.example.com	« where?	This is the hostname of the server, somewhere on the internet, which is holding the document we actually want
/something.html	« what?	Finally, after we know what server we are looking for and how we're going to retrieve the document from it, we now specify exactly which document we want off of the remote server.

Understand those three components and you basically have URLs down cold.

Your web browser (firefox, safari, IE, Opera) is all about "how", what protocols to use to pull all these documents over the web to your desktop.

The web host is the "what" machine. It sits on a server and serves document after document to remote web browsers who send it requests.

Something has to bridge the browser to the web host/server and that's the "where", that's where DNS and domains come in, and that's primarily what we do here at easyDNS. We tell web browsers (and other client applications) the "where" aspect of retrieving and transmitting documents (the "whats") across the internet. We do this via "DNS lookups" ...about a quarter billion times a day.

Yahoo email forwarding service restored...

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-10-10T15:50:35Z

The issue we were experiencing with a delay in relaying email to Yahoo email addresses has been resolved, and email should be relayed without issue. We apologise for the inconvenience.

If you continue to experience an issue with email forwarding to your Yahoo email address, please contact Support (1-888-677-4741).

Email Forwarding To Yahoo Addresses Delayed

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-10-06T21:40:00Z

We are currently investigating an issue with Yahoo throttling email being forwarded from us.

Any email that is not being accepted by Yahoo at this time will be queued on our mailservers until delivery is successful.

This will result in a longer than usual relay time.

We are endeavouring to resolve this issue, and apologize for any inconvenience.

smtp/smtp2.easydns.com IP change

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-10-04T15:03:58Z

Greetings,

The IP addresses of our mail servers, smtp.easydns.com and smtp2.easydns.com, are changing this weekend, on Sunday October 5th 2008 at 9:00am EST

The old IPs are;

smtp.easydns.com - 205.210.42.52
smtp2.easydns.com - 205.210.42.53

The new IPs are;

smtp.easydns.com - 64.68.200.52
smtp2.easydns.com - 64.68.200.53

This change should not impact forwarding or backup MX and should be transparent to you, the end user.

If you have IP based ACL lists that filter mail, you may want to update them. Ideally though please use the hostname rather than the IP in any mail ACL situation, as our IP addresses associated with smtp.easydns.com and smtp2.easydns.com may change in the future without notice.

Email forwarding delays...

nospam@example.com (easyDNS Support) — 2008-10-03T17:37:00Z

We have received reports that some customers have been experiencing delays with our email forwarding services. Our Systems Department is aware, and are looking into the issue.

We expect to have a resolution in the near future, and apologise for the inconvenience.

Update: 10/04/2008 @ 11:00pm EST We have switched our mail server cluster over to our new data center environment early so that we can allow the legacy environment to "clear out" any delayed e-mail. New mail that enters our environment at this time will not be delayed.

We are re-engineering our mail architecture presently, so that we are not as vulnerable to some of the mail queue deluges (unintentional, mostly) that have been problematic in the past.

Thank you for your continued patience as we improve our service.