back to article Domain name gaffe launches Clearswift clients into e-mail panic

A domain name snafu at Clearswift, a company that filters email and web pages for objectionable content, wreaked havoc on some of its business customers when admins awoke to find their organizations were unable to send or receive email. The outage was caused when mimesweeper.biz, the domain where customers' email is routed …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    LOL...

    The "time to renew your domain name" email probably got filtered as spam :-D

  2. plastical
    Paris Hilton

    Trusting someone else with e-mail?!

    Whichever companies trust ONE server from ONE company to handle ALL of their e-mail have no sense at all, and deserve to be closed down on the spot. If you are that stupid, you should be nowhere near a computer, let alone the Internet - and let alone e-mail! (Eye twitches at the 90% of users that really ARE that stupid)

    Paris icon - they are about as stupid as her, anyway.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    "pursuing serious damages for breach of contract "

    Good luck getting that one past your Legal department, sunshine.

    If you manage it, I can give you Microsoft's telephone number, whose products and services have been causing "direct business disruption" for years, but afaik no one has successfully sued them yet, most folks even abandon hope of getting a refund for the MS products which are Defective By Design.

  4. Aubry Thonon

    Did I miss something?

    "this whois record shows it expired on Dec. 13, suggesting someone forgot to renew its registration. Naughty, naughty."

    I have several domain names registered (I have a few hobbies - anime, dollfies, etc - and these DN all point to the one machine serving various web-sites for said hobbies) and the registrar I use allows me to tick a "automatic registration" box for each of these domains. And just to make sure I don't forget about them, it still sends me a reminder every year that domains X, Y and Z are about to re-register.

    So why is this sh*t still happening?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Re: Did I miss something?

    I get your point, but where I work none of the directors who bought the original domains are still here and the reminder emails still go to them. This bites us every year and nobody has got this sorted yet... <bangs head against wall />

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @AC

    Stop banging your head against the wall and update your DNS administrative contacts to someone who is there.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: Did I miss something?

    Yes I relied on auto renewals too.

    nearly lost a domain because the domain registrar had the wrong date for some reason in their database compared to the actual registrar.

    Even then there have been lots of documented cases of auto renewals not working, you are still relying on one companies system to do the job, if it fails for any reason you are screwed, and relying on emails getting through from a registrar is also flawed as its easy for them to suddenly get eaten by a spam filter and has been seen to fail numerous times as documented on the reg from time to time.

    My answer - all domains with one registrar, auto renewals on and I log on once every six months or so and renew anything which is going to expire within the next few months and I keep an eye on the renewal dates (especially when I do transfers as that appears to be where the dates can go wrong).

    End of the day things go wrong. What is wrong here is the design of the system such that it had a single point of failure and lack of monitoring of their domains.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Re: Did I miss something?

    Instead of banging your head on the wall, stick a reminder in your diary system. Pretty simple and effective.

    Or even keep a list of all your domain in a speadsheet with their renewal dates. Make it a job to check them every few months and renew anything due to expire in the next 6 months for as long as possible.

    stop making excuses - start doing

  9. pctechxp
    Happy

    Perhaps

    They should have used a domain registrar with an auto renewal feature.

    Dare I say 1 & 1?

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