Posts by Andy Mitchell

This is how demon.co.uk ends, not with a bang but a blunder: Randomer swipes decommissioning domain

Re: Namesco didn't discover the mistake, I did months ago

With the benefit of hindsight I wish I had told the whole story far sooner. I didn't rush to do this initially as I had been trying to have a discussion with Vodafone to get the demon.co.uk domain name transferred to a not for profit user body. This of course proved a total waste of time.

The guy who purchased the domain name did not seem comfortable about going public at the point when I had given up all hope of Vodafone being reasonable.

It's been a difficult period where knowing how much to say publicly, at each stage, to encourage Vodafone to do the right thing with the domain name rather than just make them angry and more entrenched has never been clear to me.

Looking back I think I held onto the slim outside chance of getting Vodafone to be reasonable far too long and I should of given up and let everyone know the full story sooner.

I saw The Register story on Friday and submitted my previous comment then, but it got stuck waiting for moderation over the weekend. I exchanged a few emails with a US based editor Friday evening who told me the relevant team had gone home for the weekend but that he would pass on the info I gave to them.

This whole demon story has come to a very sad end and it is deeply regrettable that everyone's use of the demon.co.uk domain could not be saved, which in my mind has been the goal since I learned of the planned closure in late April. There was never any real technical barrier to achieving this and Vodafone's real reasons for not engaging are a mystery to me.

Namesco didn't discover the mistake, I did months ago

Namesco didn't discover the fuck up themselves, I spent an hour and fifteen bloody minutes on the phone, sent them an email, was hung up on TWICE trying to get them to sort things out. All the while being told it can't happen by support people who clearly don't understand the basics of how email and DNS works. Vodafone were equally lack lustre in their response. As late at the 8th of September the Namesco support people and a director still didn't know what happened and were saying there was never a problem.

They only acted at all as by a lucky coincidence one of my university friends knew someone outside their support group with a clue and told them what was going on.

I know the guy who registered disabled-domain.com, he was one of several IT professionals I discussed the fuck up with to check I was correct as I've not worked on smtp/dns stuff in decades and wanted to check my facts. I didn't ask him to setup the server but he kindly offered to setup forwarding on my email address after he grabbed it :)

I'm going to give Stephen Ewart (director) the benefit of the doubt, he owned up the day after he last told me it couldn't happen in a phone call and the moment I mentioned the ICO and the duty to inform customers he did say he would be.

I know more but I don't want to say anymore until I touch base with the guy who owns disabled-domain.com

From: Andy Mitchell *************

To: Namesco Escalations Team <[e-mail]>

Subject: Re: Tech/Dev Escalations Enquiry Ref: [ES13234201]

Date: Thursday, July 30, 2020 7:07 PM

I have an MSc Data Telecommunications and Networks and have actually written code to implement SMTP. I've also setup SMTP servers under linux.

When the users local mail exchanger wants to deliver an email it looks for an MX record in the DNS coresponding to the hostname part of the email address. This returns one or more server hostnames and their priority values.

These are still hostnames and they have to be translated into an IP address.

The name is looked up as an A record. Who sets up the A record for disabled-domain.com? The person who buys it can and no one else.

This is explained in the wikipedia page in the "overview" section of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_record

I was actually told the update had already been put live by one of the namesco employees I spoke to even though I pointed out I was literally looking it up from the authoritive server while on the call! That was about the time my call started "mysteriously" dropping.

As for an extension to my exchange package its worthless without the demon email address.