Red Cube Hosting

Archive for February, 2008

Unethical companies monitor the publicly accessible WHOIS database and obtain registrant contact information as well as domain expiry dates. Using the information, they mail domain Registrants an official looking document, months in advance of the renewal date, encouraging the Registrant to renew the name now to protect themselves from losing that domain name. When the Registrant renews the name by paying the invoice, the domain is not only renewed, but a Registrar transfer is initiated to the unscrupulous Registrar. Depending on just how unscrupulous they are they could then increase their charges or attempt to hijack your domain.

The easiest way to avoid these scams is to check very carefully that any domain renewal notices come from us. If you are unsure, please contact us via the contact details on our website and check. The other people who may legitimately try and contact you about your domain will be Nominet, the UK domain name registry.

How to avoid these scams:

1. Ask us to enable our free WHOIS Privacy service for your domain. This hides your name, address, email address and telephone number from would be scammers and spammers. Legitimate contact can still be made via the WHOIS Privacy system.

2. Ask us to enable Domain Locking - this will prevent your domain being transferred until it is disabled again. You will always have the ability to remove the domain lock yourself from our control panel.

We’ve made some more improvements to our anti-spam service. The most important one being the introduction of Greylisting.

Greylisting works by temporarily rejecting email from people who have never emailed you before. Any legitimate, standards compliant, mail server will retry delivery of the email after a short period. Many spammers use non-standard mail servers which are simply designed to “fire and forget” in order to send the most spam in the shortest period of time - they rely on volume.

This also has the advantage that it increases the likelihood that the realtime blacklist (RBL) and distributed clearing houses we use will detect any spam.

This means that the first time (and only the first time) you receive an email from somebody it may take a few extra minutes to arrive. There is, however an increase in performance on our mail servers gained by reducing the amount of spam we process. We continue to monitor the situation and will as always work to ensure we are providing the best service to our customers. Please do contact us if you think this is causing a problem for you.