Slashdot Mirror
MacSlash Up at macslash.org
M. Uli Kusterer writes "After the recent problems with its .com domain expiring and the notice from dotster being eaten by mac.com's over-eager spam filter, MacSlash now has registered the www.macslash.org domain. So, tell your friends and surf over there again :-)" It came back up for me over the weekend. Read of the events that led up to this. The short of it: mac.com, without MacSlash's knowledge, filtered as spam their domain renewal notice, and someone swiped the domain when it expired.
...legitimate email being eaten up by anti-spam filters.
-Turkey
-Turkey
When did this get implemented? As far as I can tell, my mac.com address is still the target of way too much spam... this morning, I had at least 10 emails that I would consider SPAM. Previously, this had been as high as 30...
So it appears that Apple needs to look at this spam filtering system -- anything that removes DNS renewal notices but not the mountains of real spam needs to be fixed.
dennis
I hate to say it (b/c I do enjoy reading Macslash), but I don't think this story is really worth running again.
There's a lot of blame going around, but the fact is that the MacSlash management forgot to reregister their domain name. Things in life get screwed up all the time for various reasons. Being well organized requires some discipline. If they had marked in their calendar when their domain was about to expire, they would have contacted their domain registrar prior to losing the right to their name.
Frankly I think they're incredibly lucky that the guy agreed to give them the name back. Bully for them.
But this isn't a big story guys. It's been discussed already. Let's move on with talking about the Mac platform, not the missteps of a website that talks about the Mac platform.
Since they didn't get the notice, how long after it expired before it was available? I've seen expired domains sit for months sometimes but you never know.
What I am wondering about is this: when my domain is about a month from expiring, I start to receive PILES of [real] mail from registrars who want me to transfer over to their service... all these letters say stuff like "your domain is expiring..." on the outside of the envelope.
It makes sense that they missed the email, but how did they miss all the letters? [or were they [un]lucky enough to not get them?]
-braxton
It seems Dotster (his registrar) sends a fair amount of bulk mail asking people to switch to their service. It seems Apple filtered them due to their "bulk" status. Alot of spammers avoid this by using alot of unique addresses to avoid classification as "Bulk SPAM". This is probably why you see a fair amoung of SPAM on mac.com
"Creation is messy. You want genius, you get madness, two sides of the same coin." --Steve Jobs
Shouldn't slashdot be posting a retraction of the inaccurate headline "MacSlash Domain Stolen"? Or is slashdot now taking the editorial position that trademark infringement is stealing?
Troll this down all you want, it's just my 2c.
fyi
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
They brought this on themselves. You have to carefully manage your domain-name or things like this just.. well.. happen. It's nobody's fault for actively filtering out spam email, it's Macslash's for not keping track of when they registered the domain to begin with, and for not paying either well in advance, or using automatic debiting on a credit card.
Pointing fingers at them for malfeasance is a bit of an overreaction. These guys have been providing a service to the Mac community, and IMO, thanking them is more appropriate. And what about the individual that acquired the macslash.com domain? His/her actions are akin to keeping the wallet they found even though the rightful owners' address is in it.
cat
apple.slashdot.org is a day late and a dollar short.
keep up the great work, guys.
The short of it: mac.com, without MacSlash's knowledge, filtered as spam their domain renewal notice, and someone swiped the domain when it expired.
good reason not to use crappy webmail..
http://macslash.com/
why would somebody swipe the domain only to put up just a link to the real one? there's no ad or anything on that page. The page forwards to http://www.merc-net.com/md/macslash.htm, which seems to be some kind of communications web portal. There is a meta tag that I don't understand:
<meta name="forwarder" content="abc.dnsix.att">
perhaps somebody noticed and snatched it before a squatter could get it, but then they should be offering it back to the macslash people...
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Plugging their competitior twice, isn't that just the sweetest thing?
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
I would have thought that dotster would have known that their email wasn't accepted by mac.com... I believe that a fairly significant chunk of folks use that address.
(also, I find it ironic that the guy from dotster says that he's getting a bunch of email about the problem. At least that email was written by actual people!)
Gawd, you are just as bad as those trolls that post the "I thought we hate the MPAA" messages every time /. reviews a movie.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Hello, wake up. I just read the whole comments thing, and through my (broken) Spanish, I can understand some of what Vicente was saying. Basically, he was saying that he legitimately got the domain name, that he is not a thief, that he is now being FLOODED with insulting e-mail, and that he's trying to be helpful. So, what I'm saying is that there is apparently a little bit of misreporting here. Also, I'm guessing that crapflooding this poor guy is not going to get him to give the domain back - why don't we leave him alone?
But again, these are just MHOs.
--pi
It sounds like someone a bit more savvy sold Vicente on this scam, so the "true" thief's identity remains hidden. Vicente looks like an innocent samaritan, when in fact he's the victim of a scam. But again, I don't know much about these things, so I guess it's possible that Vicente is doing all this out of the kindness of his own heart.
ScienceSeeker.org
Hello fellow Pi! Pi