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GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage
saikou writes "There were previous reports of GoDaddy, one of the biggest domain name registrars, attacking Bittorrent sites with frivolous interpretation of their own Terms of Service (that story was resolved), and now similar events unfold with clients of one of Russian domain registrars Majordomo.ru -- GoDaddy has informed them that all 1399 client domains are now blocked (story in Russian) due to 'many of your domain names were
listed in the Spamhaus.org blacklist or were resolving to a name server
or IP address listed in the Spamhaus.org blacklist' with a demand of a neat '$199 non-refundable
administration fee to the credit card on file for your account for each
domain name you wish to reactivate' or $50 for each domain to be transferred out into another registrar.
I am all for fighting spam, but given how unreliable spam black-lists are such actions simply damage the internet. Instead of affecting people that use spam lists to control the inflow of mail to some degree, all users are effectively forced to be black-list clients.
Now all one needs to shut down a site is a few reports of spamming, and the domain (or even better, all domains of a given small registrar) will be suspended."
Whats next, are you going to tell me that used car dealers can be less than fully honest? SAY IT AINT SO!
Just a big of a threat to net neutrality as that QoS crap
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Maybe something was lost in the translation, but how can registrary GoDaddy block registrar Majordomo.ru's domains? Or is Majordomo just a GoDaddy reseller? This summary is very confusing.
SpamHaus is one of the most conscientious, well-organized, ethical and reliable lists around. Their SBL-XBL list is nothing short of essential in weighting ham and spam. I don't rely upon RBL information alone when weighting ham and spam, but if I did, I'd use spamhaus and nothing else. I'd agree with poster that RBLs are not all that great a single measure and YMMV, but don't spread FUD about spamhaus. They're great.
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.
Once we allow domain registrars to become the Spam Police, very soon there will be political pressure for them to become the Content Police. It starts with spam and kiddie pron -- content that 99.999% of the world agrees is wrong. I guarantee it won't stop there.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
Seriously, an outfit named "GoDaddy" was bound to say, "Who's your daddy?!"
How is this little more then extortion? They have a thinly veiled reason, but let's say the spammers pay up. Their domain is re-activated. What then? How does that stop them from being spammers? This is just GoDaddy grabbing people willy nilly and forcing them to pay for fees they've already paid for.
When is someone going to start running summaries through a spelling and grammar checker or even rewriting them because reading things without commas and necessary punctuation along with incredibly long sentences is extremely hard you know and this particular summary is even more confusing now because we can't tell what the submitter even meant but hey CowboyNeal just always does some copy&paste stuff without caring about the audience right and it isn't important at all if TFA is in Russian and the letter unreadably formatted.
If registers start policing spam on their sites, they will have stepped onto a steep, slippery slope that leads to policing content.
Spam is a problem, but handing even more power over to the registrars is not the answer to that problem.
Registrars, ISPs, politicians, and diapers need to be changed frequently -- for approximately the same reasons(*).
If I had any accounts with GoDaddy I'd be switching to Dotster or one of thousands of other registrars right now.
(*)apologies to Heinlein
I just renewed a domain for 2 yrs with them and I sort of regret it. GoDaddy used to be a top-notch outfit. Low prices and no nonsense. These days it's low prices and lots of nonsense. Between the GoDaddy spam, other spammers they support via special arrangements, and their incredibly convoluted ordering and pricing schemes it's no wonder they're starting to plumb the depths of sleaze.
The thing is their prices are so great it's really hard to justify going someplace else. You can pay up to $35 a year at some of the boutique registrars.
GoDaddy is usually pretty good about pointing out BS like this (eg bogus .eu "registrars", companies taking advantage of domain registration cancellation grace period, etc). I don't much like their style of advertising, but otherwise, they have been a great company to deal with on my personal domains. I'm looking for a place to migrate my business domains as well; this story has given me some second thoughts...
But good for GoDaddy. Spam is one of the scourges of the net and anyone who spams doesn't deserve to be on it.
Besides, check out Spamhaus, it takes a lot more then a "few reports of spamming" to end up on their list. It takes solid evidence that you're a large-scale spammer or provide spam support services (such as bulletproof hosting)
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Just register every domain against a unique entity -- a pain in the butt, but if this is the road we're headed down, I'm sure such a practice will become commonplace given the apparent risks vs rewards.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
The most fucked-up thing about this story is not the blocking of 1399(!) domains, but the fact that fact they CAN be reactivated, if only you pay 199$(!!) for "administration fees". This is not about policing the internet, it's about squeezing more money out of their customers. If this guy pays up, what prevents them from doing the same shit all over again 2 years from now? Hell, I'd like to know what their legal justification is now. Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless they are are hosting the stuff, they have no liabliity here, do they? Huh. I wonder if this can be used as an admissin on their end of being liable for content and actions of domains registered under them? Talk about watching an avalanche begin....
"can't run, can't hide...oh well, return 0"
About six months ago, GoDaddy held 78 (yes, seventy-eight) of our domains hostage. They had all of our sites down (we receive approximately 2 million web server hits per day, about 160,000 unique sessions) for nearly 48 hours while we wrangled control of our domains back.
What was their excuse?
Someone outside of our organization had (for whatever unknown reason, as this is not our business) spammed using ONE of our domains as a the spoofed header-from domain. And yes, we publish SPF records. That wont stop idiots from trying.
Anyway, I personally spent close to one hour on the phone with their "abuse" people (ironic that they consider what we were doing abusive). I explained the situation over and over to no avail. We escalated to their lead "abuse" person. Same story. "Your domain was in a spam and we do not allow this"... When I would try to explain that it was not from us or on our behalf in any way, shape, or form -- we were curtly told "that's not what we've been told."
Now, I had also received the spam complaint. Their "abuse" ("abusive") people were going solely off what was written in this complaint itself. In ALL CAPS, the user cried bloody murder about "I DID NOT SIGN UP AND DO NOT WANT SPAMS FROM THESE PEOPLE"... GoDaddy did not lift one finger to actually investigate the situation and instead took the end users' word for it.
We had to get our lawyers involved. We had to fax them threatening letters. Finally, they so gracefully allowed us to tranfer our domains away from GoDaddy to another registrar for the very low highjacking fee of $50 per domain we were going to transfer.
Again -- this was not a spam from us, for us, or by us. It was a completely third party individual just randomly choosing our domain to spoof.
GoDaddy is a goddamn scam and I hope their company gets burnt someday. It would not surprise me if the spam was created by them for the specific purpose of looting their more deep-pocketed customers through these $50 "re-activation" fees. Month getting slow? Craft up another fake spam. Fuckers.
Sometimes you read the article description, and actually know less than when you started.
This is one of those times.
GoDaddy are not a organisation who should tell the domain registrant what they can and cannot do with their domains.
If GoDaddy does not wish to be associated with the content or the use of the domains, then they should force the owners to transfer them to another registrar, such as preventing the name servers from being added.
I wonder if this behaviour is aginst the ICANN rules.
Why UNIX?
First the Microsoft migration, now this. Anyone recommend a good, inexpensive registar that supports spf?
The problems with false positives are really an externalized cost, which accrues largely to innocent and not-so-innocent third parties, since sometimes spam originates from IP addresses or domains where other legitimate traffic exits (innocently) but sometimes the owners of those domains are supporting the spam activity directly (not so innocently). Of course, some of the costs of blocked legitimate traffic accrue to the user of the spam list, but those folks are making a trade-off and pretty clearly feel the benefits to be worth the annoyances.
Regarding the central thesis that taking actions like these "damage the internet," may I suggest that in fact the odds of "damage" to anyone are probabaly quite low, assuming that the Registrar does proper due diligence before taking such actions. They should not take the mere presense on a blacklist as gospel, but should check the domains directly themselves.
I'm also amused at the likely effect of the "fee for restoration of service". Ticked-off innocent users will be unfairly charged, and are likely to complain very loudly. Such users will probably receive an apology from a help desk worker, and free restoration of service. Guilty users are financing their operation with stolen identity and credit cards and will probably just pay the fee using ill gotten booty. (Aaaarh, Matey! Make 'em swab the poop deck instead!)
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Wrong.
Spamhaus is a completely wreckless group. Spamhaus Captain Steve Linford controls his posse of childish crusaders from his goddamn yacht in international waters. Not kidding. The man lives on a boat outside of the scope of any laws. His lackeys at home base act with wanton disregard for the havoc they are causing. Am I bitter? Yes. Am I a spammer? No way in hell!
We were bitten by Spamhaus not for our actions, but for the action of an individual with an open relay occupying an adjacent IP address range. Spamhaus blocked the entire thing. I emailed them our domain whois and the snobby little bastards at Spamhaus brazenly told me that we were indeed the spammer and that we need to "clean up [our] act" before they would do anything. They went on to talk about "spam payloads"... WTF?!
I hope someone takes them down. I applaud the efforts of others who try to DDoS them. Someday, Linford is going to be surrounded by the Royal Navy and he will hopefully be brought to justice.
The guy who runs GoDaddy is a rabid rightwinger. Any surprise he's gaming the system to make maximum money, though it shuts down free speech (by stealing its name)?
--
make install -not war
Well, to be fair, Enron isn't a typical American company. Their hubris vastly exceeded their ability to cover their tracks, which got them caught!
: )
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I certainly did enjoy their television advertising - I just don't much like all the on-site advertising and upsells. On the other hand, I recognize that the reality of low prices and decent service is that there will be a tradeoff to make somewhere. I can deal with wading through the crap to get good prices, but I rarely recommend their services to nontechnical friends lately, just because all the options can make purchasing quite confusing.
This is brilliant!!! No seriously, i'm routinely pissed off at the limited number of domains which correctly implement SPF. Fear is a great motivator.
.. commerce law is pretty straightforward: if I pay you to do a service (host my website), and a lack of competence in your service results in damages (domain name being suspended), you are liable for those -- so either have me sign a waiver stating "i know you're incompetent", get insurance to deal with it, or hire competent administrators in the first place.
Hopefully now we'll see increased SPF adoption among major ISP's.
ATTENTION FLAMERS/TROLLS: I'm not an idiot - I realize that SPF doesn't actually help avoid this problem, and subsequently keep your mailserver off black lists. But it does bring the topic "hiring a secure+competent DNS/mailserver" into the forefront.
It seems to me that if your nameserver, and your mail server resolve to the same IP address - then you're cruisin for a bruisin, because you probably don't have a terribly competent mail/dns host.
I'm not a lawyer - but it seems here in the US - it allows ISP's that host spammers and thus have their customers domains blacklisted to be LIABLE for damages (the fines that go-daddy levies, plus lost revenue).
Even if the ISP has a terms of service, blah blah
So I guess we can all expect to be signing competency waivers for most ISP's in the near future.
Rock on GoDaddy!
Working at hosting provider's support in Russia I often had to inform clients by sending e-mail's to often not valid addresses about abuse reports. Basically I get no resonse until their site has been blocked. But sometimes we even couldn't do that if abuse was for domain resolving to our customer's server.
Blocking ip's at registrar's layer for me is more preferable, but procedure of unlocking a domain is a bit frightening although. Mainly because of the response time.
And blocking so many domain names is unacceptable at all.
I choose friends for sigs
"Now all one needs to shut down a site is a few reports of spamming, and the domain (or even better, all domains of a given small registrar) will be suspended."
This demonstrates a poor understanding of how blacklisting works and how anti-spam actions are taken. Spammers who have actions taken against them usually have thousands of reports against them, from hundreds or thousands of disparate sources, over an extended period of time.
QoS can be very handy for managing traffic on internal corporate networks. Like many other technologies (e.g. the Evil Petting Zoo), QoS can be applied for good or evil.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
We know that GoDaddy is migrating to Microsoft. Now, the question that must be asked is: does this migration have anything to do with increased spam problems?
Personally, I'm moving from GoDaddy today. There are plenty of other low-cost registrars: 10 cheap (less than $10) domain registrars
I agree that spam is bad. Having to worry about my domains being taken hostage is worse. Contributing to domain registrar policing of content is far, far worse.
If anyone registers a domain name with GoDaddy (or keeps an existing account) they are directly contributing to the loss of freedom on the internet.
I dont se it on any major news site. cnns server can't find it.
it's an old and long discussion. there's no point in repeating things as everybody has their opinion and nobody here's likely to change it.
but i'm sure that EVERYBODY agrees (no matter what they think of privte cases) that mass blocking and such extortion (htf is it sp?) can't be accepted.
On the one hand I use & respect the spamhaus.org RBL/XBL lists. I think they are the most organized and up-to-date spam listing site that I've been able to find & they have helped cut down on spam on our mail server by the truck load. If they say you're a spammer I would be reluctant to argue and I would suggest using their filter to anyone. On the other hand I think GoDaddy is one of the worst registrars out there. I've been fighting with them on a domain for over a year & they won't do shit about it. The registration contact information is in my name, the site content has my name all over it but because a previous marketing company (now out of business & unreachable) registered the domain I can't get a transfer w/o their acceptance. GoDaddy won't listen to anything and they can lick my balls. I basically have to wait until it expires and start from scratch. In the end my feelings on the article/news is: GoDaddy is extorting the customer. Don't use GoDaddy for anything.
Now, don't get me wrong. If godaddy saw a registrant engaging in uncuth activity, I would have no problem with godaddy sending a letter saying the registrant had 30 days to find another registrar. I would not even have a big issue with godaddy not giving a prorated refund. I would not even have an issue with godaddy helping bringing these people to justice. But in this case godaddy notices a venurable customer, perhaps engaging in crimanal acitvity, and is asking for a cut either in the form of protection money or a ransom. This is bad. This is worse than when earthlink negotiated protection money in the contract, because at least they were upfront about it.
So, who are the registrars that are not scum?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
This just smacks of misunderstanding. In orer for GoDaddy to block the sites, they must have some sort of ownership/licensing over the Russian registrar. I don't know if they still do this, but I know they used to allow "reselling" of registrar services under your own name. This Russian registrar could have been one of those. This type of service would have come with certain TOS that may have been violated.
With 1399 domains being reported to have been blocked under this one registrar, and assuming that this is a "reseller" under GoDaddy, this would look like it may have been a case where a person/company created a registrar service for the express purpose of being able to register domain names without question to be able to spam easily.
I'm not saying this is the case, I'm just giving one possibilty of what the case may be as we don't know all the details. And I can't read russian, so those details elude me. Hey, I could be WAAAAAYYYY off base.
If you are looking for an alternative I'd (kind of) recommend 1and1.com
We have several domains with them ($5.95/domain), they are generally OK. Make sure you read the terms though, for sometimes they are not what one would implicitly expect.
GoDaddy has to pay for all those Microsoft licences somehow...
They're saying "Okay, you screwed up, but if you've stopped spamming or fixed the problem, we'll give you a second chance. But, since out butt is on the line here, too, we'll need to make sure it's really worth it to you to get these domains back."
Did a whois on a few of the domains listed in the email and they all had:
NS1.PETERHOST.RU and NS2.PETERHOST.RU listed as nameservers (ip address 80.93.50.53 and 80.93.56.2) doing a search on spamhaus site shows these ip addresses as not listed...
what is the deal?
That's a shame. I've got a lot of domains with godaddy.com but am testing out other registrars and will be migrating more away. It's not just these sorts of reports, but also their switch to Microsoft IIS for parked domains that bothers me some.
The sad thing is that this sort of thing on their part really won't hurt all that much. How much money would they have made on each of your domains for the next *10* years? $30? I'm basing this on $3 profit ($9 - $6 wholesale cost - maybe it's different for them?) By forcing you to leave they've almost doubled that, and they don't have any work to do to service you for the next 10 years either!
If they could simply extract $50 from every single domain-name-only customer to transfer away they would be *far* more profitable than they are now because there'd be less overhead and work to do.
creation science book
Pay the $50, move your domains, chargeback the $50 and/or file a suit in small claims court.
They'll dispute the filing and keep pulling out parts of their license agreement to counter it. Dispute the agreement as being invalid. When all is said and done, you'll be out a few days of work, GoDaddy will have wasted a ton on lawyers.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is Slashdot, use common sense, this is not advice, you are feeling sleepy...sleepy...SLEEPY...you want to buy me a 50" HDTV.)
It's just funny this is reported here since the slashdot review podcast always include nasty ads for Godaddy and they are VERY annoying :)
I wonder if they will report *this* news.
BoD
BoD
I'm going to have to go a bit farther in researching this matter than reading the headline, but my tendency is to give Godaddy the benefit of the doubt. That choice has been influenced by unfortunate events that gripped my father's organization. A year ago some former members of my father's organization decided to end their affiliation with us, except that they chose to attempt a hostile, unlawful takeover instead of forming a separate entity. This minor faction concealed considerable resentment for us prior to the break-away, and they believed that they would be able to easily compel us to acquiesce and hand the corporation over to them. Settlement would not come easily. Long story short, after a year long legal battle and a year's worth of high-priced lawyer fees, the other side got crushed in a pre-trail ruling and had to begrudgingly accept our (relatively) generous terms.
Now here's the Internet angle: A few months into the conflict, they started targeting our web hosts and domain registrars with unlawful DMCA notices and other underhanded legal tactics. We had been advised by one of our attorneys to go with Network Solutions instead of the smaller registrar we had been with since our domain's original creation; we chose to take the legal advice despite my grave misgivings. Predictably enough (given the myriad of horror stories about the company), Network Solutions locked down our domain on the basis of the opposition's lawsuit and refused to unlock it until the termination of legal proceedings. Plus, our domain was locked down while its DNS record pointed to a hosting company that also denied us service. It was terrifically devastating to effectively lose our domain and site for that period, as it had been our official domain since 1996. As for Godaddy, once our site got taken down indefinitely we transferred over to one of our secondary domains that was registered with Godaddy. Godaddy never took action against that domain - we never even got notice from them about the mater despite the fact the opposition obviously attempted the same maneuver against Godaddy that it used on NetSol. The only troubling thing about Godaddy's service was an automated message sent to us concerning an illegitimate challenge to our DNS contact information. Notably, the message claimed to give us only a few days to respond to the challenge before Godaddy would take action, which could have included registration deletion. We were able to take care of that issue with one phone call, and we were even given an unusually candid apology for the previous notice. Nonetheless, that experience was disconcerting. Despite that occurrence, Godaddy did not falter for us even in those adverse conditions, so I'll be staying with it unless and until it no longer merits my appreciation. (And for less important domains, I use the slightly cheaper 1and1.)
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Mail Delivery Subsystem to me Jun 15 (2 days ago)
x bl
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
xxxxxxx@frontiernet.net
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 554 Sorry, your mail server (py-out-1112.google.com[64.233.166.178]) is rejected using sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org. See http://postmaster.frontiernet.net/error.html#sbl-
----- Original message -----
Received: by 10.35.115.18 with SMTP id s18mr2328477pym;
Wed, 14 Jun 2006 21:52:32 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.35.97.6 with HTTP; Wed, 14 Jun 2006 21:52:32 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:52:32 -0400
From: "John Wasser"
To: "xxxxxxx"
Subject: Re: printer setup repair
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
References:
I don't trust spam lists to be accurate. If had recurring problems with SPEWS which have never been resolved. What if godaddy starts to steal domains who are listed in SPEWS? Or what if there's a problem with my web hosting service? No way am I going to be offline while trying to sort this out. Thank god my problem domain isn't on godaddy, but plenty of other ones are (yea, I collect them...lots of people do), and I will be moving them off, or at least moving them when their going to expire. This is bad business practice, really, who made them judge jury and executioner?
.eu fiasco, I got NONE of the domains I wanted because I used godaddy. This is the final straw.
I was pissed off about the whole
bear with me, this is quick and dirty translation: "GoDaddy blocked domains of Russian users" On 14 of June Majordomo company (one of Russian ISPs) received a notification from GoDaddy company (leader of world domain registrars), which stated that domains of 1399 clients of Majordomo were blocked from that day. Why would a leading domain registrar block almost one thousand and a half of domain of a Russian hosting provider using false information was not clear for Majordomo. All attempts to clear up the situation failed. Domains are still blocked. On 14th of June Majordomo's tech support recevied a letter from GoDaddy informing them that 1399 domains of Majordomo clients are blocked starting that day. The reason - so-called breaching the agreement from Majordomo's side. Complaints from Spamhouse.org (Spamhouse.org is a company hosting a database of ip-addresses of servers that send spam.) were stated as a reason for blocking the domains. Complaints stated that Majordomo's clients send spam. Majordomo says there is no evidense to support the claim, and the statement itself is false apriori. Looking at the complaints from Spamhouse to GoDaddy: First complaint is about site viptimeclub.ru, which is not a client of Majordomo from december of 2005. Second complaint, according to the company, does not have anything to do with Majordomo. It has to do with a client of Peterhost ISP instead. Majordomo says that GoDaddy considered unchecked information from Spamhouse.org sufficient to block almost a thousand and a half of domains by changing their nameserver records to: NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM, NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM. Majordomo was not informed about these actions beforehand. All requests to GoDaddy's tech support at Spam and Abuse Department is answered only with one answer. GoDaddy suggests to pay $199 for each domain to restore or $50 for a domain transfer to another registrar. Another suggested variant - wait for domain expiration date to register it again. Majordomo is very worried about the situation and tries to resolve it. Owners of blocked domains are preparing a collective lawsuit. That includes not only private owners, companies, but also state-owned organizations of different countries in Commonwealth of Independent States. All clients are offered free domains in zones spb.ru and msk.ru For a second day ISP is trying to get an answer for unlawful actions of GoDaddy. All they hear back is 'pay up to resolve the issue'.
As it should -- Gmail isn't passing on the X-Orig mailer field, which is why they got spamlisted. Just because they're big doesn't mean they don't need to play nice.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
Think about this...if they really ARE busting up huge spam operations, and costing them lots of money, what do they expect these spammers to do? Many of these people are connected with one sort of organized crime gang or another. You don't extort $400,000 from a mobster, even if he is on another continent, and expect that you and your faily will be safe.
But lets suppose that some of the spammers they piss off aren't the violent type. Many of these spammers have connections to the computer underground, where they buy up zombie networks, etc. They have ready access to DoS utilities and zero-day sploits. I can see that these will most liekly be aimed at GoDaddy and will take out their servers, causing much pain to the innocent bystanders. Consumers don't tolerate downtime in DNS, for whatever reason, and will flee en masse.
So, for a variety of reasons, GoDaddy has made a very bad business decision with this policy. I don't think that the money they'll make in extortion will offset the money they'll lose when everyone else leaves. Not to mention, the fingers they'll lose for each domain they hijack from the Mob.
Spam wars just hit too many innocent bystanders. We're trying to run a business. A small one, to be sure, but communication with clients is still very important. First we were using Comcast for email. But then Comcast got into a blacklist war with mail.ru and no mail was going through either way. So we switched the email over to the mail we have through our hosting account - run by GoDaddy. Now mails have started to be rejected in Russia, probably because of GoDaddy's tactics. I care about spam. But when ISPs start pushing too hard, lots of hardworking people can be affected. This kind of crap has to stop.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Godaddy -- in fact I work for a competing ISP in their same locale.
First off how did this story become okay'd past the slashdot moderators? This story is written with a really biased, bitter, non-neutral point-of-view.
Secondly, you can hardly call it extortion if the Terms of Service explicitly state under what conditions your domain may be suspended or put on hold. I'm constantly surprised how many spammers continue to register their domains with registrars that enforce their AUPs -- luckily there's a "rule" that explains spammers' stupidity.
"I am all for fighting spam, but given how unreliable spam black-lists are such actions simply damage the internet."
Anyone who regularly reads news.admin.net-abuse.email will instantly recognize this as sour grapes from a spammer. Funny how the writer of this story simply wants us to accept that "black-lists are unreliable" and that it's a given fact without any supporting evidence. For me, someone who runs the abuse desk for one of Arizona's oldest ISP's, using the blocking lists works wonderfully and I plan on continuing to use them.
As for Godaddy enforcing the terms of their terms and AUP -- to them I say "good job, keep it up".
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
somone from registering with a GoDaddy reseller they dont like and then spam from the newly registered domain to shut down the reseller.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
This "evidence" appears to be fabricated. The IP address 64.233.166.178 is in fact not listed on Spamhaus at all:
or see the web lookup query at spamhaus.org.
blah blah blah...
OK, I'm sold. I have all my domains hosted at GoDaddy. I must say I have good experience with them but I haven't actually dealt with them in years, other than the automatic renewal. Based on the stories I'm reading here today, though, I'm ready to move.
Could people please post their experiences with alternative registrars to GoDaddy, including pricing, how long you've been using that registrar, and features available?
The shame of it is that I think my primary domains just got renewed a month or so ago.
Breakfast served all day!
Of course you can pay more at another registrar. In fact, you "can" pay me $100 to do it for you. And then I'd go to MyDomain.com and register your domain for $9 per year.
Other posters have listed other places where you can do for much less. You don't even need to stay within this country; the Internet is a global thing.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
after all, they claim they are targeting "russian spammers".
and now they are trying to extort money from them.
I find potential scenario amusing.
In other news today, for some reason there aren't that many women in IT circles. No one's telling them they can't do it, but they just aren't interested. Hmm.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
That being said, I'm also on the other end currently. One of the domains I'm hosting has the word "ebay" within the domain name. I never even realized this. The domain name is also a legal, currently registered and operating corporation within the US. It's been in business more than two years. Its line of business has nothing to do with spam, it deals with supplying certain metal goods to large distributors and large end users within the US and elsewhere. It's the type of business where you confirm the customer is a large end user or distributor, and upon doing this, you don't have a problem sending them several thousand dollars in samples, hoping they'll place blanket orders for years into the future. Without having the knowledge on running a mail server, and currently without the resources for a secondary dns on another ip block, it was decided that GoDaddy would be the host for the mail server for the domain.
A few test emails from the business domain, with an email address that is obviously business related (sales@legitdomain, a few others), everything went through without a problem, great. Add email address to invoices, statements, shipping documents, product packaging, start using to communicate with new customers, suddenly a problem. Turns out if the email contains a couple of email addresses within the body, or if the email contains a couple of urls with certain keywords (keywords normally related to some of the customers' business lines), more than two urls, a combination of an email address and a url, and the emails would be rejected. GoDaddy's smtp server wouldn't accept the email for sending. Not that it would bounce, it would outright reject the email.
Trying to get GoDaddy's tech department just to understand what was going on was difficult. Forward the bounce message. There is no bounce message, the smtp server is outright refusing to accept the email as it is being sent. Send the error message of your email client. Email client is KMail. Here's the instructions for Outlook. Email client is KMail. Here's the instructions for Mozilla mail. Email client is KMail. Here's a screenshot of the popup error message you requested. You're using a non-standard email client. Here's the instructions for outlook. Please send me responses in plain text instead of html. Sorry, our email is sent in html. Please don't send me instructions in
That's just the first few attempts to get the email working. Next, we received every excuse known to man for why mail was being blocked. Your domain is blacklisted by the RBLs. No its not. Your domain is blacklisted by Spamhaus. No, its not. Your ip is listed in Spamhaus. No its not. Your ip block is listed in Spamhaus. No, its not. The email domain you are sending your email to is listed in Spamhaus. Are you serious?
Actual email trouble ticket response:
But if that were the case, they should just be shutting the "mobsters'" websites down, not doing so and then trying to cash in on a reactivation fee.
Since the parent comment was written by an anonymous poster, I would like to add that one of our customers was put in the same situation by GoDaddy. His domain was used in a "joe job" (that is, someone sent out a spam with nonexistent addresses from his domain as the From: header in their spam emails.) He called us (his web hosting provider), furious, wanting to know why his domain name was down. We had received spam complaints as well, but since the spams were not from him and were not advertising his product (he runs a legitimate business that does not use email marketing), we did not shut him down. However, when running a quick WHOIS check on his domain, I noticed that GoDaddy had set his name servers to NS1/NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR-SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM. This was well over a year ago and since then, I have urged all of our customers to switch away from GoDaddy. Some of our customers have responded, "But I don't spam anything!" Of course you don't. It doesn't matter. If any spammer sends out spam with your domain as the From address, even if you had nothing to do with that spam, and it gets reported to GoDaddy, your domain is toast.
For what it's worth, we use eNom and have never had any problems with them. If you host more than a few domain names, get an eNom reseller account (many providers offer them for free) and pay the same price as GoDaddy. I recommend them highly; we have several hundred domains with them right now.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
This "evidence" appears to be fabricated. The IP address 64.233.166.178 is in fact not listed on Spamhaus at all:
The fact that it isn't listed NOW does not mean it wasn't listed THEN.
I have had spamhaus block email from yahoo too. It has been for me quite a conundrum deciding if the the false positives spamhaus gives outweigh the true spam it blocks. They do generally fix these within a couple hours, but it is really frustrating that during those couple hours, all email going to my mail server from yahoo is getting bounced because someone or something at spamhaus caught someone sending spam.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
64.233.166.178 - Server's IP
178.166.233.64 - Your checked IP
Nice try, troll. You're on my foes list.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
This is all fine and dandy if you can prove that they were doing something illegal with the domain. But, spam itself isn't illegal. There are strict laws governing the business (which, most companies don't actually follow, which is why spam is a problem). But GoDaddy is damaging a legitimate business. Spamhaus doesn't care if spam is legal or not for them to blacklist it.
Honestly, I'm all for the use of online marketing that allows you to, and respects your right to, opt-out. GoDaddy shouldn't be able to enforce content on domains, unless the content itself is illegal.
and because "he" is such a $-grubbing SOB, I'm not even going to ask what it would cost to buy one from "him." Go Daddy can "go to .....".
Lindsay Ashford, a promient memeber of the Paedophile community was once registered with GoDaddy until they started to yank his chain and play games with him using Section Seven of their Domain Registration Agreement--specifically the bit about morally objectionable activities. Lindsay was given 24 hours in which to move the site (which he began to do) only to be informed via email the change over was blocked from GoDaddy's end without explaination. The strange thing is while there was never any child porn or illegal content on puellula.comand GoDaddy never explained their actions, the site was also home to many racists and extremists hate sites that were apparently never a problem. It finally took a complaint from Lindsay to ICAAN before the domains were finally restored to him!
GoDaddy is run by people who see no evil in groups such as: Skinheads, Hammerskins, Aryan Nations, White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Ku Klux Klan all whom were still registered with GoDaddy as of roughly this time last year. Given the legal wrangling it took to get the company to turn over the domain names to their proper owners, why would anyone be surprised when they decide to dip into the extortion racket?
Do yourself a favor and find a domain register who is willing to take care of their customers and isn't run by a bunch of racists who think we haven't done enough torture on the Guantanamo Bay prisioners!
--I*Love*Green*Olives
There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. --George Carlin
Hey clown, learn how to query DNS-based blacklists before you jump to conclusions, eh? Due to the hierarchical nature of DNS, you revert the IP address, you moron.
This definitely happened - I can vouch for it. A few days ago my girlfriend was trying to apply for a job via her GMail account, and every time she sent her CV it bounced back saying 'sender's IP address rejected' (or something like that). In the end, I had to send her CV for her through a different SMTP server. Nice going, Spamhaus!
See the X-Spam-Status. They are now on spamcop. Yes, I censored by email address and stuff!
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on ###ERASED###
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,
RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET autolearn=no version=3.1.3
Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com (ug-out-1314.google.com [66.249.92.169])
by ###ERASED### with ESMTP id 1D2C640
for ###ERASED### ; Sat, 17 Jun 2006 13:42:43 -0500 (CDT)
Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id q2so2098158uge
for ###ERASED### ; Sat, 17 Jun 2006 11:42:42 -0700 (PDT)
DomainKey-Signature: ###ERASED###
Received: by 10.67.89.6 with SMTP id r6mr3903452ugl;
Sat, 17 Jun 2006 11:42:40 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.66.238.9 with HTTP; Sat, 17 Jun 2006 11:42:40 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2006 13:42:40 -0500
From: ###ERASED### @gmail.com>
To: ###ERASED###
Subject: Test subject
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Test email. See if gmail blacklisted....
Many in the web hosting industry had to fight with godaddy to get back their client's hostage domains at one point in time.
I strongly discourage anybody from using godaddy.
Read radical news here
I have just been spammed by someone offering me tickets for the Football world cup. A glance at the whois record for their site shows their sponsoring registrar to have been no other than Go Daddy.
is exactly what the situation now calls for. In the beginning, simple reminders on the part of the service provider and a no-tolerance policy toward rogue users would have been enough. Now, with the problem several orders of magnitude greater, we are forced to resort to draconian measures just to catch up. The further things deteriorate, the harsher the solution must become. It's like the US/Mexico immigration issue. The US sat by and watched things deteriorate, and now there's something like 18% of the Mexican population living in the 'States.
I have no sympathy for those that get caught spamming. If we'd been tougher about it sooner, it wouldn't be so bad now.
Bob Parsons, owner of GoDaddy, contributed $10,000.00 US to Perverted-Justice.com, an online vigilante group. Perverted-Justice is the group involved with Dateline NBC. Media groups and journalism scholars have taken Dateline NBC to task for journalism ethics violations regarding their involvement with Perverted-Justice.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
You're funny, stating that : "This story is written with a really biased, bitter, non-neutral point-of-view", but preceeding it with "... I work for a competing ISP in their same locale.". Why now does that sound like someone who tries to defend "its own" ?
... ehh ... strike that, it should be : demands money from all those "collateral damage" victims too ? Yeah, thats the way to go for sure. No proof of their wrong-doing, no help in how to possibly avoid being caught in that "collateral damage"-net, nothing.
"Secondly, you can hardly call it extortion if the Terms of Service explicitly state under what conditions your domain may be suspended or put on hold"
You're quite right, it isn't. But its certainly is when just citing some line outof the TOS to "clarify" their actions without even taking the time to hear two sides of the story, or without doing anything else than lay back and wait for the money come pouring in (one way or the other).
Yes, that does sound suspiciously like a quite a big disrespect to all the people that have got absolutily nothing to do with spamming, but are now the victims of what SpamHous itself regards as "a social mechanism to force non-criminal consumers to put pressure onto their ISP's to purge the (few) baddies amongst them".
SpamHouse does not seem to care about who they hurt in that process. And its something that is talked about regulary in all communities, from simple single-person e-mail users who have not done anything wrong, to (small) website-owners and (small) companies : They all resent being forcibly recruted by SpamHouse for its own "greater good".
"Anyone who regularly reads news.admin.net-abuse.email will instantly recognize this as sour grapes from a spammer. Funny how the writer of this story simply wants us to accept that "black-lists are unreliable" and that it's a given fact without any supporting evidence"
As I allready said, you do not seem to be reading much, but for that newsgroup. Spammers may complain, but so do lots of "collateral damage" victims. And neither GoDaddy or Spamhouse seems to care about that/those people.
And now GoDaddy allso wants
No, I think the article was right : Extortion from a bunch of arrogant bastards.
Oh, by the way : I am a simple consumer, and never had the "pleasure" to have been hit by any of SpamHouses blanket bombings, nor do I like any kind of unasked-for advertising (I positivily hate spam).
But I do recognise biassed bullshit when I read it, and it makes me angry. Especially when it comes from someone who could (and should) know better, being so close to the fire.
Cool - now non-standard headers (the X- prefixed ones) are all of a sudden required? Interesting interpretation of standards... Know what? Messages that contain the phrase "ch34p c14lis" are probably going to get blocked, too, but nothing in RFC822 says to do that. You should lead a revolution or something.
When are people going to realize that blacklists are worse than useless? They obviously don't work worth a shit: spam is heavier than ever. All they accomplish is making life difficult for a lot of non-spammers. Real spammers appear to have no trouble circumventing them. It's past time we gave blacklists the lack of credibility they deserve.
I have a domain with them, and suddenly stopped receiving any email for a few days. So I contacted them to findout what was going on, they said it appeared I was using the domaing for sending SPAM and they have launched an investigation to evaluate the content of the emails sent. I was confused so I looked into it and saw that the SMTP mail forwarding was open on my server and a spammer started using the account. GODADDY by default sets this as PUBLIC. So I contacted them to tell them what was going on and they told me my account might be suspended if I violated TOS. I explained I send around 3 emails a month on my account, and what had happened, but they just kept responding that it is being investigated. At the time I didn't know what was going on, but now I get it. I will be forwarding all my domains registered with back to Network Solutions, I am not a fan of sleezeball operations and extortion.
'Americans' like Bob Parsons feel that any generic term can be trademarked - my apologies, Bob Parsons would probably feel he should have handled all of the .eu domain 'sale' rather than let good old competition that Bob cant hack. I'd never acuse anybody here of being a 'yankee trader' - but you get my drift, if that american pto office which those yanks it appears employ mindless monkeys.
While godaddy might have been honourable in the past the suits are in town - and the godaddy abuse dept must now pay its way.
I've reported godaddy abuse and wrote to 'Bob' on his blog about eurid. why ? for he's an idiot, and I'm glad i dont use godaddy, in the past or now. Mind you i dont own sex.eu, but i managed to get the eu domains on landrush without godaddys 'managerial' incompetance.
Why would the Navy want to surround his yacht? Linford and Spamhaus operate with the help of the British Government. Both the Brits and the U.S. Government use his lists themselves (it's also well-known the U.S. Navy uses Spamhaus SBL&XBL).
Also who said he's in international waters? A photo some magazine took of his yacht shows it anchored in Gibraltar (you can see the rock of Gibraltar in the background). That's not 'international waters'.
Hell, they could just use our data feed to identify spam domains registrered through their nic. http://rss.uribl.com/nic/GO_DADDY_SOFTWARE__INC_.h tml
GoDaddy held my domain hostage because they decided some of the registered information on the account was invalid, and I had failed to fix the info within 2 weeks of some emailed notice (which I never received). I told them that domain names are an Intellectual Property that is recognized worldwide on WIPO treaties and that you need a court order to expropriate one. They closed their service on me and held the domain hostage for over one month, but they finally added it back to my account after threats of law suits.
Seriously, WIPO treaty should guarantee domain names property protections, and a registrar can not just decide to hold them hostage for any reason. No matter what their rules are. Changing or limiting the rights of the owner breaks WIPO treaties and expropriation of property without a legally valid court order, together with demands for money, amounts to kidnapping and extortion. In my case hundreds of businesses suffered a month long break into their DNS servers, which I had to replace with DNS domain registered elsewhere.
I will never make the same mistake of holding all my domains in one registrar.
$50? Except Godaddy wanted 50 dollars PER DOMAIN, which means they are into these guys for $69,950. That's no small claim, i also don't see it going on anyone's credit card any time soon (maybe an AMEX platinum, but do you think they used that to reg the domains?)
Simple solution. Just stop using GoDaddy.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Well, here's a story you won't see on Diggnation.
"This week's episode of Diggnation is brought to you by GoDaddy -- The people who are probably holding your domain hostage right now."
-William Brendel
Since the article is heavy on claims and light on the basis for those claims, I thought I'd dig in to it a bit. Turned out to be a difficult. I couldn't find the registration agreement via Godaddy's web page. I had to search Google for it.
o w_doc.asp?se=+&pageid=REG_SA
http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/legal_agreements/sh
Section 7 is the one that deals with spam. Here's what it says:
7. restriction of services; right of refusal
You agree not to use the services provided by Go Daddy, or to allow or enable others, to use the services provided by Go Daddy for the purposes of:
* The transmission of unsolicited email (Spam).
* Repetitive, high volume inquires into any of the services provided by Go Daddy (i.e. domain name availability, etc.).
If You are hosting Your domain's domain name servers ("DNS") on Go Daddy's servers, or are using our systems to forward a domain, URL, or otherwise to a system or site hosted elsewhere, or if You have your domain name registered with Go Daddy, You are responsible for ensuring that there is no excessive overloading on Go Daddy's DNS systems. You may not use Go Daddy's servers and Your domain as a source, intermediary, reply to address, or destination address for mail bombs, Internet packet flooding, packet corruption, or other abusive attack. Server hacking or other perpetration of security breaches is prohibited. You agree that Go Daddy reserves the right to deactivate Your domain name from its DNS system if Go Daddy deems it is the recipient of activities caused by your site that threaten the stability of its network.
You agree that Go Daddy, in its sole discretion and without liability to You, may refuse to accept the registration of any domain name. Go Daddy also may in its sole discretion and without liability to You delete the registration of any domain name during the first thirty (30) days after registration has taken place. Go Daddy may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used in association with spam or morally objectionable activities. Morally objectionable activities will include, but not be limited to: activities designed to defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, slander or harass third parties; activities prohibited by the laws of the United States and/or foreign territories in which You conduct business; activities designed to encourage unlawful behavior by others, such as hate crimes, terrorism and child pornography; activities that are tortious, vulgar, obscene, invasive of the privacy of a third party, racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable; activities designed to impersonate the identity of a third party; and activities designed to harm minors in any way. In the event Go Daddy refuses a registration or deletes an existing registration during the first thirty (30) days after registration, You will receive a refund of any fees paid to Go Daddy in connection with the registration either being canceled or refused. In the event Go Daddy deletes the registration of a domain name being used in association with spam or morally objectionable activities, no refund will be issued.
Okay, so there are some pretty nasty things in there. One thing I don't see is where they say they'll hold on to the name, refuse to let you transfer it or charge you an extra fee. In fact, they're quite specific: If you spam, they cancel the registration. Period.
I also read the supposed letter from godaddy at http://majordomo.ru/about/letter.htm . Maybe its just me, but the letter smells false. That's not the careful legal language I would expect from a company Godaddy's size faced with this sort of situation. I'm not discounting the possibility that its real, but it smells false. If I saw that letter in my inbox, I'd suspect phishing.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
So who's a good, low-cost registrar with no relationship to GoDaddy?
Since I'm serious, please don't respond with "Network Solutions".
Tech Public Policy stuff
Gaming what godaddy's doing to unjustly shut down a domain (or in this case, 1399 domains) is just too easy.
Imagine having a legitimate website and having it shut down because godaddy has shut down your domain service provider. There are probably several hundred Russians in that position right now.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Anti-China content is illegal in China. If you put or your users some on your .com domain web server, you should have no objection to godaddy blocking your domain and making it impossible for you to move it.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I registered a domain with them for a year. Once it expired, they sent me a bill for over $20 (I forget exactly how much). They charged me the cost of the domain, and the rest was a fee because I didn't renew it, making it sound as though I had broken some contractual agreement to re-up. If I had intended to do that, I would have paid for 2 or more years at the time of registration. So now, they continue to hold my domain name (at the old nameservers, which prevents the NS IPs from being changed), and I am out of a domain name (which was registered for a non-profit organization who now wants their website back online). I refuse to pay GoDaddy for what amounts to highway robbery and terrible customer service. They screw me over, and expect me to continue doing business with them? Not happening.
...by far is DirectNIC.
$15 and no bullshit.
To me they are like the Google of registrars - "do no evil".
They even are based out of NOLA and had very little if any downtime during Katrina. You can read about it and see damage to their building here:
http://interdictor.livejournal.com/
Libertas in infinitum
is indeed valid IMO.
A lot of people de facto dismiss slippery slope arguments, but is valid especially when it comes to government and other human behavior that can be reviewed with history.
Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it etc...
But as far as registrars go DirectNIC is my favorite
$15 and no bullshit.
To me they are like the Google of registrars - "do no evil".
They even are based out of NOLA and had very little if any downtime during Katrina. You can read about it and see damage to their building here:
http://interdictor.livejournal.com/
Libertas in infinitum
This isn't the equivalent of a property owner evicting a tenant for drug violations, this is the equivalent of a property owner evicting every tenant in one of his buildings because one tenant is dealing drugs.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I agree completely that blacklists should be used to score spam, not block it, I can't afford to have mail from my editors (I write Linux tutorials for money at this point) falling prey to the false positives even the best of blacklists are subject to.
So I'm suddenly a dissatisfied godaddy customer. If they don't understand why blacklists should NOT be used for domain name blocking at the registrar level, I can't believe that they have the technical competence to handle the job I'm paying them for.
Tech Public Policy stuff
This has nothing to do with how much they charge for regular domain names. (Does GoDaddy even go down to that price? I thought that was Yahoo!'s first-year deal.)
This is about bad faith enforcement of a social norm, in this case spam. GoDaddy is saying these sites are spam sources and have "shut them down." However, GoDaddy is also offering to re-instate the domain names if the websites they are accusing of violating a social norm pays GoDaddy an exhorbitant fee. If that is not the definition of extortion, I do not know what is. Basically, they are saying these sites can have GoDaddy look the other way if they pay up.
Now, if you want to talk about being like a car dealer: GoDaddy charges regular everyday domain owners $80 to get back any domain name that is not timely renewed. That's right, if you accidently lapse in payment GoDaddy charges you $80 to get your domain name back. Talk about shady.
AUP Enforcement is the RIGHT way to eliminate spammers. I have also worked at a large ISP, and this is one of the best ways to fight spammers. Keep making it costly and more trouble for them than it is worth. Spamhaus is far and above the most reliable RBL in the world today and does more to help in the fight against spam than any other organization I know of. They are VERY reliable in only listing sites and domains with proper justification, and even more important deal with proper cleanup and removal of listings that have been remediated in a timely fashion. The reason you hear all the complaints about RBL's is because they are so effective. Yes, there is the occasional person that gets burnt because of their space being adjacent to spammers, but this also helps ISP's keep pressure on their clients to stay clean to prevent such over blockage. I'm personally familiar with one client of a large ISP that had a hard time kicking a known spammer off of their network due to a long pre-existing contractual obligation, that was able to finally disco them due to Go-Daddy's listing and blocking of dozens of their domains last year. Great job Go-Daddy! Keep it up, us regular users love to see you support your AUP!
Does this mean joker.com can disable/suspended send-safe.com? ROK5500
And gandi.net can stop/suspended clustermailer.com? ROK5611
I had someone sending spam from among my dedicated servers and ISP's didn't try to freaking extort me with a magical bill 100x what i normally ay like godaddy. They asked me to investigate and remove the offenders which was done. Problem solved.
Hmmm... Pie...
Ages ago I once started to do some research on domanin name availability (for my own personal domain) and I started getting online quotes for a specific name from a number of domain providers. But after I checked out what GoDaddy was offering I discovered that my wanted domain name (which was fairly unique) was suddenly owned by Godaddy. And if I still wanted the domain I had to pay for their services.
I then scrapped the idea of getting a domain for a while. As I was a little pissed that some providers do nasty Domain Camping tricks just to get your money. I have since moved on without paying them a cent and got a different domain name trough a different provider.
[homepage]
Dreamhost is only a dollar more per year, and includes privacy guard as a base-level feature (which costs $1/year on GoDaddy), so they're arguably the same price.
Rob
so lets report godaddy.com as a spam domain and get them blacklisted.
Same thing,claimed someone spammed through his site, and charged a 199$ extortion fee. He transfered his domain to another registar and threatened legal action if they refused to transfer. Was lucky it went though. Godaddy is a criminal organization, I smell a class-action lawsuit.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
And they respect the privacy of your information, too.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Digging through the hundreds of domain registrars unassisted wasn't a job I was exactly looking forward to, and the best kind of recommendation is that from happy customers.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Your customers running the challenge-response solution need to be told not to, post-haste. We all know that spammers routinely forge email addresses. Accepting at face value the address on a piece of email that you get of dubious veracity, then sending an email to that address saying "Hey, are you really interested in talking to me?", IS spamming. Have your customers jump on the filtering bandwagon with everyone else, it works extremely well 99% of the time and doesn't scream "My time is valuable, the rest of the Internet can go "#$#"$ off".
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
For those who don't get it, I repeat: Majordomo is not "an underground spam network in the anarchist country". If you think this way, take your nose out of computer and travel the world, it's much different from what you think. Majordomo is a legal and respectable company (yes, it's reselling GoDaddy's services). On my part I'm an independent Mac shareware developer. Thanks Majordomo, now these domains are unblocked.
GoDaddy's actions look like, feel like, smell like, and in fact ARE real extortion. It's absolutely clear, this is one of their ways to earn money. This time they went too far, probably thinking that if Russia is far abroad, such actions won't be noticed. I would recommend to everyone never have any business with GoDaddy, and those who already use it as a registrar, switch immediately.
Did I get any response to my e-mail to GoDaddy? No. Did I get any excuses for their actions? No. Will I get a reimbursement for the loss of profits? No. Anyone who had the same problems with them, send a report at internic and FBI websites, and I hope that scum will be shutdown.
A few months ago my grandmother's ISP started using the sorbs.net blacklist which blocks quite a few gmail servers. At least half the e-mails I sent her were returned because of the blacklist. I eventually gave up on e-mailing her through gmail because it was so unreliable.
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
xxxxxxxx@cogeco.ca
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 554 Service unavailable; Client host [64.233.184.194] blocked using dnsbl.sorbs.net; Spam Received See: http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?64.233.184.194
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
xxxxxxxx@cogeco.ca
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 554 Service unavailable; Client host [64.233.166.179] blocked using dnsbl.sorbs.net; Spam Received See: http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?64.233.166.179
"My fellow Americans, these are not the droids the nation is looking for."
You're right I used illegal as in "illegal and I agree it's bad". So I'll retract that and just keep it at the TOS level: in their TOS they reserve the right to suspend your account if you use it in connection with spamming or phishing.
Donate free food here
This was sorbs, which is well known for having strange crieteria. My own static IP address is regularly listed as dynamic, unlisted after several maisl of complaints to them, then relisted a few weeks after...
However, I agree with you that if godaddy shuts down your website down for actions you had absolutely nothing to do with or for any other reason, that you should pay the $200 to persuade them to turn it back on. But I don't think anyone else should have that problem.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I've had 50 or so domains with eNom for a year now. No problems, solid backend.
And yes, GoDaddy sucks.
barack to the future?
I see quite a few of us are sitting on some unused domain names. I will assume, like me, most of you are just defending a project yet-to-be, or have "inherited" them from some goon refusing to pay a bill somewhere along the way.
There are at least 25 domains I have right now that I have no intention of using any time soon. I would be happy to trade my domains for other domains, assuming I found a name I liked better than the ones I have.
Am I a lone nut? Are you thinking to yourself "hey, me too"? Does a site exist where geeks trade the old and unloved domains? if, not does anyone else have interested in starting one?
Point of clarity: I am not talking about SEDO or any "sell your domain" service. I am envisioning a simple community "trading post"; the only fees necessary would be those to transfer the domians to each other (blame ICANN).
Just putting it out there...
barack to the future?
Sorry for not having an account, but I never did register and don't feel like doing so now.
"GoDaddy has blocked domains of Russian users"
14 June - the company Majordomo (a Russian Internet hosting provider) has received notice from the company GoDaddy (a leading worldwide registrar of domains) in which it was written that the domains of 1399 Majordomo clients were blocked from that day.
No one at Majordomo understands why a leading registrar of domains on the world level would block almost one and a half thousand domains of a Russian hosting provider referring to false evidence. All attempts to clarify the situation have not gotten anywhere. The domains remain inactive.
On 16 June 2006 a letter to Majordomo's support office from GoDaddy came, informing that the domains of 1399 Majordomo clients were blocked from that day forward. The reason is ostensibly violation of the user service agreement with GoDaddy. The the block ostensibly originated with complaints from Spamhouse.org (a company which works with databases of various IP addresses of servers which are implicated in the delivery of spam) to the effect that Majordomo's clients are involved in that same delivery. At Majordomo they say that this allegation not only has absolutely no evidence in and of itself, but is also deliberately false. For evidence, references to complaints addressed by Spamhouse to GoDaddy were brought forward.
The first complaint was founded against the site viptimeclub.ru, which hasn't been a client of Majordomo since December of 2005. The second complaint, by the same company, wasn't founded against Majordomo; the language in it goes about one of the clients of the company Peterhost.
At Majordomo they say that the untried information from Spamhouse.org to GoDaddy is regarded as sufficient grounds to block almost 1,500 domains and change their DNS servers to: NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM and NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM.
No notification was sent about such activities to Majordomo, but in response to questions sent to GoDaddy's spam and abuse department, there is only one answer: they suggest to pay GoDaddy $199 for each domain for its release or $50 to move it to another registrar. Yet another exit proposed by GoDaddy is to wait out the GoDaddy domain registration and register it again.
At Majordomo this situation is very worrisome, and they are struggling to resolve it. At this time they are making a collective search of owners of blocked domains, amongst which are not only actual and important juridicial persons, but also goverment instutitions of the Commonwealth of Independent States. All victims are clients of freely registered domains in the zones spb.ru and msk.ru.
The second day the hosting provider tried to get a reponse about GoDaddy's unsanctioned actions. The answer to the letters and calls was almost the same offers: various payments of money as the possible way of resolving the conflict.
1) Craft a single spam from every single domain GODADDY has.
2) Make a complain about every single spam.
3) Watch GoDaddy take down thousands of websites
4) Watch GoDaddy get sued to oblivion in a class action suit
5) Profit!
Seriously, what happens when they pull thousands of customers sites offline and demand extortion money to reinstate them? Would banks put up with this? Government sites? Perhaps send fake spam from these sites, watch GoDaddy take them down and let someone bigger than the rest of us with very deep pockets, a very long memory and lots of hate to burn crusade on your behalf.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
How unreliable black-lists are? I find them to be very reliable. They tend to be way more reliable than content analysis. The latter could not understand that mail containing sales pitches for music CDs was something I actually signed up to get.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You missed the point of the grandparent. The point is that Spamhaus shouldn't require X-Orig or any other X-* header, as those are not required by standards. It is irrelevant whether headers are added or removed during transit.
Yeah, very few are using it anymore -- and for those that are there is now a global per-email-address message limit of 5 emails.
Said policy was implemented shortly after the spamcop debacle (before it was 5 emails per user per email address iirc) but because of how they score stuff, I'm fairly sure that SMTP server is still on that blacklist (I could be wrong, haven't worked there in about half a year).
Moderation -1
40% Offtopic
30% Troll
30% Underrated
I think those with mod points are taking this post way too serious...
Yes, Godaddy is believed to be selling domain name querries to other companies to supplement their income. Read the full article here: http://ray-solomon.com/2006/06/10/dns-question/
Long term goal: gain control of the Internet
Short term goal: secretly send out spam as an excuse to shut down "spammers" who aren't actually spammers but are actually dangerous free speechers. Wooooooo!
Result: an Internet with content at a 12 year old level and very subtle propaganda at a very sophisticated level. End result is something similar to television: hell.
This is the Internet going from the control of engineers to politicians and social scientists.
they are behind a massive squatting outfit. Reading http://www.rootfest.net/squatters.html will bring you up to speed on it, and there's more information on a few forums, such as www.kenyatechwatch.com
Not only is it not a required header, it's not even suggested or advisable to include such a header, out of respect for for clear harmful security and privacy implications of including a X-Orig header.
For all you non-Russian speakers here is some info from majordome press release ( http://majordomo.ru/about/150606.php ):
First complaint (SBL 36165) referenced in letter is about a site viptimeclub.ru, which is not a client of majordomo at all
The second compaint (SBL 42891) is about even different hosting company at all
All claims have absolutely no relation to majordomo, and yet godaddy blocked 1400 domains...
This is exactly why I explicitly ignore the SORBS SpamTrap RBL. All it takes is ONE "spam" message EVER to be listed FOREVER. It doesn't even have to be spam; any message to one of their fly traps is all it takes. (they are such asses about it, too.) And they LIE about the process to get delisted -- "oh, nobody pays that 'donation' anymore..."
Basically, SORBS is pissed at gmail because they don't do any outbound anti-spam inspection. (distributed sender database thing. I'd have to dig through my email to find exactly what they insist everyone run.)
Majordomo.ru hosts many free mail lists. It sends *large* amounts of e-mails daily. There were many attempts to curcumvent the service and use it as spam relay. Probably some of the attempts succeded to some extent. Most probably, the spam black list service just got them once N years ago listed, and never bothered to contact admins / resolve the matter. Admins over there are quite responsive.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Posting anonymously just because I don't want to incur the rath of Mathew Sullivan (who is infamous for holding a grudge), the owner/operator of SORBS. I had my office email server listed in SORBS a few weeks ago for the exact same reason. My ISP had generic rDNS names for most of the IPs that shared my block (ie. w-x-y-z.company.com where w,x,y and z are the octets of the IP address associated with the record). SORBS listed this because of the rDNS naming convention. They *assumed* that the block of addresses was dynamic and listed them because of this. In reality, this entire block of addresses are static and have been static for a number of years.
Regardless, after literally dozens of attempts to
1). register with SORBS in order to delist the addresses (and having the site fail miserably, not to mention never receiving a "confirmation" email -- I went as far as to tail my mail log -- there was no connection initiated at all) and
2). filling out the contact form to report problems with their terminally-broken website
I have *yet* to recieve a response of *any* kind from them. Screw SORBS and their arrogance. For the record, Habeas (habeas.com) no longer considers SORBS to be accurate (My company being a customer of Habeas and asking them for help when there was nothing my company could do -- Seems like Habeas ran into the same problems that I did).
Nothing in the GoDaddy story suggests that they took actions similar to the nuke switch spamhaus rarely pulls, when they block an entire huge subnet.
GoDaddy is addressing a single owner or group who control a number of websites that are related by ownership. The spam has been coming from or pointing to those domains. In an ongoing spam operation it would behoove the spam operators to maintain fresh, clean domains that can be put to use at a moment's notice once their active spam domains are discovered and blocked.
I've seen nothing to indicate that other than shutting down a single owner or group of owners operating as one, controlling the same domains, is what GoDaddy did. Why didn't they indicate that all of their domains were found to be spamming? Maybe at the time GoDaddy looked at them, they only found specific ones even though Spamhaus points the finger to others as well. Maybe GoDaddy is anticipating due to specific names, same ownership, dormant names almost exactly matching active spamming domains, or for other obvious reasons that the dormant (non-spamming) domains either haven't been caught by them or haven't been put to use yet and are being held to be put to use at a moment's notice.
Either way, if you have a problem with subnet blocking, then you have a problem with Spamhaus, not GoDaddy.
As for my position, this clarification makes clear my position as stated in the original post for those that don't get it. As for the the drug dealer analogy, in quite a few areas including in Europe and Western Asia, it is the duty of the landlord to evict a drug dealer if that drug dealer is dealing drugs from the landlord's property. In some areas the landlord can be fined the first or second time the drug dealer is caught, and the third time the landlord can lose the property. In other areas its possible for the landlord to lose the property on two or even one drug arrest, but in the ones I'm familiar with, it is after a long and protracted battle with the local government, even though the government wins these cases in the end unless a local politician's property is involved.
GO read the TOS. Godaddy has made provision for this already and are now enforcing it.
Enough said.
Read the notice again.
It's $199 OR get unlisted from spamhaus.
There's an awful lot of FUD being posted.
Godaddy have an antispam policy, are enforcing their ToS and they have the right to simply shut down and lock the domains forever.
As for all the carryon about the other registrars with privacy policies - they also mostly have antispam policies and tend to unmask anyone caught spamming.
Gmail is one of the world's single largest sources of 419-type scam email.
Adding to that, they shield the scammers by not showing the originating IPs and refuse to take action against the s[c|p]ammers.
They are fully aware they're listed - the attitude is "WE ARE TOO BIG TO BLOCK".
As soon as they deal with the spam, then they'll get unlisted.