> Many mail servers would flag you for spamming. Don't get me wrong, I > agree completely with the reasoning and the logic, but my website > contains a hidden email address and any email that appears at this > address results in the sender's host being blocked.
Then your domain name gets deleted and I have proof that I made very possible effort to contact you when you come crying about your email address expiring, especially if it is a working site. Which happens on a regular basis. We receive two-three "emergency" emails per week from owners of working sites whose site is down because they did not renew. They may consider it an emergency but we don't, since we have made every effort to contact these individuals prior to the expiration. And many do not fill out the payment form when they send the emergency request but want us to immediately turn their domain back on, before we even receive payment from them. We notify them to fill out the order form and their domain will be renewed after payment is received. Depending on the registrar their domain may be offline 24 hours or more. But this is their fault, not ours as we attempted to reach them. We help them as soon as possible after payment is received but they must take responsibility for their site being down. We made every effort to reach them. I also file a complaint with the blocking authorizes against you, as I have proof of an ongoing business relationship with you that allows me to contact you. The legitimate blocking authorizes then will remove you from their service for filing a false report. Or at least most of them claim on their web sites that they will remove a user who files such a report. I also don't process the renewal of your domain name but notify you to find somebody else to service your domain. So your domain remains offline longer as resolving the email server issue is more important to me than responding to your inquiries concerning your domain name being offline. So perhaps you need to reconsider your automatic action against all emails that come to that address. Frankly I don't believe there is such a thing as a "legitimate blocking authority" but that is a different discussion. >All that being said, if you humanly inspect the site, you should be fine. That is how we get the email addresses from the web site, by logging onto the web site and trying to find email addresses that the website owners provides for users to reach them. Plus the webmaster@ email address. So it appears we would not have a problem with you nor your site. :) > Agreed. Personally, a domain is too low profit to be worthwhile wasting > a stamp. Also the time in generating a letter which costs more than the stamp. Which is why we are evaluating dropping all domain registrations except for hosting clients. We operate domain registrations as a source of advertising but at this point are evaluating whether it generates enough new hosting business to make it worth the tech time to support it. Especially those unhosted domains that are allowed to expire after one year. And you can't tell in advance which domains fall into that category. > In the case of a hosting client, yeah. On the other hand, if the > expense isn't a regularly occurring monthly charge, then I could see some > customers getting upset over the "unauthorized charge" We only do this for hosting clients. Too many domains are allowed to expire each year to assume that each person wanted the domain renewed but forgot. If a non-hosting client does not renew then we assume they intended to allow the domain to expire. If a hosting client complaints they intended the domain to expire and cancel the hosting service we point them to the section of the hosting agreement that requires a 30 day notice. We then offer to refund their payment and take over the domain name and use it for advertising our sites. Most decide to keep it but we do get stuck with a few. But that is the price of providing good service to your clients. And if they host with another company then that company should be monitoring their service to ensure the domain is renewed, not us. We do not automatically renew the domains for those who do not host with us. They should switch to our service and have their domain protected. Which we tell them when they complain about their site being offline. :) For non-hosting clients, we make the site search the week before expiration and send a final notice. If it is not a working site, we send a final notice to the admin and billing email addresses. If the domain expires we do not renew it. Hence the "emergency" requests as most hosts do not monitor their client sites but it only takes a script to hit the site once each day to see if it responds. > In all fairness, if you only receive one message every couple weeks from > your business domain, how many people would miss it if it disappeared? We operate twelve business sites of our own plus manage several for clients. We check each of them daily for activity and if we were only receive a message every couple of weeks we would be working on the site design to fix the problem. But I understand what you are saying. Many so called business sites are just vanity sites. Unfortunately it comes down to personal responsibility again and the domain name owner has a personal responsibility to keep his contact information up to date and check his web site on a regular basis. So threatening to sue us when he loses the domain is a waste of his time and ours, as he doesn't have any legal grounds but we must take the time to explain everything to him. Which is why we search his web site for email addresses prior to expiration, as proof that we made every reasonable attempt to contact him the week of expiration. Of course he can claim that if we did not telephone we did not make all reasonable effort but then we point him to our web site and registration agreement which states email notification is all we provide. He can sue his large ISP if he can prove they caused his problem. :)
