Well, I have done some digging and have found out where the inconsistency lies, which starts to revolve around the same type of reasoning we are already occasionally being added to the Spam Cop blacklist for short periods of time.
Domain Direct, although we treat them as any other reseller, does have enough of an association with the Tucows Wholesale staff and offering to share the same ideals and ethics as we do in terms of marketing, such as spamming and other questionable techniques of communicating to non-clients. To quote an individual who leads up their team: "We do not and will not mine the whois data base of any domain name registration provider" What has happened is that Domain Direct had sent out an email to their EXISTING client base and due to the fact that their model reflects a yearly subscription based service, if a client transfers a domain to another registrar during a paid period the client may still have active tertiary services. This means that Domain Direct does not have an automated way of shutting down the account until the END of the paid for term. Basically what has happened is this subscriber tagged the email as SPAM even though they still had an active subscription or live account with Domain Direct and they had no way of determining the fact the domain had been transferred to another registrar. Please let me know if you have any further questions. Peter Ejtel Sales Manager Tucows Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Robert L Mathews Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2003 3:19 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: SpamCop At 3/6/03 9:01 AM, Edward Gray wrote: >Early this morning the opensrs mail system that is used for sending OpenSRS >domain renewal notifications was >blacklisted by SpamCop. > >This has happened several times in the past specifically with SpamCop. This >occurs because a registrant receives the renewal notice and in error, flags >it as a Spam message with SpamCop. We are required to send at least 2 >renewal notices to the owner of every domain as per the ICANN Registrar >Accreditation Agreement. Yep, some of them are incorrectly reported domain name renewal notices: http://spamcop.net/w3m?action=checkblock&ip=216.40.33.45 It looks like SpamCop has manually delisted the system, which is good. Note that SpamCop will take action against one of their users who incorrectly reports messages as spam, preventing the same person from causing the same problem in the future. So in this case, TUCOWS should report these kinds of "spam reports" to a SpamCop deputy: http://spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/167.html Although there is no "list" involved, pointing out that the person does in fact own a domain name should be sufficient to get the user's SpamCop access revoked, which will at least prevent these particular people from doing it again. While I was there, I noticed something disturbing at: http://spamcop.net/w3m?action=checkblock&ip=216.40.33.61 This spam report appears to be some kind of promotional message from Domain Direct. It appears from the headers that the offending message was sent to an address "@whois.gkg.net", which is only used for GKG.net WHOIS listings. (It was probably sent to the WHOIS address listed for kairosnet.com.) So on the face of it, it appears that Domain Direct was sending messages to addresses harvested from WHOIS. I assume that's not actually what happened, because it's too monstrous to believe :-) -- but there's something odd going on there that TUCOWS should probably investigate. ------------------------------------------------- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
