A couple people have asked to be able to put our IP addresses in their personal nameservers. We don't encourage that since the problem is almost gone. If you put our IP addresses in your personal nameserver and we later change those IP addresses, you won't be able to reach us and it might take a while to figure out why.
Others have asked if they could use a cesmail.net email address instead of a spamcop.net email address. Those don't work in general because we might have different users who have already picked out the same name at both of those domains. In the future, cesmail.net isn't any more protected from something like this than spamcop.net is. However, we are in the process of moving all of the domains involved to another registrar, one that won't suspend our domains at the drop of a hat.
10/31/03 - 22:52 EST
Several people have asked if our DNS servers are messed up or if our DNS information at the registrar is wrong. That's not the case. Joker specifically
cancelled or suspended our domain for reasons of their own. At that point,
there is nothing we can do from our end to fix it. We don't actually use their
DNS servers at all, but only Joker can tell the master DNS servers on the
internet about our domain.
The good news is that we believe Joker has fixed the problem. It will still take at least two days for the problem to go away entirely. They don't answer emails or phone calls, but we can see that their database seems to be back to the correct information.
Moving forward, we have already begun procedures to transfer all of the involved domains to a different registrar so this can't happen again in the future.
10/31/03 - 10:59 EST
Several people have noted that there is indeed contact information on the
joker.com website. We are in the process of contacting them to try to get this
resolved. Unfortunately, because they have been handing out this bad
information and most ISP's cache that for a couple days, the problem will
persist even after joker fixes it.
10/31/03 - 10:10 EST
If anyone in Germany can actually call joker.com, please do so and ask them
why they have suspended the domain and if they can turn it back on. We have
had NO communication with them about this, either before or after they shut it
off. The email addresses listed them them in the domain registration are valid
and we read those addresses.
The following newsletter was just sent to all email subscribers:
Hello again from SpamCop.
We need to let you know about a situation which is ongoing at this time. It appears that the registrar for the spamcop.net domain has essentially shut off the domain. We're still trying to figure out why. We know for sure that the domain doesn't expire for over a year. It's possible they were tricked into shutting off the domain by people impersonating us or something like that.
This will cause mail problems for the next several days. We are doing everything we can to mitigate the situation, but it won't be perfect. Only the spamcop.net domain is affected. If you use one of our other domains, you should be in better shape.
If you currently forward your email to your spamcop.net address, you should probably shut that off immediately until after the weekend. If we POP your mail for you, that's fine as our system is running normally. If people email your spamcop.net address directly, it's possible that some of that will bounce over the next few days.
To retrieve your email, you may need to change your POP server settings in your email program to retrieve from pop.cesmail.net instead of pop.spamcop.net. This applies to everyone, regardless of what domain name your email uses. The pop.spamcop.net name may go away over the next couple days until we can get this straightened out. If you use webmail, you should be able to login to http://webmail.cesmail.net to read your email. If you don't want to change your POP server settings, you can just wait a few days or read your email using the webmail address.
As I said, our domain registrar is the one that did this. Our registrar is joker.com. Despite their name, they're actually a respected domain registrar based in Germany and are one of the older registrars out there. If any of our German users can figure out how to call them, that might be helpful as they don't advertise any phone support. We've been working on this since last night but haven't heard anything back from them yet.
Until we can get this resolved, you may have problems with email, simply due to DNS issues. Our system is up and running, the DNS is all correct, we're doing everything we can. However, as the registrar, joker.com can effectively shut off the domain all by themselves and that's what has happened.
The latest news will be at http://mail.cesmail.net/news.php. If you have specific questions, please feel free to email us. Because of the magnitude of this problem, we may not be able to answer status questions. Please just keep an eye on the news web page.
Jeff
SpamCop Support
service@cesmail.net