Sponsor's Message

Although the seemingly endless tide of fly-by-nite registrars who send out pro-forma invoices charging highly inflated prices for domain names you don't have and don't need appears to have abated somewhat, there's still some jiggery-pokery going on.

First-up, if you use your own domain name for your website or email, are you sure that your name actually appears in the registry records?

Recently I've received a number of emails from people who thought they'd registered a domain name through their ISP, web designer or hosting company, only to find out later that the name isn't registered to them at all.

What has happened in these cases is that the ISP, designer or hosting company acting on behalf of the customer has registered the domain in their own name rather than that of their client.

To make things worse, the customer has no way of altering, or requesting the alteration of the records relating to that domain, other than to go through the company they originally dealt with.

This setup can see customers effectively held to ransom.

The argument forwarded by most agents is that it's just a whole lot simpler for them to hold the registration since they may, from time to time, need to alter technical information and because they'll be the technical contact anyway.

Readers Say (updated irregularly) Domain ownership... - Peter Retrospective Disclaimers... - Jared E-mails sent to wrong... - Peter Domain name registr... - Debbie E-mails sent to wrong address... - Mike Retro Disclaimer... - BobK Have Your Say

However, problems can start if that company goes into receivership or just gets greedy. If they own your domain and you wish to change providers they may might be reluctant to make the changes required to facilitate such a move.

You could probably sue them and, after paying out a small fortune in legal fees, win back your domain -- but in the meantime you'd be out of pocket and quite possibly off the air.

So, if you have your own domain -- check to make sure that it has actually been registered in your name, just in case.

In other domain-related news, I received a few complaints about an email sent out by Domainz about a week or so ago.

Some claimed it was spam -- but that's probably not strictly true since, as far as I can tell, all those receiving it are actually Domainz customers. However, if anyone who isn't a Domainz customer received an email with the subject "Domainz Fee changes and Domainz Ad-oNZ" then I'd love to hear about it.

However, the email was interesting mainly due to the disclaimer that came with it. This disclaimer said in part "If you have received this email in error, please contact Domainz by returning the email and destroying the original."

Just how do you "destroy" an email?

Does simply deleting constitute destruction? Maybe not, after all we now have people who specialise in the forensic recovery of data from disk drives and they repeatedly tell us that deletion doesn't actually remove data from your drive.

I'm getting a lot of emails that carry long-winded disclaimers on them these days and quite frankly it annoys me.

If someone sends me an email then *they* have the responsibility of ensuring that they've sent it to the right person and that they've not included any information I didn't ask for that they might consider confidential.

I'm blowed if I'm going to fix their mistakes for them -- life's too short.

Common courtesy dictates that when someone has obviously sent you something in error, you drop them a note advising them and delete the message. But when senders decide to include a half-page of threatening legal prose on the bottom of their emails which tries to lay down a long list of terms and conditions associated with receiving that message then I say "get stuffed."

I doubt (but I'm no lawyer) that such disclaimers are even enforceable under law, since they appear at the bottom of the email and would only be read after the body of the message. Are retrospective disclaimers even legal?

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