Tuesday, March 9. 2010
A bunch of years ago I had an idea for an espionage/action/thriller story where a bunch of mercenaries planned a coup d'etat against the regimes of either Columbia or Cameroon for the sole reason of gaining control over the country's top-level domain registry and making billions off of typo-squatting .COM.
Truth did kind of mimic fiction (minus the coup d'etat part) when Kevin Ham cut a deal with Cameroon to wildcard .CM root. Well now Columbia has decided to overhaul it's .CO root level domain and open it up to second level registations for non-locals.
.CO is being marketed ostensibly as 'Associated globally with the words "COmpany," "COrporation" and "COmmerce"', but let's face it, the activity in this TLD is going to be driven primarily by the fact that it's a typosquatter's wet dream for .COM and a goddamn headache for everybody else with a net presence built mainly under .COM.
As we've observed before ( here and then here), most registrars like to whip their customer base into a frenzy to "grab your name" under every TLD that tries to tart itself up as some pseudo-generic and trots itself out as the latest "must-have" domain. Most of them aren't "must-haves" and a lot of them are quite frankly, a waste of time and money.
So it is with a heavy heart I have to come out and say this. If you're operating a serious net presence on .COM, you probably should go out and get the .CO version of your name, as much of a royal pain in the ass as that is/will be. Not to mention expensive. The base cost on a non-Columbian Sunrise claim will be somewhere north of $250 (non-refundable) and for landrush there will be a small non-refundable "application fee" but the first year registration will be over $200. Then after landrush, the cost will settle down to a more digestible level, only about 3 times the wholesale base cost of an actual .COM.
Nice work if you can get it.
We don't want to make a bad situation worse, but we won't work for free either, so we'll try to keep our markup reasonable.
What I am interested in is what our members think of this. If you have a few moments, please take the following survey on whether you will participate in .CO. For each response we'll donate $1 to the charity of your choice.
Feel free to comment as well.
Friday, February 26. 2010
We are pushing back the launch of the new website and user interface until April 12, for a few reasons - not the least of which is that we will be shorthanded through the month of March on a few fronts. (March break, time off with the kids, Confoo, etc).
What we will do next week is post instructions on how to start trying out the new platform in advance and begin talking about what's new under the new system.
Tuesday, February 2. 2010
I've fielded a handful of queries from members about the coming DNS usage quotas. Some have looked at the "query usage" links beside their domain names and are surprised at the numbers they are seeing.
One thing to be aware of is that we've discovered that the January numbers were tabulated incorrectly and are too high. To gain a truer insight into your usage, look at the January 28th figure. We are currently running a process to fix up the stats to reflect actual usage and expect to have those online within the next couple of days.
But I'd like to take an opportunity to convey the following principles behind this to our member base:
Monday, February 1. 2010
We will soon be launching our new member interface, a ground up rewrite of the current members.easydns.com website. It has been a long time in coming, like all complex projects, it always goes over-budget and takes longer than expected.
The current user interface works, but it's pretty stale. There are so many layers of upgrades, fixes and plugins underneath the UI you see when you log in, that it's hit the point of diminishing returns: every time we add a feature or commit a bugfix, it seems to break something else. Despite the fact that most people dislike change, especially user interface changes, it is time to move on to the next level for easyDNS.
Monday, April 13. 2009
As of tonight you may notice when you log into your member control panel a new item beside each of your domain names called "query usage".
This links you to a monthly histogram depicting the DNS query counts for the domain. Right now we are just compiling aggregate lookups across all
RR types and it only counts the lookups that resulted in SUCCESS. To get the exact count for a specific day, hover your mouse over the date.
Use the "previous / next" text links in the lower right to scroll backward and forward by month. Keep in mind, we have no data available prior to March, so everything zeros out if you go back further than March 2009.
Wednesday, July 23. 2008
With the ramifications of the DNS cache poisoning bug beginning to sink in and the first exploit code being published today, we are anticipating an accelerating number of queries from our members about this and what they can do to ensure their own DNS caching resolvers are safe to use.
We can tell you about two public DNS resolver systems you can use. One external, one we just launched ourselves:
OpenDNS: User friendly DNS lookups - with anti-phishing protection
We've never been in the DNS resolution or DNS resolving business. There are companies like OpenDNS who are. We know the people who run this company, they are competent and knowledgeable and we consider their service safe. That said, they also provide protection against phishing domains and they do trap NXDOMAIN traffic. Yes, they do monetize failed lookups via a search suggestion page with PPC links, individual users do have the ability to turn this off.
easyDNS launches DNSResolvers.com: no frills, pure DNS lookups - fully patched
Some of our members have expressed reservations around using any DNS resolver that "alters" the traffic in any way, including typos and non-existent domains. Which is good news for us, because we've done this so fast we haven't had time to build anything like that even if we wanted to. What we did want to do is provide a couple of DNS resolvers for use by our members (or anybody else) who just want to know they're using a system run by people who are actively following this situation and are proactively keeping their own resolvers and caching nameservers as secure as the protocol allows.
With this in mind we've turned up DNSresolvers.com today. No website, no user interface, at the moment it's just a couple of resolvers with the latest security patches in place and that will continue to do so, open to use by anybody who wants. We have no idea where this will go, and it's not really an official easyDNS "service" per se. But we wanted to do something to give our members options.
If you want to use DNSresolvers.com, the details are as follows:
cache1.dnsresolvers.com -> 205.210.42.205
cache2.dnsresolvers.com -> 64.68.200.200
Tuesday, August 21. 2007
We've had customers asking us for a simple SPF wizard to help generate Sender Policy Framework (SPF) data. There are a few out there, but we have set up one at wizard.easySPF.com or spfwizard.com.
As we iron out any usability bugs we will roll out some integration hooks to make it easier to pull the output from the wizard into your zonedata, but for now it's the old cut-and-paste.
Friday, May 18. 2007
Happy Victoria Day weekend, eh? We're marking the holiday by filling a gap in our service offering. When .CA rolled out, we wanted to capitalize on our position as a premiere DNS provider by bundling our world class DNS hosting with our newfound status as a Registrar (this was very new to us at the time).
Things are very different today and many of our customers have expressed the wish to have the option to register .CA's without DNS and have a price point that reflects that.
So today we introduce the .CA domain registration at $19 CDN. As with our other gTLD registration and parking packages, this one comes with basic email aliasing/forwarding, so even if you just want to reserve a .CA domain name, you can start using it for receiving email right away.
Happy May Two-Four!
Wednesday, January 24. 2007
We are now tracking the Spamhaus The Policy Block list. This list allows service providers to define blocks of IP addresses where e-mail should not originate from.
This service should reduce spam and load on our mail systems.
From the summary at Spamhaus:
The Spamhaus PBL is a DNSBL database of end-user IP address ranges which should not be delivering unauthenticated SMTP email to any Internet mail server except those provided for specifically by an ISP for that customer's use. The PBL helps networks enforce their Acceptable Use Policy for dynamic and non-MTA customer IP ranges.
Users who have been added to the PBL (most probably by the originating ISP that you receive Internet service from) have recourse; you can go to the page below which will explain how to get unblocked.
More information can be found at this location; http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/
Wednesday, December 13. 2006
Over the last few months, there has been a steady increase in spam and virus emails. Due to the nature of our mail forwarding service, this sometimes leads to ISPs and free email services being forwarded a large number of "junk" email. In the past, easyDNS has always strived to limit the amount of filtering that has been imposed upon the mail forwarding service that we provide. Unfortunately, in the case of Hotmail and MSN, we have been reluctantly forced to subject all forwarded email destined for Hotmail and MSN email addresses to "greylisting". More information about greylisting can be found here, at the following URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting
In short, greylisting is a method where a piece of email being relayed to one of our mailservers is initially deferred. This means that it is not accepted upon the first attempt, rather, the sending mailserver is told to relay it again at a later time. With standard mailserver configurations, such as those generally maintained by your ISP and free email service provider, the email will be re-sent at a later time, usually anywhere from 5-20 minutes. For spammers and machines sending virus emails, they generally don't operate like standard mailservers, and usually won't relay their email again at a later time. Right there, at least 50% of spam and virus emails have been effectively stopped.
Unfortunately, with greylisting enabled for all email destined for Hotmail and MSN email addresses, this means that those emails will be subjected to a delay every time they are handled by easyDNS mailservers. This has been put into place to limit the amount of blocking that we have endured by Hotmail and MSN. The idea is that it is better to have email relayed a little late, than not at all.
However, we do understand that there are some who rely on their email being relayed to their Hotmail and MSN addresses as soon as our mailservers receive it, which is why we do have a procedure in place to have your specific Hotmail and MSN email addresses removed from greylisting:
Simply send an email to " support@easydns.com ", with your domain name(s), and the email addresses (along with their destination Hotmail and MSN email addresses) within that domain that you would like to have exempt from greylisting, and we shall update the filter as soon as possible.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us via email, at " support@easydns.com ", or toll-free at 1-888-677-4741.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this implementation.
Monday, October 23. 2006
We are pleased to announce that server monitoring is now available for beta users.
This feature is being rolled out under the DNS-plus service level and will be included as a component of that package. Server monitoring allows members to setup service tests on their hostname (A) records and our system will check those services and send out an alert if the service is found to be down or unresponsive.
For more information on this please see:
http://support.easydns.com/server_monitoring.php
During the beta period users need to have the "beta flag" set on their accounts. To have this flag set, please contact support.
We have promoted SPF checking on inbound mail forwarding from beta to normal production. All members can now optionally enable SPF checking on inbound mail destined for their domains via the "email" settings in their domain options.
If the SPF validation equates to hardfail for a domain with SPF validation enabled, our mail servers will reject the inbound message, all other outcomes will be prepended into an additional SPF-Received: header in the message and processed normally. Members can then add additional filters keying on this header in their mail clients or downstream MTAs.
For more details on SPF and how it works, please see easySPF.com
Wednesday, October 11. 2006
The .mobi top-level-domain goes into realtime live registrations today.
That means you can now register .mobi names like any other TLD. If you own joesgarage.com or joesgarage.ca you can probably grab your .mobi starting today.
One other thing: the .mobi registry is forcing minimum 2-year initial registration periods.
Thursday, June 29. 2006
We are now enabling Sender Policy Framework (SPF) checking for email destined to our members' mail forwarding or backup smtp spooling domains.
If the SPF validation equates to hardfail for a domain with SPF validation enabled, our mail servers will reject the inbound message, all other outcomes will be prepended into an additional SPF-Received: header in the message and processed normally. Members can then add additional filters keying on this header in their mail clients or downstream MTAs.
This feature is currently in beta , if you wish to be a beta tester for SPF checks, please contact support and ask to have your beta user settings activated.
For more background on Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and how it can reduce email forgery, see our SPF tutorial and the SPF homepage
Monday, May 1. 2006
We are pleased to announce the addition of our easySMTP™: Outbound mail service to the DNS Plus service level.
This service allows members to send outbound mail through our system and is useful in a number of situations.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns regarding the service, please let support know.
|
