Wow. Everybody was up in arms at Metafilter, Slashdot and other places over the alleged domain hijacking of MacSlash.Com, which is now a generic Dotster “coming soon” page. The MacSlash folks insisted their domain name had not expired which had me worried because I’ve been relying more and more on Dotster.
Turns out, Dostser did not screw up at all. The domain name did expire, but the MacSlash folks never go the notice because their ISP’s — Apple! — e-mail filter labeled it as spam and never sent it on to them.
According to an article at MacSlash.Net,
We have learned that our ownership of the macslash.com domain did in fact expire without our knowledge. The reason we never received any of the domain renewal notices from Dotster is because the email address we supplied to Dotster was a mac.com mail address, thus enabling Vicente Peiro Crespo to register macslash.com. (For the current situation with macslash.com redirection, see this informative post by user samiam).
Recently, it was discovered that mac.com filters email without users’ knowledge or user controls. We discovered yesterday that the folks at mac.com have at some point classified all mail from Dotster as spam, therefore trashing our domain renewal notices without our knowledge.
Not only is it wrong for Apple to filter our mac.com email without our knowledge, but also very ironic that Apple has so severly damaged MacSlash, which was created for the sole purpose of supporting and informing Apple’s customers.
Okay, on the one hand they should have known when their domains were going to expire. I have a nice list on my PDA of all the domains I own and when they’re going to expire as well as notes on my calendar a month in advance saying “re-register” (and with Dotster being so cheap to renew, there’s no point in not doing multiple year renewals, which I’m also doing to avoid this sort of headache).
But still, this is the problem with spam filters and why, personally, I wouldn’t use an ISP that filter out spam. That’s especially odd that they tagged Dotster as a spammer. I know they’re one of the few companies I don’t receive spam from, but maybe they are spamming and I’m just no on their list since I’m already a customer.
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