While the Site Finder controversy has raged on, I've found myself wrestling with an odd but obscure little issue also involving VeriSign/Network Solutions. Let me tell you about it, because it's a case where a little more input from readers should help make things clear.
Last week I heard from a handful of readers who on or about Oct. 1 had received an e-mail from Network Solutions entitled "Retrieve Expired Domain Names." Recipients were informed of one of the domains in their Network Solutions account having recently expired. For an unstated fee, NetSol was offering to renew the domain for another year. Which might have been fine, except the readers I was hearing from knew for a fact that they had already transferred and renewed their domains with a different registrar.
"I called Network Solutions, and the poor gal in their call center could only guess it was 'a clerical error,'" wrote one recipient of the e-mail. "So Network Solutions, the outfit we entrust to keep the DNS system working, is too disorganized to know which domains are actually its responsibility. At least, I hope it's simply incompetence, rather than a venal plan to bill all its former customers in the hope that some just pay up for domains actually registered elsewhere. Why, that would be like rerouting mis-typed domains to its own page to generate ad views, even if that breaks some network setups and e-mail systems!"
It was hard for me to believe even Network Solutions would have sent these messages out deliberately to the wrong folks. After all, the company has faced considerable legal difficulties over the bogus expiration notices they used to mail to other registrar's customers, and those were at least carefully worded not to be outright lies. The Oct. 1 email though was quite blunt and direct - such-and-such domain has expired and you must contact Network Solutions to keep it from becoming "available to the general public for anyone to register."
Sure enough, within a few days three readers who had received the message on Oct. 1 reported that they had gotten a second e-mail from Network Solutions acknowledging it was a mistake. "We have determined that some of these e-mails were inadvertently sent to former customers of Network Solutions," the message read. "Please disregard that e-mail and accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused."
So no big deal, right? It's hardly the first time Network Solutions has made a mistake. Perhaps they just haven't gotten all the bugs out of that new customer database they were touting earlier this year. I did wonder a bit about the propriety of VeriSign/Network Solutions demanding an extra fee from those customers whose domains really had expired - shouldn't such domains just be returned to the general public once the registration has expired? Still, there's probably some ICANN regulation somewhere that says NetSol can do it.
But there was one other thing about the situation that made me curious. I noticed that all three of the readers whose experience I was able to confirm had transferred to the same registrar: GoDaddy.com. That seemed like an odd coincidence. GoDaddy is a popular low-cost registrar, so it's not inconceivable that all three NetSol refugees I heard from just happened to have moved there. But GoDaddy is one of the companies that's suing VeriSign over the Site Finder boondoggle, and there's probably not a lot of lost between the two companies in general. So I had to wonder if in fact only GoDaddy customers had received that message in error.
A GoDaddy spokesperson told me that the company had indeed heard reports from upset customers about the Oct. 1 e-mail and had contacted Network Solutions about it. Network Solutions had responded quickly by sending out the second e-mail, she said. GoDaddy was not in a position to know whether customers of other registrars had also received the message in error.
A Network Solutions spokesperson said the company "pulled data incorrectly which led to the inadvertent e-mails sent to some customers" including some transferred domains. "The data pulled was not registrar specific, but rather it was pulled by the date of expiration (within the last 41-60 days)." When I asked if that meant that customers of other registrars besides GoDaddy's had received the message, the spokesperson reiterated the inadvertent emails were sent to some customers "regardless of the registrar."
So was it just a coincidence? Looking around the Internet in a few likely places, I have been unable to find anyone else complaining about the Oct. 1 e-mail from another registrar. Perhaps other registrar's customers are more tolerant than GoDaddy's? I don't know, but it sure seems to me most people who received this message in error would want to make a stink about it. So if you got one, or you know someone who did, let me hear from you now at Foster@gripe2ed.com.
12:39:52 PM 
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