So bl3nd.com was taken from me by GoDaddy. It was taken for a really stupid bullshit reason. I wholly blame it on vincentde@wanadoo.fr and some fucktard in China.
So some idiot decides to include the bl3nd.com domain name in one of this spam emails selling watches.
Here is a copy of the offending email message:
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:50:02 -0800 From: TimeForEveryone Subject: Browse our huge selection today To: vincentde@wanadoo.fr Let me show you what you can get for that someone special this upcomming holiday season. The EntranceLet me show you what you can get for that someone special this upcomming holiday season. The Entrance http://bl3nd.com/8z0e.0
Read more after the jump
So this douchebag uses my bl3nd.com domain in his unsolicited emails advertising some shitty ass watches. Even though it has the bl3nd.com domain in the text, it actually pointed to a website with a .cn extension, something like superassholewatches.cn or some such.
Then I guess the person who owns vincentde@wanadoo.fr reports MY bl3nd.com domain to abuse@godaddy.com for sending spam, even though it had nothing to do with the spamming. GoDaddy sends me a lovely message saying that I am in violation of some spam agreement in their huge ass terms of service agreement I signed when registering the domain. I have been doing ISP work for my employer for 6 years now. Over the years I have dealt with a lot of spam accusations through our servers. Most of the time it is due to spoofing the headers on the messages or actually using a customer’s server as an SMTP relay. Every time that something like that has happened, it has never gone to our domain registrar’s abuse address. They always get sent to the upstream network provider, who then gets in contact with us to help resolve the problem. This didn’t happen with bl3nd.com.
So GoDaddy sends me a few more messages requesting that I either join their spam-super-buddies-awesome-go-lucky group for $199 and keep my domain with them, or pay them $75 to transfer my domain to another provider. Obviously I went to GoDaddy for the cheap prices, not because I enjoy using their shitty products and service. The fuck if I am going to pay them any more money than I already have just to “clean up spam residue.” I replied to their message telling them fairly politely that I do not make money from my website and offering to take down the website so no future “incidents” could occur. Here is their first offer at “resolving” the issue, which I refused with this reply. They promptly replied with this second offer of $75 administration fee, which I also refused.
I took down the bl3nd.com website and redirected the domain’s A record to 127.0.0.1 until this could be resolved. Today I received this message from GoDaddy finalizing the revocation of my bl3nd.com domain. Since I only use the domain for personal things, such as a short email address for signing up for things on non-computer devices, I promptly registered b13nd.com at 1and1.com. The 1and1 website sucks balls, and it takes forever for domains to finalize registration, but finally I had the domain up and running. I have changed all my personal email addresses so they use my new address and updated the b13nd.com domain to point at this blog again.
Now I need to deal with the hassle of a refund for the year and a half more on my registration for the domain that was taken from me. I am considering taking legal action, but I don’t really know how to go about doing that. I consider it an act of extortion to take something like a domain based solely on the occurrence of my domain name in a spammer’s email body. It wasn’t even in any of the headers. That is like saying if I include microsoft.com in all my emails, and one of them is a spam message, then Microsoft can have its domain name revoked. It just makes no fucking sense.
I need to find a new domain registrar with decent prices that won’t fuck around with my domains if someone puts my domain in their spam messages. I will start transferring all my domains as they expire with GoDaddy and they can expect me to not renew my hosting with them after it expires. If you know of a good host and domain registrar, please post a comment and I will look into them.
*sigh*