Scrupuli

Date: 27 June 2017

Thank you, but no, I will not be registering for the @grinnell.edu alumni “lifetime” email address. About fifteen years ago, I gratefully took you up on the offer of an @alumni.grinnell.edu “lifetime” email address which you are on the point of cancelling. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The cancellation makes no sense. On one hand, it is simple and cheap to run email service for a domain. On the other hand, the cancellation is complicated and expensive to the end users. I sympathize with anyone who has lost a supposedly “lifetime” email address. One of the benefits of such an address is providing it to other Internet services, knowing that it will always work. You have cost every such person hours in cleanup, plus the worry that no important services have been overlooked.

For four years, I was the person at Grinnell held accountable for email systems serving over 2,000 people. I would have agonized over such a discourtesy to alumni. I cannot imagine doing it. And I can imagine the uproar coming from the Alumni office if I had tried.

By the way: you have a short memory. You describe the existing service as seven years old, which is either mistaken or misleading. A quick look at archives shows I have been using it since at least April 2002.

Sincerely,

Edward McGuire ’84
Grinnell College Computer Services staff alumnus
Fort Worth, Texas

A WHOIS query for the domain shows inconsistent information. In one section it shows a future expiration date and a status of ClientHold. In another section it shows a past expiration date and a status of Locked.

To resolve the problem for my employer, I took the decision to transfer the domain registration to GoDaddy. However, Hostway have made that impossible.

(i) Hostway have failed to unlock the domain at our request, either through their website or their telephone support center.

(ii) Hostway have interfered with delivery of the domain transfer e-mail to the administrative address of the domain by disabling the domain.

(iii) Hostway have failed to change the administrative e-mail address of the domain at our request, either through their website or their telephone support center.

These are violations of the domain transfer rules that registrars are required to follow.

Hostway's answer has been to admit fault again and cite the original technical problem. But they cannot say when any of these problems will be fixed.

We have filed a dispute with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), alleging Hostway violated the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP).

My employer has been a customer of Hostway for 11 years. Ironically, that may be a part of the problem. Hostway bought Affinity, which bought ValueWeb, who originally created the domain on my employer’s behalf. Integration of old customer records into new systems is never perfect and can have many strange side effects down the road.