Domain Renewal — A Cautionary Tale
Here’s what happens when you don’t check your Outlook Junk E-mail box regularly: your web domain gets deactivated because you missed all the notifications.
This morning I tried to go to my home page, and got a screen saying “DNS error - cannot find server.” Ouch. I called my web host, and learned that my domain had been deactivated. The renewal notices all went into my Outlook Junk E-mail box, and I didn’t see them. Freak-out time. I had registered the domain through my former hosting service on the other coast, in California, and it was 6:30 am Pacific time. Nobody in the office yet. So, I’ve sent their support people a desperate email and am waiting for a reply. I’m writing this post in Notepad, and will transfer it when I’m up and running again. Another thing that happens when you’re deactivated is that you have no access to your account. I can’t even FTP into my files to update pages while I’m waiting. It’s all domain driven.
What I’ve learned: check your Junk E-mail box at least once a week, if not daily. And keep it cleared out and clean. I’ve got more than 400 messages in it now. Although I checked it a few days ago, with so many messages, I missed what was really important. Second, make a tickler file to remind yourself when your domain comes up for renewal. All I have to do is schedule it as an Outlook appointment or a to-do, with a reminder set for the appropriate date.
So, I’ve apologized to the cat for pestering me while I was panicked, and am awaiting instructions on how to get re-activated. I meditate almost every morning, and this is a chance to stand back and observe the surges of adrenaline, the accelerated heart rate and the thoughts about all of it… and to surrender to having to wait out the process of getting up and running again. Live and learn. Aaargh (the sound you make when anxiety supplants “Om.”)
…and here’s what happened: I left a message and the California web host (AZC.com–they’re terrific) called me back right away. They took my credit card number and got my site reactivated within about four hours. Whew!
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We use a tool on our hosting servers called Spam Assassin to help with junk mail. It uses a grading system to assign (negative) points to mail based on certain parameters, such as, does the from: address really match where it came from? Is it written in all caps, and so on. Since it’s web-based, it collects intelligence from live servers all the time and gets smarter as the spammers evolve their techniques. You can set the threshold at which it determines something is spam. At that point, it can rewrite the subject line to include text you chose (we add ***SPAM*** to the subject) Once you determine that Spam Assassin is marking junk mail properly, you can have it delete it automatically.