You would have to be blind to miss all the bad press GoDaddy has been getting recently. Most notably their practice of suspending domains they deem to be spamming and demanding a $199 reactivation fee or $50 to transfer out. Now that’s bad enough but imagine if they decided to do that to your entire client list.

…Events unfold with clients of one of Russian domain registrars Majordomo.ru — GoDaddy has informed them that all 1399 client domains are now blocked (story in Russian) due to ‘many of your domain names were listed in the Spamhaus.org blacklist or were resolving to a name server or IP address listed in the Spamhaus.org blacklist’ with a demand of a neat ‘$199 non-refundable administration fee…for each domain name you wish to reactivate’ or $50 for each [client] domain to be transferred out into another registrar.

OK – well of course I am against spam but IMO real time blacklists (RBLs) don’t work, it’s just too damn easy to get on them (or get someone else on them). While Spamhaus is one of the better RBLs they have the usual problem with shared IP’s – i.e it just takes one site on the server to get everyone’s email stopped on the box. In fact this exact situation happened recently to us with the recent PHP form exploit. Not malicious spamming by anyone’s book but a simple form exploit that anyone sharing your server could be affected by.

So what is particularly bad about this case is that they seem to have held hostage Majordomo’s entire portfolio of 1399 domains – guilty or not – due to a percentage (what %?) found in Spamhaus. Not sure how I would even begin to try explaining that one to my clients.

Story continues over at Slashdot

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