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By: Adam Eisner on October 31st, 2008
Posted in: Events
Tags: ICANN
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Next week in Cairo, ICANN will hold its 33rd international public meeting, which affords ICANN, registrars, registries and other related organizations an opportunity to get together and talk about important topics related to the Internet.
 
Some of the hot-button topics sure to be discussed at the conference, which runs from November 2-7:

• New TLDs: At June’s Paris meeting, ICANN approved new guidelines that effectively pave the way for the creation of up to thousands of new domain name extensions. Since then, ICANN has released some preliminary details on the application process, including proposed fees ($185,000), and procedures (no lobbying is allowed, for example). This is sure to be a topic talked about at length both in the hallways and during sessions.
• Consulting firm CRA International recently published a report of findings entitled “Revisiting Vertical Separation of Registries and Registrars”. This report is sure to gain the attention of registrars and registries, since it discusses the relationship between the two at length. As the roles of registrars and registries are considered in the upcoming round of new gTLDs, this is emerging as an important topic.
• DNSSEC: Short for Domain Name System Security Extensions, the adoption of DNSSEC will be a much-discussed topic, as DNS threats are becoming increasingly prevalent.

 
As usual, we’re headed there to meet with registries, suppliers, and customers, and to participate in meetings with supporting organizations like the Registrar Constituency, which is comprised of registrars from around the world. ICANN meetings are one of the key events where we are able to make our resellers’ voices heard around the world. If you plan to attend, please make sure to get in touch and say hello!

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By: OpenSRS Team on October 30th, 2008
Posted in: Reseller Resources
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We’re receiving numerous reports about emails allegedly sent from Enom or Network Solutions asking registrants to login and confirm their contact details or to renew their domains. We’d like to emphasize that these are NOT legitimate emails and that registrants should NOT click on the URLs linked in the messages.

If you look closely at the messages, you’ll notice that the link you’re being asked to click ends with a .biz or a .asia or a .mobi extension, none of which either Enom or Network Solutions use as their web address.

If you do click through, the web pages that appear are exact copies of the Enom or Network Solutions sites, with the exception of the login box. Submitting your details here sends them to the phishers who can then use your logins to fraudulently register domains for themselves.

Since there appears to be a large volume of these messages appearing this week, you may wish to communicate with your end users about these scams.

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By: OpenSRS Team on October 24th, 2008
Posted in: Partners and Resellers
Tags: Meet the Resellers
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Inspired in part by RoadBurn, the road trip taken by three of the guys from Freshbooks this past spring, I decided to combine pleasure with business by dropping in to see some of our resellers while on vacation in Iceland. The nice part about Iceland is that, with a population of just over 300,000, it was easy to gather all of our Icelandic resellers around one table. We met up at Hressingarskálinn, a cozy Reykjavik café that transforms itself each night into a hip bar.

Sigurdur (“Siggi”) Skulason

Co-founder of Vortex Internet, one of Iceland’s oldest ISPs, Sigurdur is responsible for data acquisition and quality for Teris, a financial software company. He also works as an independent Java developer and is the IT consultant and CFO for Thumalina, a children’s clothing store owned by him and his wife. All this is in addition to his responsibilities running Darval Solutions Ltd., a provider of “organic technology solutions” to companies in Iceland and the UK.

Jón Dal Kristbjörnsson and Fannar Freyr Jónsson

Founders of IO, a web development company whose clients have included many of Iceland’s most prestigious corporations, Fannar and Jón Dal use the latest in open source web technologies to build robust e-commerce web sites. IO has grown quickly and is now looking to expand its reach into the international market.

Meeting Siggi, Fannar and Jón Dal reminded me of a few great truths about working in the Internet business. First, that no matter where you go in the world, geeks all speak the same language. Second, and perhaps with more meaning, the Internet has connected us in a way that no other technology has been able to do, enabling anyone, from the freelance Java developer to the two-man web development shop, to do business all around the world, just like the big transnational corporations.

Iceland has been in the news recently because of the collapse of its banks, and the resulting economic mayhem is hitting small businesses like Siggi, Fannar and Jón Dal’s particularly hard. Being able to do business beyond their own borders is a lifeline in times like these.

I truly enjoyed meeting Siggi, Fannar and Jón Dal and gaining some insights into their business. I can’t wait to meet more of our resellers. Now, I’m off to talk to the boss about paying for some flights to far flung places. The Bahamas might be a nice break from our Canadian winters.

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By: James Koole on October 23rd, 2008
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: Email Service
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As mentioned in the previous posting, we’re in the midst of rolling out a new release of OpenSRS Email Service. The most visible of the changes that will be promoted to the live service next week is the end-user spam management settings page. To help you out, I’ve prepared a short screencast to show you what the end-user experience will be.

You can test it out for yourself in the Production Test Environment (PTE). The new release was promoted to PTE earlier today.

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By: OpenSRS Team on October 23rd, 2008
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: Email Service
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Earlier today, we promoted the latest version of code for our email service to the Production Test Environment (PTE). If you’re one of our email resellers, you should have already received an email from us letting you know about the release, so you can familiarize yourself with the changes before your users get them a week from now. Complete information about what’s changing in this release can be found on the release notes page.

In addition to feature releases, we’re constantly working to improve performance and reliability. Those releases where there is no end-user or reseller impact, beyond an improved overall experience, usually happen ‘behind the scenes’ and fairly frequently.

While we’re talking about releases, I wanted to take a minute to explain our approach. In general, we have two main goals in our releases:

1. Address or remove bugs wherever and whenever we can.
2. Add new features that provide the widest possible benefit across both the end-user and reseller user bases.

For example, in this release:

• To help both end users and resellers, we added a new settings page that gives users the ability to change how their spam is handled. In particular, POP users can now choose to have their spam tagged and delivered to their Inbox. Then their spam will get downloaded with the rest of their mail, and they’ll no longer have to use Webmail to check the contents of their Spam folder. We have a screencast showing this functionality in another blog post.
• To help end users, we added the ability to export contacts. Users could previously import contacts from Outlook-format address book files, and now they can export them as well.
• To help resellers, we’ve added a way to mitigate the effects of phishing attacks targeting their user bases.

Our mission with OpenSRS Email Service is to provide an easy-to-use experience that gives the ‘power user’ enough functionality to keep them happy, while not overwhelming the average user with gizmos and whiz-bang that does nothing to help them read their mail quickly and easily.