Archive for: May, 2010

Celebrating the Domain Pioneers at the .com Gala

Last night in San Francisco, California, VeriSign celebrated the .com 25 – the people and companies that, over the past 25 years, helped shape the web as we know it. This was part of the 25YearsOf.com celebration. In addition to the .com 25, Verisign also recognized a select group of Domain Pioneers. We’re proud that Tucows, and Elliot Noss, Tucows President and CEO, were on that select list of those recognized as pioneering people and companies in the domain name space.

VeriSign visited our Toronto offices a few weeks back to give Elliot the opportunity to talk about how the Internet has impacted his life, and about where he sees things heading in the future:

The Internet is people

Look back all the way back to 1994, when Tucows.com software library launched in Flint, Michigan, you’ll see that there was a focus within Tucows around the idea that the Internet is made up not of wires and routers, but of people.

Tucows.com used a network of thousands and thousands of mirrors – mostly Internet Service Providers – who provided a local copy of the Tucows software library to their customers as an additional feature on top of an Internet connection. In 1999 Tucows extended this network of relationships by adding domain name registrations to the mix through OpenSRS. We leveraged the existing relationships that we had in the Tucows network to build out a global network of domain sellers who used the OpenSRS backend to power sales and management of domain names to their customers.

These days much is made of Web 2.0 and the social qualities of the Internet. But the truth is that the Internet has always been a synergy of technology and people. Without the physical interconnections, the Internet wouldn’t exist and conversely, without the Internet, many of these social connections wouldn’t be possible.

What was originally a way to connect computer networks to computer networks quickly morphed into a way to interconnect the billions of people on planet earth with each other at the speed of light. Mobile, ubiquitous Internet access leads to a more social Internet which empowers people through the Internet.

This generation of kids who grew up with the Internet have come to expect to be able to access it on demand, wherever they might be. They forge relationships with each other via the web, they communicate via the web and they seem to be constantly connected to each other via the web.

Much thanks goes to VeriSign for putting together the 25YearsOf.com initiative. We’re honoured to be recognized as part of this select group of Pioneers. It’s a testament to vision that both Elliot and Tucows as a whole share–that the Internet is more than a vast physical network but that it is an extension, and an extender of social interactions between people that makes the world wide web so incredible and powerful.

How do you .com?

Along with the gala in San Francisco, VeriSign also announced a new contest, “How do you .com?,” which invites people to share their personal stories of how a .com website has changed their lives. The contest runs through August 31, 2010, and entrants’ stories will be voted on by the public as well as by a panel of judges notable in the Internet industry. The Grand Prize is $10,000, First Prize is $5,000, and Second Prize is $2,500. In addition, the contest will feature weekly drawings for an Apple iPad between June 21 and August 31. For more information about the contest go to http://www.howdoyou.com.

The contest provides a great way for you to extend the 25YearsOf.com celebration to your customers. Do make them aware of the contest and other happenings around 25YearsOf.com and encourage them to think about the impact that the Internet has had, and will have on their lives in the future.

Lower price for .MOBI domains

Starting on June 1st, 2010, dotMobi is lowering the cost for new .mobi domains to $7.25USD. That’s good news for OpenSRS Resellers because like other generic top-level domain names (gTLDs), OpenSRS sells .mobi domains under our cost-plus pricing model. Thanks to that pricing model, you’ll see that registry price decrease passed down directly to you.

It’s pretty easy to figure out your new cost for new .mobi domains:

Take the new Registry cost of $7.25
add the ICANN fee of $0.18
then add your OpenSRS Management fee

Assuming list pricing, that totals out to $10.43.

The cost for renewals and transfers is unchanged ($12.00 plus ICANN fee and OpenSRS Management Fee).

As mentioned this all goes into effect on June 1st, 2010.

The results are (almost) in!

Several weeks ago, we sent out an email asking for our resellers to help us improve our level of service by filling out a short survey. Thanks to everyone who participated – the response rate was great! Although we’re still crunching the numbers a bit, we’re getting some valuable insight from the survey responses, and we’ll be sharing some of that with you soon.

In the meantime, we’d like to congratulate Curtis Hays, our lucky reseller whose name came up in the draw to win an iPad! Curtis will be receiving his new toy shortly!

We really do value your input, so keep an eye out for our future blog post where we’ll share some of what we’ve learned from the survey results.

Holiday Hours: Victoria Day (May 24)

Happy Victoria Day from the OpenSRS team! We’ll be closed this Monday May 24th for a long weekend.

Our Technical Support team continues to be available 24/7 to assist you.

Please note that during this closure, there will be:

No orders or requests processed for the following TLD’s: (.at, .fr, .ch, .li, .it, .dk, .com.mx)
No special processing for .ca (registrant transfers, conflicting and municipal registrations) or .eu/.be (redemptions).

Here are the hours by department:

Technical Support - Regular hours

Payments - Email support: payments@opensrs.org

Compliance – Closed May 24th (Monday)

Making OpenSRS Email Filtering Easier to Deploy and Use

Starting next week, we’re making our Email Filtering easier to deploy and more intuitive for users. The change is quite simple–instead of delivering mail to a webmail-based Spam Quarantine by default, we’re instead making it possible to tag the spam, add an optional and configurable header, and then deliver the spam through to the users’ regular inbox (filtered into a spam folder, either server side, or in the client).

Making things easier

We looked at how a lot of software anti-spam solutions worked and decided that if we wanted to allow you to get rid of the headache of operating something like Spam Assassin on you own email server, then we shouldn’t create any additional headaches for you to make the switch.

So, we set out to replicate the setup of many of these self-run solutions with the anti-spam software in our data center, maintained by us. That meant allowing you to configure a specific header to add to messages flagged as spam and allowing you to tag the messages as spam in the email subject line.

The net result is an Email Filtering service that is effectively “hot swappable” with your existing setup. To your users, the change can be invisible – they don’t need to change their email client, or be retrained to visit a Spam Quarantine to view spam email. They can continue to receive their email, and messages flagged as spam as they are today, using your own setup.

Fewer hassles

Of course, you get the benefit of not having to maintain those spam filters or worry about things like blacklists, or other abuse issues.

Here’s a graphical representation of the new email flow. You can see on the left, with the Spam Quarantine, users have to deal with two interfaces to email. On the right, with “pass through” enabled, it’s a single point of contact with both wanted email, and spam (tagged and delivered to the spam folder).

Email Filtering starts at just $0.10/mailbox per month. Consider the time spent maintaining your current setup, including downloading and applying rules changes, or modifying settings, and we think you’ll agree that having us filter your users’ mail is the best way to go.

Learn more about OpenSRS Email Filtering.