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<p><font face="Tahoma">I would ask Namecheap for a discount. Once
companies start paying for their mistakes, they may get better
at fixing them. Even if they don't, you get some compensation. <br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Tahoma">Another idea is for you to set up a gofundme
once a year to help with the costs. I would gladly contribute.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Tahoma">Regards,</font></p>
<p><font face="Tahoma">Tony Sarabia <br>
</font></p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 5/4/2024 1:09 AM, Carl Oppedahl via
E-trademarks wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:ce0a211f-4967-4777-9e75-265f233ae89e@oppedahl.com">
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<p>Hello fellow listserv members.</p>
<p>About 56 hours ago, some internal system at Namecheap got a
wrong answer. And the e-Trademarks listserv got shut down. Now
it is working again, after 24 emails back and forth and an
escalation to higher-ups at Namecheap. That's the executive
summary. here are the details, for those who have the time and
energy to read all of this.<br>
</p>
<p>Namecheap has some internal system that tries to identify
outbound spam from its customers. There seem to be at least
three triggers in this system.</p>
<p><i><b>A first trigger, </b></i>it seems, is the event of a
large number of emails being sent at about the same time, that
have the same subject line. There is some internal system at
Namecheap that watches for such events, and when it happens, the
system triggers an alarm, and the Namecheap customer finds that
their outbound emails are shut down.</p>
<p>Never mind that this behavior is exactly what a listserv (an
email discussion group) is supposed to do. If the listserv were
to avoid ever sending a large number of emails with the same
subject line, it would mean the listserv is broken.</p>
<p>The listserv function is a particular advertised feature for
the level of service that I am paying for at Namecheap. The
level of service at Namecheap that I selected, and am paying
for, specifically provides for the customer being able to
operate a listserv. So at this level of service it ought not to
be the case that normal listserv behavior would be wrongly
tagged as spam.</p>
<p><b><i>A second trigger,</i></b> it seems, is the number of
emails sent per hour. The level of service that I am paying
for at Namecheap permits as many as ten thousand outbound emails
per hour. The event that happened that led to the listserv
being shut down was the sending of 1227 emails during an hour.
(It was the monthly reminder to subscribers of their membership
in the listserv, that happens every month on the first day of
the month.) You will note that the number 1227 is smaller than
the number 10000.</p>
<p><i><b>A third trigger, </b></i>it seems, is related to some
internal monitor of something like the level of the processor
workload for the part of the hosting platform that handles
outbound emails. Our listserv is hosted on some particular
physical machine that also serves a couple of dozen other
Namecheap customers. They call this kind of service "shared
virtual server" service. Namecheap has some system or device
that inspects all of the outbound emails on that particular
physical machine, to try to figure out if they are spam. And
this system, I guess, does not scale well. It gets completely
overwhelmed sometimes and then all of the outbound emails from
all of the Namecheap customers who are hosted on that physical
machine get clogged up or something.</p>
<p>As I say, it looks like this spam filter on the outbound emails
was poorly designed and does not scale well. Something like
that. Perfectly normal listserv behavior like a few hundred or
a thousand emails somehow overwhelms the spam filter system.</p>
<p>What probably needs to happen is the Namecheap people doing
some kind of throttling inside their software that provides the
listserv function. Instead of sending out all one thousand
emails at once, which I guess overwhelms some downstream
processor, they probably need to make some adjustment in the
software that provides the listserv function, so that it
dribbles the emails out over the span of a few minutes instead
of all at once. Or, better yet, they would need to rework the
software that they use to monitor for spam so that it can scale
well enough to deal with normal listserv behavior.</p>
<p>There have been four times in the past few months that
Namecheap shut down my listservs (including e-Trademarks) and
eventually turned them back on after a lot of struggle. These
four times were:</p>
<ul
style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px; list-style: disc; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;">
<li style="box-sizing: inherit;">May 1, 2024, case number
PRB-650-91372</li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit;">February 21, 2024, case number
JET-420-91825</li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit;">November 6, 2023, case number
LZW-313-84957</li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit;">January 9, 2023, case number
KHX-716-74404</li>
</ul>
<p>For now, the Namecheap tech support people tell me that they
have taken some internal step to keep such shutdowns from
happening again. My guess is that this is not some
across-the-board internal step that would protect all of
Namecheap's customers (that use the listserv function) from
ill-advised shutdowns of service. My guess is that this is sort
of a sticky note on the computer screens of a bunch of people in
the legal-and-abuse area of Namecheap, and the sticky note says
something like "for this particular physical hosting server, and
for this particular customer who is one of the many customers
hosted on this physical server, when this alarm sounds, do not
automatically shut down the user's outbound email function." <br>
</p>
<p>Anyway, hopefully the listserv will continue to function for
some time, until the sticky notes dry out and fall down from the
computer screens. <br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
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