Monday, July 16, 2007

Shut down by spam ... arghhh

I own a domain, adrr.com. I've had it a long time, my e-mail used to route through it. Sigh. Not any more.

Because it is a four letter domain, it is on the list to get spam -- lots of spam, tens of thousands of spam a day -- all of it sent to e-mail addresses that don't exist, but might. Enough that my hosting service had to shut down my e-mail server and briefly had the domain itself shut down.

Many four letter domains are worth a lot, a couple hundred thousand dollars or more. Mine isn't (not to mention, if it were, I'd probably sell it and move everything to srmarsh.com where I keep my slow moving negotiation blog -- having a four letter domain isn't that important to me). Many generate a lot of revenue. Mine doesn't, http://adrr.com/living/, for example, just doesn't have much commercial cachet.

As a result, the "solutions" that cost "only" fifty or a hundred dollars a month just were not reasonable.

But if you've wondered where I've been, I've been "snowed" under, so-to-speak, by spam.

If I could reach back and actually touch them, I'd arbitrate and then collect under the terms of service. Anyway, that is where I have been.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's no fun. I hate spam! I hope you get it cleaned up soon.

Anonymous said...

Stephen:

Have you considered having your email hosted by Google Apps? It's free for personal domains. And, they apply their spam and virus filters to all of your email (it will look and work like GMail, or you can still use Outlook Express, etc.).

http://www.google.com/a

Good luck!