afongen
Sam Buchanan's weblog.

VeriSign snafu

July 13, 2002

Back in January, I got email from VeriSign customer service that "your VeriSign domain name registration for lscmetalfab.com and others ... are up for renewal soon." This was a lie:

1. lscmetalfab.com is not my domain. I had in fact never heard of it until VeriSign prompted me to renew it.
2. The domain was not in fact due to expire until November, eleven months after I received the email.
3. The other domain listed in the email, afongen.com — which I haveregistered, as you may have noticed — was also not due to expire anytime soon.

I contacted VeriSign and they told me, "We will look into it. If you receive any further notices for this domain, please disregard them."

Right. I forwarded the message to the contacts for lscmetalfab.com, so they would know that VeriSign was screwing up like this. By a bizarre coincidence, this company happens to be in the same city where I was living at the time.

Well, guess what? I got another renewal notification today, this time warning me (a "Valued VeriSign(r) Customer") that my domain afongen.com and others are about to expire. Another lie.

1. I am no longer a VeriSign customer. I moved my registration over to PairNIC a couple months ago.
2. afongen.com doesn't expire until November 2003. I will renew it long before then.
3. They again listed lscmetalfab.com as a domain that I have registered.

Grrr.

So I'm going through the same rigmarole, only this time I can tell VeriSign that I am not a VeriSign customer, so why in the world are they contacting me?

I haven't really been using spam filters lately, but I think that I'm going to set one up and route any messages from verisign.com, networksolutions.com, nsi-direct.com, etc. to /dev/null. On the other hand, these are rather amusing.

And if you're from Linders Specialty Company and happen to be reading, consider VeriSignOff.