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Today I learned, much to my distress, that I had not received the final "this domain is about to expire" e-mails from Dynadot relating to my main domain name, tristatelogic.com.  So of course, the domain expired over the weekend, and ALL inbound e-mail stopped working, not to mention that all of my DNS for all of my other domains stopped working also, because the DNS for all of those was based on name servers within the tristatelogic.com domain.

When I learned what had happened I first just tried to log back in to my Dynadot account to renew the now-expired domain, but had some small self-created trouble with that, so I actually called Dynadot to make inquiries. When I did I was told that that their final expirations notices to me had actually begun bouncing (as undeliverable) on the 26th of October, THREE DAYS BEFORE my tristatelogic.com domain had actually expired.  This seemed very odd, so naturally, I investigated.  As a result, I learned the following...

In a nutshell, Dynadot is sending their outbound e-mail, including those all-important expiration notices, from IP address 208.78.242.180.  They have used this same IP for outbound e-mail the whole time I have been their customer, i.e. since at least March, 2010.  That was fine up until they decided, recently I gather, to change their corporate web site setup.

My e-mail server, as many other these days, does quite a lot of filtering to try to thwart inbound spam.  One check it performs to see if the sending SMTP client is a ``legitimate'' one or not is to check that the reverse DNS name associated with the current SMTP client's IP address can successfully be subjected to a _forward_ DNS lookup, and if the result of that forwward DNS lookup yields the same IP address as the current SMTP client.  If not, then
the current SMTP client is deemed ``suspicious'' and mail from it is rejected by my mail server.  (A standard option to enable this exact kind of forward/reverse DNS checking is available in Postfix, Sendmail, and many other popular
mail servers.  So you know, it isn't as if I just dreamed this idea up on my own.  A *lot* of sites do this exact kind of spam filtering on ``suspicious'' SMTP clients.)

So anyway, Dynadot sends their outbound e-mail, including expiration notices, from 208.78.242.180 as I already noted above.  The reverse DNS name associated with that IPv4 address is "www.dynadot.com".  Up until at least Spetember 14th of this year (2011) if one did a forward DNS lookup on that name, it resolved back to 208.78.242.180, so that was great.  E-mails sent from IP address 208.78.242.180 passed the forward/reverse DNS check and all was well.  However some time within the past month and a half, Dynadot, in its infinite wisdom, re-vamped their web server setup and *now* the name "www.dynadot.com" no longer
resolves to 208.78.242.180, but rather it now resolves to three different IP addresses, 204.236.131.125, 184.72.32.121, and 50.18.115.182.

In a nutshell, Dynadot has broken the forward/reverse DNS correspondence that they formerly had in place for their outbound mail server.  The result is that many of their customers may no longer even be receiving e-mailed notices sent by Dynadot.  (*I* definitely missed some such notices, and it screwed me up rather gigantically.  And yes, I _am_ kind of pissed off at Dynadot, because this most certainly *was* THEIR FAULT, as I have established, unambiguously, and as I've described above.)

Speaking only for myself, I personally think that domain name registrars should exhibit a better understanding of DNS than Dynadot has shown of late.  As a result, I will be moving my domain registrations to a different registrar in the near future.  I cannot afford to have my domain registrar drop the ball like this.  The result in this case was that ALL of my domains became completely dysfunctional over this past entire weekend.  I am not amused, and I now have to re-sign-up to about a zillion mailing lists I was on, because most of those mailing lists certainly unsubscribed me once they saw that e-mail
to me was bouncing.  That occurred due to the fact that my main domain name expired, and that in turn was due to the fact that I did not received the final expiration notices for that domain prior to expiration, and that in turn
was directly due to Dynadot's DNS screw up.


Regards,
rfg

That is correct.  The IP address has changed.  

It was a simple oversight by one of our Engineers who was making improvements to our site.