J man writes
“”sent from gmail account.
(tucows mail problems again. they are going to lose customers if this keeps up. they probably already have. I should be moved to another email provider by early next week.) please confirm ya got this. Cheers, mate. / j”"
***FS*** Last year they had some big problems with IBM and their data center ..I’ve heard the mail thing from another person and have personally had some problems getting products rolled out.. I think they’ve had a lot of staff turnover in the last year and some of the brain-drain has caught up to them. I still think highly of Tucows. They are a great company.. They have a bunch of really great seasoned core people who are terrific at what they do… But this mail thing and other issues are just not like them.
They are only $56 million market cap, there are 2 domainers that can buy them with. I won’t mention there two names, they are both canadian.
Tucows has been a nightmare for some now imho.. they did a great job in the beginning but the entire opensrs system is filled with problems from inabilities to transfer to rogue resellers refusing transfers etc..etc..
beware!
by the way frank, love your blog.
If Mark Cuban has anything to do with a company, stay away. The guy is a real loser. Sure, he’s a billionaire loser but I hope I never have to deal with him.
The best thing Tucows could do is start “selling registrars”. Make it really easy for anyone who has the money. They already have the OpenHrs product, now they just need to assist people, and by assist I mean do all the paper work and everything. Make it really easy for anyone. I don’t know about other domainers, but I don’t know squat about tech stuff, nothing at all really. The only thing I figured out how to do is buy a domain and fwd it. As it turns out, that’s all I needed to know.
Everyone out there with 5,000 domains would be a potential customer. Make an easy to use interface etc. Large portfolio owners don’t want websites to sell to the public. Just a back office would be fine.
I suppose you are all aware that you can use your MX records to send you email directly to you Mail Box without it ever going near you Domain Registrar. This improves security and is a lot faster. Using registrar email services is for losers, as is free mailboxes.
Email security is probably the biggest threat to your portfolios. Don’t use anyone that is doesn’t do this for their main business.
a few comments. first, yesterday was a brief “outage” that was due to (nasty) external factors that those of us doing volume business on the Internet all experience and do not talk about (I hope that was not too much innuendo).
there have been email problems that I have talked publicly about at length. we have a new email platform that is a fantastic piece of work. we are in the process of migrating all the old customers. email migrations are very complicated and cannot be rushed. unfortunately, some customers of the old system are rightly frustrated and when something else unrelated happens they lump the issues together. I have been doing this a long time and I understand that and we deserve it. anyone who wants to be moved up in the migration queue is welcome to contact me directly. anyone who leaves, I understand and apologize.
two other things that are more important to me. first, there is NOT a brain drain at Tucows (to frank: there are a couple people that we both love who have gone on to bigger and better things and we both wish them the best of luck! you know who you are
. with 200 people that happens). in fact I am comfortable saying that the people we have today are the best group all in that we have ever had. frank, if we could ever get you back up to toronto you would agree.
second, arlo, you talk about “….problems from inabilities to transfer to rogue resellers refusing transfers”. not so. I am proud to say that we run the cleanest game in town. always have. always will. if there are rogue resellers then contact compliance@tucows.com and they will deal with them. if they don’t help you, I will. inabilities to transfer? we fought for years for registrant freedom in transfers. we are now still fighting against registrars who are restricting registrants’ ability to transfer. again, support will help you or I will make sure they do.
love you frank!