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UK2 Major Change...

Discussion in 'Domain Name Registrars' started by devolution, Apr 6, 2007.

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  1. devolution

    devolution Active Member

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    Just got this email - if you have a credit card on file, remove it now...
    They are now charging for 'catch all' email services - the princely rip-off of £4.99 a month. Most domain services provide this for free.

    Here is the email I got:

     
  2. Domain Forum

    Acorn Domains Elite Member

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    IWA Meetup
     
  3. Pred United Kingdom

    Pred Well-Known Member

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    yeah, got the email. an outrage.
    tried ringing them to double check all my renewals are cancelled.
    they truly are in the cesspit ofg registrars. 1 & 1 look good compared
    any newbies reading, never, ever reg with uk2
     
  4. domainking

    domainking Active Member

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    Hi Predator

    I would have thought a guy like you would have his own tag and also own servers
     
  5. Pred United Kingdom

    Pred Well-Known Member

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    Hi dude,
    yeah, it probably is the way to go, i admit.
    However got all my .uk's out of uk2 a while back.
    I thought they were pulling their socks up as the support staff seemed much better trained & they have introduced a freephone number which is a great move.
    All my uks are at 123 now & although have moaned much about them, i am very happy with them past 6 months & have had no problems at all, seems they are much improved.
    I will think about a tag i think in next year .

    cheers
    Predator
     
  6. Paulsco

    Paulsco New Member

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    complain to Watchdog

    Having just managed to avoid a massive bill from UK2 for £4.99 per domain (I have about 20 domains!) "well do basically sod all with you email and charge you cash for the priviledge", and discovered that they have charged over £110 to my card in the last three months without my authorisation, I suggest that we encourage everybody to write to BBC Watchdog and get this publicised.

    UK2 will make a fortune out of lots of people by this method unless we warn them.
     
  7. scooter United Kingdom

    scooter Well-Known Member

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    I still have over 180+ names with them. I emailed them to ask how to do a bulk transfer out.

    To which the reply was:
    We currently do not have a feature to transfer out multiple domain names. This will be a feature we hope to incorporate at a later stage. I'm afraid the transferes will have to happen one at a time via our system.

    I'm off to Nominet for a TAG change. Well worth the £15 + VAT

    Goodbye UK2


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  8. zee United Kingdom

    zee Well-Known Member

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    The way I read it ,they are charging for 'catch all' part of email forwarding, I'm with 123 and do not use that part, just 3 or 4 redirections, according to that uk2 message,they allow up to 5 free , or have I misread it?...z
     
  9. devolution

    devolution Active Member

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    The catch-all service is a standard service provided with all domains at UK2.net. Previously, it was free but they are now going to charge. There will be tens of thousands of people who won't understand what is going on and get a bill for £4.99 a month PER DOMAIN.

    They are relying on people's ignorance to make money... They could simply stop the service on people who don't want to pay for it... It's the UK version of RegisterFly...
     
  10. retired_member27

    retired_member27 Retired Member

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    UK2 have always been the worst in the business when it comes to add on charges. I transfered all my domains away from them back in 2000 when they tried to charge me £20+ just to change nameservers on one domain.

    My advice to everyone is transfer your .uk domains to another registrar such as Heart Internet, for all your other domains you can administer them for free at joker.com if it says that your registrar is joker.com in the whois. Full instructions to transfer a .com away are here.
     
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  11. Pred United Kingdom

    Pred Well-Known Member

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    cheers apd :cool:
    where uk2 catch you out is they have themselves as the admin & technical contacts, so don't think can go the joker route & change/transfer away.
    can't use their email address
    plus to transfer out info & com you need auth codes which they don't supply
    for the tlds, once you have renewed them over 2 years i.e in their 3rd year of registration they can be transferred out free
    i spoke to someone recently at uk2 who said they are working on changing that soon
    thing is with the email charges, looks like they are increasing charges :???:
    as far as i can find, & have done, (like you say bulk tagchange via nominet), cheap & simple. i transferred all mine out some time ago too.
    cheers
    Pred
     
  12. retired_member12

    retired_member12 Retired Member

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    Anyone can take the Nominet route to change the tags for a charge usually less then UK2's.
    However, it's a load of crap really. it should be free for any owner to change the tags through their Nominet logins.
     
  13. Pred United Kingdom

    Pred Well-Known Member

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    Very true.
    However i think i tag changed about 350 domains for the princely sum of £25 or whatever it was
    Nominet were 100% efficient & speedy & was very happy with it
    Great thing about uk domains there
    The idea of tld pushes is wonderfully simple but is a nightmare when you get a rogue registrar like uk2 bending rules, yes in the conditions of service etc, but to my knowledge, no other registrar has a 'sytem' like them
    I am with about 20 registrars too for pushes etc & ease of buying & selling as tlds are my main bag really
    uk2need to clean up this area imo
    cheers
    Pred
     
  14. scooter United Kingdom

    scooter Well-Known Member

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    All my .coms with UK2 were registered in 1999 and I have transferred plenty out through joker.com as APD describes.

    That was until December last year. UK2 then took it upon themselves to sneakily change the admin contact on all my .coms to themselves, so now the only way to get your coms out is to go through them.

    There is good news:
    I sold a .com last month and they did release the name to me within 2 hours of me following the procedure here: http://amail.co.uk/moveaway.htm

    ..............

    I should have moved my co.uk's away from them yonks ago, but it was just down to laziness. The boot up the backside for me is this new rediculous stealth charging.

    I cannot understand their business model. When I got my first PC back in 1999 they were the market leaders. But they have continued to operate in the "pay for everything" mode while others are now flourishing by doing the opposite.

    UK2 could have consolidated the market even today if they had taken the same approach.

    Good to see you can actually contact them now. Bad to see you pay premium rate phone price for the privilage. (It wouldn't be so bad if they talked dirty to you at the same time. :mrgreen: )

    I remeber they always used to show how many domains they had registered on their main page. They took this down long time ago. I wonder why :rolleyes:




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  15. retired_member11

    retired_member11 Retired Member

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    I just received the UK2 catch all email charge notice ...on a domain I moved away two months ago!

    So if I hadn't set the account to 'do not renew' my credit card would have been charged...even though the domain is on another Tag. This really isn't on.

    Sharks.
     
  16. Pred United Kingdom

    Pred Well-Known Member

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    i just push the names if i sell as finally they got that bit fixed & seems to work fine.
    i'll renew the good ones ship on out for free after
    already got the uk's out
    the phone number is now freephone:
    08006122142
     
  17. capt_cornflake

    capt_cornflake New Member

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    Hi, just registered here because of this outrage.

    Given that the only thing I use my domain for is mail forwarding in exactly this way, I guess this mean I'm gonna have to move to someone else.
    Being meaning to do it for a while, but never actually bothered to research who's any good (although probably most companies are better than uk2...).

    apd recommended heart internet previously, and they look pretty good from their website.
    Anyone else got any experience of them or can recommend anyone else? All I want to use the domain for is email forwarding, so any other extras aren't really required.
     
  18. devolution

    devolution Active Member

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    It's even worse then I thought -- I just got an email regarding a domain I've already transferred out of UK2, they're still going to try and bill me for email service on a non-exist domain! (Luckily, the credit card they have on file is expired), but thousands of others will be stung by these a-holes...

     
  19. olebean United Kingdom

    olebean Well-Known Member

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    I find it odd they have given two weeks notice and taking the money prior to the actionable date
     
  20. Ditlev

    Ditlev Member

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    UK2 and Catch all

    Hi Guys,
    A few notes on our new catch-all policy:

    If you have read the blog posts, I hope you understand why we had to make this move. 91% of all mail going through our system is catch-all related spam - this naturally takes up a lot of resources from our system, but more importantly it causes the UK2 mail servers to be blacklisted in spamfilters in all the major free-mail providers world wide. Please give me a moment to explain how/why this happens:

    UK2 has around 7 million mails going through our system on a daily basis, and as mentioned earlier 91% of that is catch-all related spam. Most of that spam is forwarded via our servers to clients freemail accounts such as hotmail/gmail/virgin/.mac/etc. Problem is that when clients open their hotmail account, and see all the spam being sent to them via the UK2 catch-all mail, they click the "spam-button" in the hotmail system, and the mail will be deleted/sent to junk folder.

    However, and this is the real problem, hotmail can not see that this mail was forwarded, so they actually think that UK2 was the sender, since that is the last place of origin. Result is that hotmail/gmail/yahoo/etc puts a 100% block on all mails being sent/forwarded by UK2 - also the legit mails that our clients actually wanted to read. Clients are naturally furious about this, as they expect their mail to end up in their inbox, and not the spambox. So while this is easily filtered on your side, the problem is much bigger than just that.

    We had two options regarding the implementation of the new price model:

    1) Either we let catch-all expire for those clients not paying for it when the free month we have given you is up. Result would be that if you were away from your computer for a few weeks, or if you have very aggressive spam filters (which is very likely if you actively use catch-all) or for some other reason did not read the mails we send out about this change, then you would suddenly start loosing mails, as mails sent to your catch-all mail would bounce. This could be very important mail, and UK2 would surely be accused for any losses related to our clients not receiving their mails. Some clients depend on the mail as a daily tool, and losses to not getting it could be significant.

    Or

    2) We can auto renew catch-all and ensure that no mails are lost.
    Before doing that we send out 2 mails dedicated to this, we mention it in our regular newsletter. We post notices on this blog, on the login on mail.uk2.net and on the main page of the control panel.
    What if we auto renew someone who actually does not want the product? Or if someone has missed all the notices/mails/posts about this?
    We would naturally issue a full refund!

    Those not using catch-all will naturally not be renewed for it.


    This is the main reason for the new catch-all policy, and I hope this
    is clearer now?

    We have lowered the price for current clients to £19.95/year, and if you have 10 domains or more the whole lot can get catch-all for 39.95/year. Which is
    quite lower than the 4.99/mo new clients has to pay

    My hope is, however, that catch-all can be phased out over the next 3-5 years.

    Best regards,

    Ditlev Bredahl
    MD, UK2.net
     
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  21. Pred United Kingdom

    Pred Well-Known Member

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    welcome to acorn Ditlev, thanks for taking time to post

    couple of questions i have, are you not bothered that most people i know it seems are disgusted in general at uk2 ?
    it's not just the email forwarding.
    as far as i'm aware you're the only people extorting money from people who wish to move their domains away from you.
    in particular tlds where it's normal for any other registar to give an auth code & then the domain owner pays the receiving registrar a years renewal normally.
    your £12.95 charge is a scandal & a nightmarish process designed to prevent people moving.
    i'm sure you'll tell me its in the terms & conditions, but the non-functionality of your site, awful customer support (recently improved) inability to push names for months, unanswerred support enquiries etc are not either!
    i moved about 400 .uk domains from you recently via nominet (not payoing the individual fee as you would have liked lol)
    maybe if you read through some other uk2 posts here & other forums you will grasp a better idea of your 'reputation'
    you have a lot of domains registered with you.
    i would be interested to see how many you have in 18 months
    look forward to hearing from you
    cheers
    Pred
     
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