We no longer invoice our Zambian clients or accept payments in kwachas due to the incompetence of Stanbic Bank. This will change in early 2025 due to our planned change in management structure, which will include banking with a competent Zambian bank. Until then invoices will be issued in US dollars.
We apologize for this temporary interruption.
As our Zambian clients are well aware, we have had nothing but trouble with Stanbic Bank of Zambia this year. Our business account has been locked/frozen multiple times, and it’s a huge hassle to get access again each time. In the meantime we can’t confirm receipt of payments so that we can send receipts to our clients. And we can’t manage our funds to pay bills and so on.
When I was in the country in May 2024 I approached Immigration and let them know that I wanted an Immigration permit for one reason and one reason only: To open a new bank account. I suppose my honesty must have flummoxed the first person I spoke to, so he referred me to a supervisor. The supervisor told me that I didn’t need to go that far (i.e., get a permit just to open a bank account); all I needed to do was talk to his unemployed friend who could “assist” me if I just “bought him lunch”. Of course, we all know what the quoted words in that last sentence mean: bribes.
I was desperate at this point. I joke to everyone I know that all of my grey hair is the result of dealing with Stanbic for the last sixteen years. It may be a slight exaggeration, but it’s not far from the truth. One of these days I will write a book, or at least document sixteen years of torment at the hands of Stanbic on an anonymous blog.
Anyway, considering my desperation I followed the supervisor’s advice and contacted his unemployed “friend”. However, besides the fact that I had no way to know how hungry said friend was planning to be at lunch time, it turned out this guy didn’t know anything about business accounts. So I just gave up and told him where to go.
This is relevant because my grandly named “business banker” at Stanbic decided in about June or July to start their officially sanctioned harassment project on NinerNet, known euphemistically as “KYC”, Know Your Client. It’s completely legitimate, of course, because since I opened our account in 2008 I may have changed my identity, and with the vast sums of money that our clients pay us NinerNet could single-handedly be financing all of the wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan … on and on the list and our largesse grows. Stanbic harassed us about a year or two ago, and I finally told them that either they could close our account and I would move our business out of the country, stop paying their exorbitant monthly fees, and stop paying taxes to the ZRA … or they could just let us carry on running our legitimate business as usual. I, of course, have no idea how the brain trust that runs Stanbic thinks, but that fended off the harassment.
Until now. Our business banker again made threats that our account would be closed if we didn’t produce a permit, despite the fact that we obviously produced a TP (temporary permit) to open the account in 2008. So the whole reason I abandoned the plan to open a new account back in May was now being forced on us by brainless bean counters at Stanbic. And then one day, we were locked (again!) out of online banking.
We tried to contact our “business banker” at Stanbic, but he was apparently on leave. Please note that when someone is on leave from Stanbic they do not feel the need to shift that person’s work to another employee so that the bank can continue serving their clients; you just have to wait until they get back from the beach to get help. Not satisfied with this, I reached out to another Stanbic employee. Miracle of miracles, I had access to our Stanbic account a couple of days later.
But that was the last straw. We can’t go on wondering from one day to the next if we’re going to have access to our account. We can’t go on wondering if we’re going to have access to our funds, that we have earned from our clients and had paid to us in our account to pay our suppliers. Tying to do business under these conditions is intolerable.
So we have pulled the plug. Starting with our invoices this month, we will no longer be invoicing our Zambian clients in kwachas. We will squeeze the few remaining kwachas in our account out to pay our suppliers — data centres, domains registrars, phone companies, “tax consultants” — and then we will abandon our Stanbic accounts. (What’s the point in jumping through Stanbic’s hoop to close them formally?!) By the end of September 2024 we will no longer accept payments into our Stanbic account. Our September invoices will be issued by our Canadian company and will be payable in US dollars. We are in the process of de-registering NinerNet Communications in Zambia, and we have stopped filing tax returns and paying taxes to the ZRA.
Zambia has won; we admit defeat.
We are not paying billions of kwachas in taxes; we are just a small Zambian business trying to do the right thing. We are trying to run a business that provides excellent service to Zambians, and we are trying to pay our taxes to contribute to the Zambian economy, an economy that is hobbled by ZESCO inflicting load shedding for up to 20 hours a day. (There are only 24 hours in a full day!) In return we are treated like absolute crap by Stanbic, ostensibly enforcing rules that make our ability to carry on doing business impossible. These conditions make it impossible for NinerNet Communications, a Zambian-registered and tax-paying company, to continue doing business in Zambia. And if one Zambian small business is driven out of the country in this manner, it’s only a matter of time before all Zambian small businesses are driven out of business.
We regret that we have been forced into this situation, but we see no other option at this time. In early 2025 NinerNet in Zambia will be reborn under a new management structure, and will again have a Zambian bank account, but not with Stanbic. When this happens we will again be able to invoice our clients and accept payments in kwachas. Until then, though, Zambian clients will be issued invoices by our Canadian company and accept payments only in US dollars, and our Canadian company will pay taxes to the Canadian government and will not pay taxes to the Zambian government.
After a very trying day for many customers around the world that use Microsoft Windows or rely on companies that use Microsoft Windows — like Hotmail/Outlook.com, Office 365, Google Cloud / Compute Engine, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, etc., etc., etc. — we would like to take this opportunity to ensure that our clientele know that we were wholly unaffected by the worldwide chaos.
Is this blog post an opportunistic jab at people who rely on an operating system and company that was late to realise the potential of the Internet? Yes, of course. Why? Well, just look at the trouble that Microsoft gave us last month, and are still giving us today. Microsoft are not our favourite people these days, even though Microsoft themselves weren’t responsible for the Crowdstrike failure.
Hey, we get it, shi … stuff happens. Our status blog currently shows 207 posts in the “incidents” category since 2009. Of course, that’s not 207 failures; at the very most it’s 104 failures if you assume a post announcing an incident and a second announcing it’s over, but in reality some incidents had multiple posts and some posts were only to alert clients to issues with other companies. I’d say that there were far fewer than 100 incidents in fifteen years; feel free to do the maths and check our live uptime monitor for yourself. But one does wonder how an update was pushed out by Crowdstrike without it being tested. That’s just unfathomable. On the other hand, NinerNet doesn’t check every single update we apply to our servers, but we have to rely on our operating system vendors to do that for us. As Crowdstrike customers and their customers found out yesterday, the IT world is very interdependent.
Of course, NinerNet will almost certainly have some major incident in the future, and I know that some will then say that this post will come back to bite us in the ass. Not really. I’m always amused when an incident happens and people say or claim, “We will learn and it will never happen again!” That cracks me up. Incidents — whether they are global IT meltdowns or plane crashes — are almost always human-caused. So yeah, it will happen again, and NinerNet will have some issue at some time in the future and we will learn from it and promise that we will take steps to prevent it from happening again. But we have never and will never claim that it will never happen again.
The other purpose of this post is for marketing. The word “marketing” is a four-letter word to me, simply because about the only skill that marketers have is the ability to lie, with a straight face. I certainly wouldn’t accuse Microsoft or Crowdstrike of any kind of over-marketing or marketing subterfuge but, you know, there’s a part of me that looks askance at claims made by companies that over-promise and under-deliver … and over-promising and under-delivering are pretty much the meat and potatoes of marketers! It is far beyond my remit to determine whether or not either Microsoft or Crowdstrike have ever over-promised or under-delivered, but yesterday under-delivery was rampant.
Update, 2024-07-24: I wasn’t planning to drive home any of my points above, but I was cleaning up some open browser tabs and there were a few Crowdstrike-related tabs still open.
At “Helping our customers through the CrowdStrike outage” Microsoft proudly states, “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines.” Umm, so? Your point is? What they fail to state here is that those 8.5 million Windows devices affected many, many more millions (a billion?) of poor saps who rely on companies that rely on Crowdstrike that relies on Microsoft’s crappy operating system. It reminds me of a saying: “Figures don’t lie, but liars sure as hell can figure!”.
George Kurtz, CEO of Crowdstrike, also stated in a tweet, “Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected.” This statement is freaking hilarious! If you can’t turn on your “Windows device”, of course it’s “fully protected”! OMG, this is one for the comedy annals!
Browsing through Mr. Kurtz’s Twitter feed you see a lot of the aforementioned “marketing”:
* Wow… another great quarter in the books for $CRWD.
* $CRWD delivered a strong 2Q23 with record $218M net new ARR, $2.14B ending ARR, record net new customers & $136M free cash flow.
* $CRWD delivered record Q4 results.
*yawn*
Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are decreasing our retail kwacha prices effective today and until the next quarterly review by about 7%. The base USD rates remain the same, as do our kwacha rates for the Zambian TLDs, dot-zm and dot-zam.co.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours. We are very sorry that this review is so late this quarter.
Please be advised that there is a phishing message getting through the spam filters with the subject:
Oops, Error updating the POP/IMAP server of YOUR-DOMAIN.TLD
In the actual email, “YOUR-DOMAIN.TLD” just happens to be the domain of the email address to which the scam was sent (see screenshot below). (What a coincidence!) These are not sent by NinerNet, as even a cursory look at the “From” field will show. We also do not use folksy words like “Oops” in business and technical emails, and we don’t pose as the “webmaster” of your domain. We are NinerNet, and that is how we always present ourselves to you, our client.
If you click the button to “Update Preferences” (or whatever action your copy of the message urges you to take) — which we strongly urge you not to do! — you will be taken to a page that looks like the log-in page for a webmail system (not our webmail system, I hasten to emphasise!), where the scammers expect that you will enter your email log-in information. Your log-in will fail, of course, but you will have given your real email password to the scammer, who will then use it to hijack your account.
If you or someone in your organisation falls for this, change the password for that account immediately! It’s not shameful to fall for a scam; many are convincing and we are all busy people who sometimes do something we regret when we are busy and distracted. What is important is that you recognise what has happened and take action to prevent any further damage.
Please be aware of and do not fall for these types of messages! The spam filter has been catching a lot of these types of messages lately, but the casual language of this one seems to be defeating our spam filters.
Please ensure that your employees, colleagues and other associates know about these scam messages. You should also remind yourself and your employees, colleagues and associates of the information on our website at the following links:
Thank-you for your time and attention to this vitally important matter. Please contact NinerNet if you have any questions.
Phishing scam email, 2024-05-16.
As we’ve said outright and intimated over the years, the battle against spam is never-ending.
One thing we have noticed in the last year or so is that a huge amount of spam comes from certain TLDs (top-level domains), but blocking entire TLDs is a bit radical. We have generally avoided doing so, but the time has come to block the following two alternative TLDs:
These are simply two regular domains, but they are owned by CentralNIC (now “Team Internet” because they can’t make up their minds about how they want to be known) who market them as TLDs — just as NinerNet markets the zam.co domain as an alternative TLD (actually, SLD, second-level domain) for Zambia. Therefore, you can buy the sub-domain your-name.sa.com and your-name.za.com. CentralNIC doesn’t seem to make even a cursory attempt to stop spammers from using their domains to spam, so we now block all messages sent from all addresses on those two “pseudo” TLDs — e.g., spammer1@spammer1.sa.com and spammer2@spammer2.za.com. We’re considering blocking the .top TLD as well, for the same reason, but we haven’t yet. You can certainly block entire TLDs from reaching your email addresses as well, if you feel this rather extreme move will benefit your domain.
If you happen to correspond with a legitimate correspondent on one of those alternative TLDs, please contact NinerNet support and we will work with you to address the problem you will now have communicating with them.
Thanks for your attention to this matter.
Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are increasing our retail kwacha prices effective today and until the next quarterly review by about 4%. The base USD rates remain the same, as do our kwacha rates for the Zambian TLDs, dot-zm and dot-zam.co.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.
Update, 2024-04-09: Corrected the webONE example rate.
Occasionally, and even more often lately, we’re asked — usually indirectly, because the “question” is more the statement that is the title of this blog post — about disk-space management when it comes to the limited email quotas that exist in every email account in the world, despite claims of “unlimited” this and “unlimited” that made by shyster hosting companies the world over.
Contrary to popular belief, you are not obligated to delete messages; you only have to move them off of the server. You can very easily do this in any full-featured email program by creating folders that are on your hard drive, as opposed to the server. Then you can archive messages by dragging them to your “local” folders, which moves the messages off of the server onto your local hard drive.
We really should create some detailed instructions on our website for this, as we’re finding this come up more often. For now though we’ll point you to this link:
Here it shows you how to create local folders, which it also calls “personal” folders for some reason, perhaps because of Microsoft’s terminology. This will mean that you will continue to have these messages (they’re not deleted), but they just won’t be available in the webmail or whenever you’re accessing your email that is stored on the server itself, such as possibly on your phone.
It refers to this page on the Microsoft website:
The video there seems to be a good summary of what you need to do. There’s a warning at the top of the page that states, “Support for Office 2013 has ended”, but the same principle applies even if the actual technique of creating local/personal folders has changed more recently in Outlook, or if you’re (very smartly) using a different email program. It has been years since I did this in Outlook myself for a client, but it works very well.
I do the same about monthly on my own computer. Once a month I archive all emails from two months previously into “local” folders on my own hard drive, thereby freeing up space on the server. The local folders are organised by year and month, so they look like this:
Then, next month (March, since this is being posted in February), I will just drag all of the emails I received in January into the local “January” sub-folder under the 2024 folder. I also create a folder hierarchy for my sent messages, organised in the same way by year and month. This way I always have this month’s and last month’s emails on the server (and available on my phone or in the webmail), and anything before that on my own hard drive. However, you can archive messages by any scheme you desire, not just by date. And, of course, if there are special messages that you want available on the server at any time, just move or copy them into folders you create on the server.
We’re all used to being aware of the fact that our hard drives are finite, even though they grow exponentially every time we buy a new machine, so we don’t save every awesome cat video we see and install software as if there’s a race to install all the software we can before we die. It’s the same with our email accounts, although on a much smaller scale.
Yes, it’s great that we can use IMAP on multiple machines or devices to have access to all past messages wherever we are at any given moment. But do we really need access to that message from 18 October 1987? Sure, there may be the occasional need to have access to a really old message — especially in industries where that is regulated by law — but not necessarily at our fingertips 24/7.
We hope that helps you understand how email works. And this applies to all email accounts with all providers, even Gmail. Daily (including at this very moment as I write this) we see outgoing messages queued on our mail server for Gmail accounts that are full. Usually they bounce after a few days unless the Gmail account owner clears up some space, usually using the technique above.
If you have any questions at all about this, and you are a NinerNet client (or want to be), please feel free to contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.
