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 32%. If we see a significant improvement in the value of the kwacha we may revise this rate sooner than the next quarter.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.
We know that some of you are no doubt weary of COVID-19 (coronavirus) news updates, but we’re prompted to make this brief statement.
NinerNet‘s operations are not currently, nor forecast to be, affected by this pandemic. We do have business continuity plans, but at this point they have not needed to be activated beyond following public health guidelines and directives. We have had communications from some (but not all) suppliers that they are implementing contingency plans to ensure the continuity of their own businesses, and therefore we do not anticipate we or you (our clients) will be adversely affected.
It’s important to remember that the vast majority of the relatively small numbers of people who have been affected so far have recovered. This means life will no doubt carry on as usual in the near future.
In the meantime though, as the operators of a service on which you rely for information communication, we want to remind you that the scammers and spammers never rest — in fact, through our spam filtering we know they are already at work, attempting to take advantage of fear. If you receive any email about the pandemic — offering rumours, cures, masks, hand sanitiser or even (in some parts of the world) toilet paper! — they are best ignored.
We very much appreciate your business. We hope you are staying safe and healthy, and we look forward to continuing to serve you for many years to come. If we can help you or your business in some way during this time, please do tell us how.
Here are some links that may help you get some factual information from your governmental health authorities:
Thank-you, and stay well.
Craig
As you’re aware, we work hard to ensure that our mail servers do not get into blacklists. On the rare occasion that one of our IP addresses is blacklisted, we investigate the cause of the problem, fix the problem (often a client with a compromised machine) and (if possible) try to have our IP address removed from the blacklist. Often though, manual removal from the blacklist is unnecessary, as modern, well-maintained blacklists are automated, and offending IP addresses are removed very soon after they no longer show any signs of sending spam.
It’s not often any more that we run into old-style blacklists — blacklists that are poorly maintained, that blacklist huge swathes of the Internet, or that offer no discernible removal process — but there are still some of them out there. Not many are used by mail servers that accept email on behalf of any sizeable number of users, but we have run into one that happens to fit that exact trifecta: urbl.hostedemail.com.
This blacklist is used by Hostedemail(.com), a subsidiary of OpenSRS/Tucows. Good luck getting to their website though, as one doesn’t exist. Their email hosting service is a white-label service sold by their resellers, and they don’t even have a way for other mail server administrators to contact them, to search their blacklist or ask to be taken out of it.
Thankfully though, we are still hanging onto our own long-established reseller account with OpenSRS, and we contacted them about this block of our (non-resold) primary mail server (NC036). We first did this in February when we noticed that email from some clients was being blocked with this error message:
host mx.DOMAIN.com.cust.a.hostedemail.com[216.40.42.4] refused to talk to me: 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [178.62.195.26] blocked using urbl.hostedemail.com; Your IP has been manually blacklisted
(It was the reference to being “manually blacklisted” that really got our attention, as this is a hallmark of the aforementioned poorly maintained blacklists.)
OpenSRS responded quickly, and we were removed from the blacklist within about eight hours. But we were surprised to see, a couple of weeks later in March, that we were blacklisted again, so we contacted OpenSRS yet again. The response this time was much slower, but we have again been removed. This time, however, we pressed for an explanation for the block, as we are not listed in about 300 other blacklists that are more widely used. This is part of their response:
I am just replying back on the RBL listing you inquired about and I can confirm the IP was once again de-listed but I did get some additional information for you as requested. I needed to do a bit of checking but the IP 178.62.195.26 is provided by RIPE Network Coordination Centre, the IP assigned to the user by the hosting provider carries the reputation of the rest of the CIDR. The nature of VPS/Shared IPs is to be disposable …. But of course for the time being we have de-listed the IP but assuming nothing changes its [sic] likely it will be listed again in the future.
This kind of outdated thinking is another of the hallmarks of old-style blacklists: blacklisting half of the Internet based on some outmoded way of thinking that died off around the end of the twentieth century. Essentially, Hostedemail.com is blacklisting all IP addresses in major data centres around the world, which is very counterproductive for their own customers.
We’ll be contacting individual clients whose emails were blocked by this blacklist to point them to this post, and we recommend that if your email is blocked with the above message you contact your correspondent by some other means to advise them to move to a more enlightened mail service provider.
Update, 2019-03-19: Our primary mail server is again blacklisted by this one mail provider in the world out of about 300 major blacklists we have checked. OpenSRS/Tucows/Hostedemail warned us this would happen, so we’re not surprised. We can take no further logical action against an illogical practice. We’re sorry to those clients who are affected, but we again suggest that you tell your correspondents to move to an email service provider that doesn’t run their mail servers based on practices from the last century.
Zamnet’s sleepy accounts receivable department has again risen from its seldom-interrupted slumber to suspend random dot-zm domains. This time they have suspended about 25 per cent of the dot-zm domains that NinerNet hosts — all without a shred of notice to any of their registrants (our hosting clients).
This results in days of downtime while these businesses — some with hundreds of employees and many hundreds of customers across southern Africa — scramble to get a few kwachas to Zamnet’s offices, and then Zamnet takes their time processing the payments. If Zamnet had bothered invoicing for the renewal of these domains in the first place this would likely have never happened. This is not the first time this has occurred; in June 2013 another significant tranche of dot-zm domains were taken offline by Zamnet until registrants coughed up extortionate sums of money (sometimes thirteen years’ worth!) to pay for all the years in which Zamnet didn’t bother to invoice for the renewal of the domains. While that’s the only example we have documented on this blog, it’s not the only example of Zamnet causing dot-zm domains to fail.
NinerNet, in partnership with registered ISP Preworx, are trying to become accredited with ZICTA to register and manage dot-zm domain registrations so that this kind of uncertainty and lack of reliability with dot-zm domain registrations and renewals can be stopped, at least for our clients and those who choose to register their dot-zm domains with us. We made the application in June 2019, but progress on the application has been held up by additional, undocumented steps we have had to take. Only yesterday we happened to submit additional paperwork in support of our application, and this morning we followed up with a complaint about this action by Zamnet and made clear that such an action would never happen under our watch. It is unclear to us what obstacles will be placed in our path now, but it is the incompetence demonstrated by incumbent registrars like Zamnet that drives us forward to our goal.
If you’d like to voice support for the application by Preworx to become a dot-zm domain registrar, we encourage you to voice this support through the ZICTA website. Thank-you.
Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are (for the first time in a while) maintaining our retail kwacha prices until the next quarterly review.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates are available on our website.
Thank-you very much for your business in 2019. As the year comes to a close we’d like to wish you, your family, your colleagues and everyone in your organisation all the best for the holiday season, a Happy Christmas, and a prosperous New Year. We look forward to continuing to serve your needs into 2020 and beyond.
This email is also to let you know that non-essential administrative tasks will resume on 6 January. We will, of course, continue to monitor all services 24/7 and respond to all support requests. Please contact support if you need anything.
Thank-you again for your business and continuing to trust us with your online business needs.
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%.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.
NinerNet‘s offices will be closed from Monday 16 September and will re-open on Monday 23 September. Emergency support will continue to be available 24/7, but routine emails and enquiries will be dealt with on Monday 23 September. Thank-you.
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%.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.
WordPress warning.
A number of clients have contacted us because they’ve noticed that WordPress is now displaying an ominous message on their dashboard that states, “WordPress has detected that your site is running on an insecure version of PHP.” This, unfortunately, is gratuitous, self-serving fearmongering (often referred to as “FUD“) on the part of WordPress the organisation. However, what is true is that version 5.2 of WordPress requires a higher version of PHP than our operating system vendor currently supplies. Therefore, providing the necessary version of PHP will require more work than just clicking a mythical “upgrade PHP” button somewhere, as some assume we just need to do.
Please be assured that we are alive to this issue, and are working to address it as soon as we can. However, it will likely take at least a couple of weeks.
Thank-you for your patience.
