🚀 go-pugleaf

auk@inf.ethz.ch (Anthony Uk) wrote:
>Yesterday I submitted an update request to the CH-DOMREG. This morning I
>received confirmation both as E-mail and as a fax!
>

IMHO: a fast service ;-).

>Surely sending faxes must be more expensive than E-mail. I'm not against
>paying a fee for my domain name but I still think that Switch should strive
>to keep costs at a minimum.
>

How do you know ? We strive to keep costs low. Faxes are no issue due to a 
special agreement with Unisource.

>How about a "preferred contact method" field for the contacts, where one
>can choose whether one would prefer to receive confirmation as fax or Email.
>
>--Anthony Uk
>dataway GmbH

Here our opinion:

1. The 'preferred contact' is the applicant. This address is always an 
e-mail address and is stated either in the From: header line of a mail or in 
the 'your e-mail address' field of the HTML form. But still many applicants 
leave this field blank.

2. The admin contact: this contact is responsible for all database entries 
concerning her/his domain(s). We had several cases where tech contacts 
changed entries in clear violation of what the admin contact pretended to 
have defined. So this contact needs to be informed. The admin contact is 
regarded as most interested in getting everything running correctly.

3. The tech contact: for technical issues this is the most important 
address. But would we solely inform this address, we'd get even more 
complaints of applicants and/or admin contacts (holders of domain names). 
'Why is may domain name still not registered ?' is the most common answer. 
We also had cases of misuse of name server entries. From the viewpoint of 
ISP's this contact is regarded as the only one which should be informed. 
Due to our experience we do not agree.

4. The billing contact: this contact receives invoices. Would be fair enough 
to inform that contact too, we guess.

The question of fax and/or e-mail remains. We experience many broken e-mail 
systems. Checking non delivery reports and resend messages which could not 
be delivered would result. This consumes a lot of time.

We usually send both an e-mail and a fax message to the admin contact and, 
if possible, just an e-mail to both tech and billing. The applicant receives 
an e-mail message when an address is stated.

The fax cover page caused a lot of difficulties lately because a reference 
to SWITCH or the Domain Registry is absolutely not obvious. The cover page 
even is misleading. We will install an own fax gateway to cover this 
problem. Future fax messages will contain clear sender addresses.

As stated above, this is our opinion. Comment appreciated.


Marcel Schneider@SWITCH