WorldsWideDomainName.com – Alex Shafts

29/10 Note: This page has been updated.
29/10 Note2: This page has been updated again!

Will Alex Shafts please stand up? No, I thought not!

There’s a whole tonne of spam doing the rounds today but it really is an all round mess (worse than your usual spam)….. Let me explain.

Thousands of people are receiving emails about their domains and the fact that worldswidedomainname.com is partnering with LunarPages, like the email below:

Subject: Notice Regarding Your DOMAIN NAME
From: “Domain Name Support”
Date: Tue, October 28, 2008 5:16 am
To: info@worldswidedomainname.com
*****************************************
Important Notice Regarding Your Domain Name(s)
*****************************************
Dear Webmaster,

According to our records you are the ADMINISTRATIVE CONTACT.

We would like to inform you we have partnered up with LunarPages Web Hosting. We understand you are currently hosting with another provider. But we encourage you to try out LunarPages. LunarPages also has an affiliation program where you can embed banners on your website and earn $65 for every referral.

A little more information about LunarPages; Lunarpages Web Hosting was born from Add2Net in 2000, and has grown rapidly providing Shared Hosting, Dedicated, Reseller, and most recently, VPS Hosting Plans. LunarPages is BBB Accredited and is rated A for excellence. LunarPages also has received many Industry Awards including Web Host Magazines highest level of recommendation. LunarPages is one of the fewest hosting services that provide unlimited transfer and unlimited data storage.

LunarPages can fit your business needs whether you’re a small business or a large company. Join (or lurk about) Community Forums and ask our customers why they host with LunarPages. For more in depth information, news and articles about Web Hosting, Marketing, SEO, Traffic, AdWords, Design, Networking and General Fluff, visit Lunartics Blog (updated daily, sometimes hourly). Our BlogStars consist of a team of more than 20+ industry experts. You may learn something, or simply be entertained.

VISIT LUNARPAGES

If you’re not ready to give LunarPages “Web Hosting” a try just yet, TRY the affiliation program where you can earn hundreds or even thousands a month. Save this email for your records and click the link above for special promos throughout the year.

Best Regards,
Alex Shafts, CEO
World Wide Domain Names
If you are the domain administrator of more than one domain account, you may receive this notice multiple times.
——————————————————————-
All rights reserved.

Listen very carefully………

This is email is not from a domain registrar or your web hosting company! I’ll repeat that again for anyone that wasn’t listening the first time:

This is email is not from a domain registrar or your web hosting company!

I hear you shouting:

It’s only SPAM – Just delete it! Set your spam filter and forget about it.

In the normal course of events I would……..

But it would appear that whoever sent this has set things up so that all replies to his spam go back to everyone on the list, or back to innocent people who never sent the mail in the first place (like me)! This is causing a flurry of bouncebacks, abuse and general annoyance around the web! Most of the one’s I’ve received are just angry, I’ll reproduce one of the cleaner ones here (a few should never be reproduced anywhere!):

with spam like this and unsolicited email, you can rest assured that any hope you had of getting a cent from me has disappeared.

don’t ever, ever spam me again.

It’s a case of is a spammer ever going to listen to that? No, but you’re telling the wrong people my friend.

So there we have it, I’m being bombarded with mail from people who’ve been spammed (actually they’re spamming me as I didn’t ask them to mail me – but that’s a whole other argument!) I’m actually tempted to setup an autoresponder that will forward them to this blog post if they email things to the address – however, that would probably only add to the mass of problem traffic that this appears to be generating!

No point to the post really – just I needed to vent and it can be an informational resource for anyone that decides to Google this whole thing!

29/10/08

Overnight I received a vast amount of traffic, clearly a lot of people are affected by this (this is especially apparent from all the comments I’m moderating through now and the traffic over on Dynamoo’s blog).

One of the comments was from Alex Shafts himself as well, threatening legal action…. Alex, could you clarify anything above that’s not true? Rather than legal action would you like to provide me with a comment here to explain what is going on? Surely that would be a better scenario for you – if you are as you stated in your comment “The largest hosting company online”.

29/10/08 Note2:

For all those that keep commenting with contact details for this domain, I’m editing them out – we’ve all seen the domain and know where the WHOIS database is – I’d prefer to keep it that way in line with my commenting policy.