Following the recent surge of .COM renewal price, and the cool rebrand for Dynadot. I’m considering Dynadot to be a new home for my domains. When I was checking the service out, I had a question and found a bug regarding their email form, as following:
1) Dynadot seemed to mask the WHOIS email address into a URL. This can be a concern when transferring the domain out, as the new registrar will send a confirmation email to the domain owner, based on the contact email listed on the WHOIS database.
Question: Do I then have to turn WHOIS protection off when I need to transfer a domain? Does Dynadot provide any WHOIS email forwarding services?
2) When I tried to contact them via their email form here (https://www.dynadot.com/community/contact), I received a “failure notice” email from the Dynadot email handler and the contact message was never sent to the Dynadot support team (info@dynadot.com).
TL;DR:
The Dynadot support (info@dynadot.com) is not as knowledgeable about the transfer requirements as I wish. And every time I replied to the email thread, a different support engineer came to answer my question. In which, I have to clarify my questions every time since they don’t seem to be reading the communication history, and the context is lost between them.
For more details…
So, I reached out to Dynadot support (info@dynadot.com) for my 1 question, 1 bug report above. Since each time I had a different person replying, I will just name them Support 1~10.
For the WHOIS email question:
Support 1: privacy@dynadot.com will be listed on the WHOIS page for the domain, and Dynadot will handle all the forwarding.
(Very good! Except… That’s not true as I mentioned in my description, right now they are being replaced by URLs like https://www.dynadot.com/domain/contact-request?domain=)
Support 2: Sorry for the confusion, we have actually replaced privacy@dynadot.com with the Domain Holder Contact Request Form.
(Thanks! So back to my question, wouldn’t it kinda block the domain from transferring out because the new registrar cannot get a valid email address from WHOIS?)
Support 3: You might need to confirm the details with the new registrar since every registrar has different rules with it.
Support 4: Our customers transferred their domains away from dynadot successfully before, so no worries about it. (Fair. But…)
If you’d like to know which email address will be sent to by the new registrar, you may need to contact the new registrar support to ask for the information about it.
(Cool. I have given up on question 1.)
For the bug report:
Context:
This is the “failure notice” I received from Dynadot’s system after I sent out the form.
Hi. This is the email program at mail-out.dynadot.com. I was not able to deliver your message to the recipient below. This is a permanent error; I've given up.
<info@dynadot.com>
550 spf check failed
Remote mail server ip: REDACTED
--- Below this line is a copy of the message.
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2023 07:46:23 -0700
From: REDACTED <MY_EMAIL_ADDRESS>
To: info@dynadot.com
Subject: REDACTED
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <REDACTED@www.dynadot.com>
It looks to me that Dynadot’s email handler is trying to set the customer email as the From address, then send the context to info@dynadot.com. But because my domain does not allow their IP to send email on behalf of me, a SPF check failure occurred. Which should not happen on a website form really.
Support 1: Can I have your browser version?
(Although I mentioned that the email I received is from Dynadot’s system – mail-out.dynadot.com, it is fair that not everyone is a backend expert)
Support 2: Could be a temporary connection issue.
(Trying to clarify again that my message is being sent to the Dynadot backend for processing, so this doesn’t look like a connection issue. And with clear error message – 550 spf check failed)
Support 3: Could not reproduce, can I have a video recording?
(Sent the video recording, this time I did not receive any “failure notice” so asked them to check if it reaches their system)
Support 4: May I ask that have you received “failure notice“ email now? Looks like the email titled “Test email regarding the “Email us” form” hasn’t reached yet.
(Good, the support engineer understands the context and I replied that this time I did not receive any “failure notice” emails)
Support 5: We did not receive an email with the subject: Test email regarding the “Email us” form. We also didn’t receive a failure notice email.
(Great. The context is once again lost. And I have given up on clarifying myself again and again.)
Next: I found the dedicated “Report Bugs” link for Dynadot and tried sending my report there, now waiting for their response if any. Dealing with the support team has been tiring, as context is lost between support engineers.
Update: No engineers replied to the reported bug as well. Given up on moving to Dynadot.
Update 2 (9/13): Dynadot replied to the bug report and claimed that the issue has been rectified.