General Questions

• I am a CompuServe 2000 user and I am getting an error message "The page cannot be displayed" or "Cannot find server".
• I am returned to the login page whenever I select any management or renewal option after logging in.
• Mail Server Reverse DNS Checking

Forwarding Service Questions

• How do I change the authoritative name servers for my domain to DNS Central?
• I can't reach my website via it's custom forwarding domain.
• What is the maximum e-mail message size or in other words, do you limit the size of e-mail messages?
• How do I forward mail to more than one address?
• How do I disable the catch-all or a specific e-mail address?
• What is Greylisting?
• How do I use Greylisting?
• How do I upload the files for my Web site? How do I check my e-mail?
• Does the forwarding service support dynamic IP addresses?
• Can I set up web forwarding to forward to non-default port?
• I want to use DNS Central web and/or mail forwarding with a third party DNS provider, what DNS settings do I need to use?
• I have moved my domain name to a web hosting company so I no longer need the forwarding service, what should I do?

Framed Forwarding Questions

• How can I get the address/location that is shown in the browser to reflect the current page URL as users visit different pages within my site?
• When a user bookmarks a specific page on my site and later attempts to visit it, the bookmark takes them to my home page instead of the page they bookmarked. What's wrong?

Name Service Questions

• How do I change the authoritative name servers for my domain to DNS Central?
• How do I update my static IP address in your DNS?
• How do I add an SPF or Sender ID record to my domain?

Registration Questions for .biz .com .info .net .org .us domains

• When I request my username and/or password via the "Forgot your username or password" link, the e-mail message I receive only shows the username and/or password. How do I know what domain the username/password is for?
• The e-mail address the "Forgot your username or password" request goes to is no longer valid. How do I change it?
• How do I change the name servers or contact information for my domain name?
• I am trying to add a name server to my domain but I get an error that the name server is not valid.
• How can you charge less than Network Solutions for .com .net and .org domain name registrations?
• I want to transfer my domain to another registrar, will you release it?
• I want to transfer my domain to another registrar, where do I find the auth code?
• I have unlocked my domain to transfer it to a new registrar. The new registrar says it is still locked. What is the problem?
• I received a letter from Domain Registry of America. Can you tell me about it?

Registration Questions for .uk domains

• What is your Nominet IPS Tag?

Spam & Virus Questions

• Why Am I Getting All This Spam?
• Why am I getting bounced e-mail showing spam or viruses I didn't send?
• Why and how can a spammer use my domain name?
• What is E-mail Adress Spoofing (Faking, Forging, or joe-jobs)?
• Can you tell me more about Greylisting?

This is a problem with CompuServe 2000 software and accessing web sites in general. It is not limited to viewing web pages at DNS Central. Please see our CompuServe 2000 page which includes possible reasons and solutions supplied by CompuServe staff.

Most of our management and renewal features use cookies to maintain state between pages while you are logged in. If your browser is set to reject or not save cookies received from our site, you will not be able to use these management and renewal features.

We have a simple tool available for you to test your web browser to make sure it is accepting and saving cookies generated by our management and renewal systems. Run the cookie test.

Please see our transfer page which includes details on changing the authoritative name servers for any domain to be able to use DNS Central forwarding or name services.

Please let support know via the Service & Support interface in Forwarding Service Management. While waiting for a response from Support, here are some troubleshooting tips:

1. Try accessing your site via it's real address. The server you have it hosted on may be down.
2. If you can access it via the real address, has it been less than 72 hours since your domain was registered or transferred to DNS Central? If so it could be a DNS propogation issue. Domain propogation around the world could take up to 72 hours from the time that your domain is either newly registered or a transfer has completed.
3. If the above isn't the problem. Contact your local ISP. They need to check their name servers. Ask them what their local name servers think the address of your domain is. Also ask them to verify you are using the correct name servers in your Internet setup. Your local ISP may have bad data for your domain or for some reason your Internet setup is not using the correct name servers.

We don't have a specific limit, however you should be aware that originating, destination and any mail servers/gateways in between may have limits imposed. We are really not aware of any limits, but they could possibly exists, therefore it is best to keep messages to a reasonable size.

Usually one is thinking about sending files as attachments via e-mail when questioning about size. We suggest that you keep messages to one or two megabytes, and even then you should ask the question "should I really be sending this via e-mail, or should I use the protocol designed to transfer files--the File Transfer Protocol (FTP)?"

You can set any of your addresses, including the catch-all, to forward mail to one or more e-mail addresses.

To forward mail to multiple addresses, log in to Forwarding Management, select E-mail Forwarding and then select the e-mail address to modify. Select the option to "Forward mail to the following addresses" and enter each address to forward the mail to, one address per line. Then select Save.

You can set any of your addresses, including the catch-all, to return mail to the sender with the message "user unknown".

To return the mail to the sender, log in to Forwarding Management, select E-mail Forwarding and then select the e-mail address to modify. Select the option to "Return mail to sender" and select Save.

An alternative to returning the mail to the sender is to just silently throw it away. Our mail server will accept the message and immediately put it in the trash. The sender will have no way of knowing that the mail has been thrown away.

To silently throw away the mail, log in to Forwarding Management, select E-mail Forwarding and then select the e-mail address to modify. Select the option to "Throw mail away" and select Save.

Please note that returning mail to sender entries count against your mailbox usage due to the resources used in returning the mail to the sender. "Throw it away" entries do not use additional resources, therefore they do not count against mailbox usage.

Greylisting is a method of blocking significant amounts of spam at the mail server level, but without resorting to heavyweight statistical analysis or other heuristical (and error-prone) approaches.

Greylisting relies on the fact that most spam sources do not behave in the same way as "normal" mail systems. Greylisting temporarily delays delivery of mail for a few minutes the first time a specific e-mail address from a specific mail server is seen sending mail to your e-mail address.

Standard mail servers know how to handle temporary delays of mail--they just attempt to send the message again later. When a standard mail server retries the delivery, the message will be accepted and that mail server and sender will be automatically whitelisted for a period of time so that future messages will not be delayed.

Most spam sources do not bother checking the status of the mail delivery and do not retry a temporary deferral. For a detailed description of the Greylisting method, see The Next Step in the Spam Control War: Greylisting by Evan Harris.

Can you tell me more about Greylisting? Please see this entry on our spam help page.

You can turn Greylisting on or off for each of your defined e-mail forwarding addresses.

Greylisting is turned on by default, to turn Greylisting on or off, log in to Forwarding Management, select E-mail Forwarding and then select the e-mail address to modify. Check or uncheck the "Enable Greylisting" checkbox and select Save.

We suggest that you leave Greylisting enabled to help could down on the volume of spam being forwarded to your real mailbox.

The forwarding service will forward web requests for your domain to a website that you host elsewhere and e-mail is forwarded to real e-mailboxes that you have elsewhere. You could choose to use one of the many free web hosting services, one of the many free web based e-mail services, or you could host your website and use the e-mail account that is provided by the Internet Service Provider that you use to access the Internet.

You will need to contact the provider that you choose to host your website and/or provide your e-mailbox for information on how to upload files and check your e-mail.

Yes, the forwarding service does work with dynamic IP addresses. Whenever your dynamic IP address changes, just access the following web address via your web browser and your forward to address will automatically be updated to your current IP address.

https://dnscentral.securenow.com/fwdtools/seturl?dn=example.com&pw=password

Be sure to replace "example.com" and "password" with the correct domain name and password for your forwarding account.

You can specify an optional port number by appending &port=8080 to the command above. This example would set the port to 8080. The default port is 80.

Yes, the website forwarding will allow you to enter a port number to forward web requests to. By default, web requests automatically forward to the standard http port 80. You can however specify a port number at the end of the forward to URL just like you would in a browser address field.

For example, if you are running your web server on port 8080, you would set website forwarding to forward web requests to www.example.com:8080 (as always you can also forward to an IP address as well).

It is possible to use third-party DNS with DNS Central forwarding services. However, please note that when using third-party DNS providers, DNS Central will not be able to provide support for any DNS configuration issues that you may encounter.

To use the DNS Central web forwarding, you should set up a CNAME record that resolves to webforward.dnscentral.com for "www" and/or any other host name that you want to use for web forwarding.

To use the DNS Central mail forwarding, you should set your MX record to route mail to mailforward.dnscentral.com.

Make sure that you use these hostnames and not the IP addresses that they resolve to as the IP addresses can change at any time without prior warning.

You should cancel your forwarding account if you no longer need it. To cancel a forwarding service account, log into the Forwarding Service Management system and select the "Service & Support" option. Select Customer Service and state that you would like to cancel the forwarding service account.

Use the TARGET tag location "_top" in the anchor definition to tell the web browser to refresh the displayed URL, for example:

<a target="_top" href="http://yourdomain.ext/page2.html">View Page Two</a>

The web browser will bookmark the URL displayed in the browser address/location area. See the previous answer for the proper HTML coding to display the correct URL for each page.

Please see our transfer page which includes details on changing the authoritative name servers for any domain to be able to use DNS Central forwarding or name services.

Log into the Name Service Management system and select the "DNS Zone File" option. This will display your current zone file and allow you to add, edit or remove DNS records.

Please go to www.openspf.org and use the SPF Wizard to generate the SPF record. Once you have an SPF record that you are satisfied with, log into your Name Service account, select the DNS Zone File option and add a TXT resource record containing the text generated by the SPF Wizard.

If you have any questions about SPF, please refer to the information provided by the SPF group at www.openspf.org. They also maintain forums where you can ask questions.

If you want to add a Microsoft Sender ID Framework SPF record, please use the Microsoft Sender ID Framework SPF Wizard then add the generated text as a TXT record in your DNS Zone File. More information about Microsoft's Sender ID can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/senderid.

The automatic "Forgot your ..." request sends the missing information only for security reasons. For forwarding accounts, you supply the domain name and the automated system will reply with the password. For domain registration accounts, you supply the domain name and the automated system will reply with the username and password. Once you have the username and/or password, you should return to the Online Management System and enter your domain name and the username/password that was e-mailed to you. I would suggest requesting information for one account at a time so that it will be clear which domain the password is for.

Please visit www.dnscentral.com/adminchange and complete and fax the form available there to request a domain registration admin e-mail address change.

If you registered your .biz .com .info .net .org or .us domain name via DNS Central you can use the Manage Your Domain Registration interface here on the DNS Central web site. Once you are logged in, select "Manage Name Servers".

If you did not register your domain via DNS Central, you will need to contact the registrar where your domain was registered for their procedures on modifying your domain contacts and name servers.

The name servers in question must be valid registered Internet name server hosts in the root registry. If the name server's domain was registered through Network Solutions, only Network Solutions can register the name server host. Any name server host previously registered by Network Solutions will also work for domains registered through DNS Central. Name servers based on ccTLDs (country-code Top Level Domains, like .ca for Canada) must be manually added to the root registry by DNS Central. To get ccTLD name servers added to the registry, please e-mail the name server hostname and IP address to support@dnscentral.com.

Prior to 1999, Network Solutions was granted an exclusive contract (a legal monopoly) by the U.S. Government to register all .com, .net and .org domain names. In 1999, the U.S. Government opened the .com, .net and .org domain registration business to competition. This has resulted in greater choice and lower cost for consumers when registering domain names.

The U.S. Government selected the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as the organization to oversee the new competition based system. Prospective registrars must be accredited by ICANN in order to compete on equal footing with the Network Solutions registrar.

Prior to February 2000, DNS Central was working with Network Solutions to process the majority of its registrations as their was no better alternative at the time. Starting in January 2000, DNS Central teamed with ICANN accredited registrar Tucows, Inc. In January 2000 some registrations were processed via Tucows and the remaining majority were processed via Network Solutions. Beginning on February 2, 2000, all .com, .net and .org registrations are now processed via Tucows. This new partnership allows us to offer better service, better support, better security and better prices for .com, .net and .org domain registration.

Per ICANN requirements, the gaining registrar must submit a registrar transfer request to the registry. The gaining registrar is required to obtain verified authorization from the registrant of the domain before proceeding with the transfer request.

Per our ethics policy, we do not block registrar tranfers away from us, but we do have security features built into our systems to protect you.

First, if you locked your domain when you initially registered it or via the management system, all registrar transfers will be automatically declined at the registry level. You will need to unlock your domain via the management system prior to submitting a transfer request at the gaining registrar.

Second, when the registry notifies us about the transfer request, we send an e-mail notice to the administrative e-mail contact of the domain giving them the opportunity to decline the transfer. If the transfer request is legitimate, you can ignore our transfer away notice. However if you did not specifically request a registrar transfer, you should decline the transfer using the steps described in our notice.

Both of these security features are in place to protect you from the various domain renewal scams currently making the rounds. We advise you to make sure the gaining registrar provides similar security features to protect your domain.

As an additional level of protection, the .biz, .com, .info, .net, .org and .us registries have implemented a registrar transfer authorization code usually referred to as an auth code. The auth code is required to authorize a registrar transfer of a domain and is only available to the registrant of the domain via the current registrar.

Per our ethics policy, we make it very easy for the registrant to view or change the auth code at any time. In order to view or change the auth code, the registrant should log in to Manage Your Domain Registration for the domain in question and view the Registrant Information section. The auth code is one of the fields available there.

Please be aware that some registrars either claim ignorance when you ask about the auth code or they make it very difficult to obtain. We advise you to make sure the gaining registrar provides similar easy but secure access to view and change the auth code before transferring your domain.

First log in to your registration account and double check the lock status. The lock status shown in your account is retrieved from the registry in real time meaning what you see in your account is the actual current lock status of the domain.

We have become aware that some registrars, when checking a domain's transfer status, do not process the standard domain transfer check command with the registry API, instead they incorrectly look at the registry WHOIS information which can be out of date by up to 48 hours or they manually review the registry WHOIS information and misinterpret the status codes.

If the registrar you are transferring to does this, you will need to wait for the .com registry to update the registry WHOIS information for your domain and then try again or if the registrar is manually reviewing and misinterpreting the information, you will need to try again and hope a different person interprets the registry information correctly the next time.

This is an unfortunate circumstance caused by the registrar you are trying to transfer to. You may want to bring it to their attention and perhaps someday they will change their test to use the correct and much more accurate method provided by the registry specifically for this purpose.

    DNSCENTRAL

If you would like DNS Central to be the sponsoring registrar (i.e. Tag Holder) for your .uk domain name, you will need to submit a request to your current registrar (i.e. Tag Holder) asking them to release control to Nominet Tag Holder DNSCENTRAL. If you don't know who your current registrar is, we can find out for you.

More information about changing the tag holder/registrant agent is available at the Nominet site.