First published: 31st January 2008
A domain name problem at email and web-filtering company Clearswift resulted in about 5% of their customers having all email blocked, starting early 23rd January. This coincides with the last update time of 03:12:53 that day for the mimesweeper.biz domain, used for routing the email to be filtered. The whois record for the domain shows that it expired on 12th December 2007, leading to speculation that a failure to renew the domain led to the problem when the grace period expired. Some customers have worked around the problem by adding addresses to their mail configuration files, allowing messages to take alternate routes. Alyn Hockey, Clearswift's director of product management, was unsure what caused the domain name failure.