Tuesday 16 February 2016

Nominet price increase and CRAM-MD5 support

OK so this is more of a public service announcement rather than a blog. We sent some of our customers an email recently, informing them that Nominet (the official registry of UK domain names) is increasing the wholesale cost of UK domain names by 50% this year and we, in turn, have been hit with more like a 100% increase from our upstream provider. Unfortunately, we've had to increase our prices as a result but we've managed to keep it as low as possible. To be fair, it's the first time Nominet has increased its prices for UK domains since 1999 so we can't complain really. Well, we can and I'm sure some of our customers will too, but that's just life unfortunately.

Also, some of our customers were contacted recently about changes being made to older mailboxes. This will affect many other people as well so, being the nice people we are at Datapartners, thought we'd share our knowledge on this matter too.

Basically, something called CRAM-MD5 support (yeah I don't know either) is being switched off on 22nd February 2016 in line with industry security requirements. Therefore, anyone using this must update their email clients (Outlook, Windows Mail etc) to use secure sockets in order to improve email security and to continue using mail after February.

As complicated as it may sound, the necessary changes are simple to make on your computers, phones and tablets and we have found some great step by step instruction videos on how to do this:

For Android devices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY0ejyXpN_0

For iPhones / iPads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN7PNk2xs10

Professional:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5bQJ-ZFpJo

For Windows 10:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWffeFTPmJA

For Apple Mac:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0ISihtgsMQ

We suggest watching the relevant video through first and only make changes to the settings if required because it may not affect you at all. Of course if you only access your email using online webmail then you're fine anyway.

https://help.fasthosts.co.uk/app/answers/detail/a_id/2745

You're welcome :-)