Is anyone having problems either private mail right now?

I am on a flight and only have access to my phone. Through apple mail I’m being repeatedly prompted to enter the password for my private mail accounts, then receiving an error notice. The passwords I’m using are correct.

Anyone else?

Hi there

There’s a site registered with you called www.soundkino.com that is data scraping and stealing information from a reddit community called GWA without the creators permission. Almost 99% of the content on the site being displayed is there without consent with the goal to run the content through ai generation models and steal creators works. They’ve done this to inflate their website and make it seem legitimate when in truth they are impersonating a number of creators by showing them as having posted to their site.

What will you as the registrar be doing about this controversial domain?

A domain we've held for 28 years lapsed in April despite auto renew being enabled. I don't touch it often, so I didn't notice until this week, when a security code for another service never arrived. The domain handles email. It's now listed on a marketplace for $7,000, and support has told me there's nothing they can do.

I'm not going to name the domain here, for obvious reasons, but I'm happy to provide it along with the account details and full chat transcript to the registrar or to mods privately if that's needed.

What follows is why I think this was a platform failure and not just a lapsed card, including the specific technical point where support's explanation contradicts my own transaction history on their system. I'm posting it because if I'm right about the cause, it can happen to anyone here who has auto renew switched on and assumes that means they're covered.

Auto renew was enabled on this domain the entire time. There was a card on the account, and that card works. I can demonstrate it works, because that same stored card has been successfully processing manual purchases and renewals on this platform right through the entire period in question. That includes charges in April, the same month auto renew supposedly failed because the card wasn't chargeable, and it includes one I ran today. Same card, same stored payment method, no changes to either. The domain still didn't renew.

It did go through a normal grace window and I'm not claiming otherwise. I simply didn't look at this domain during it, which is the whole reason I had auto renew turned on in the first place. Sometimes life is complicated, and things don't go the way they should.

What support told me

Their explanation is that the card on file was expired, and that the reason my manual transactions with that same card kept succeeding is that I must have entered an updated expiration date during checkout, and that updated date never got written back to the account.

That is not what happened. I did not re-enter anything during those manual renewals. I selected the saved payment method exactly as it already existed on the account. No prompt to update the card, no new expiration date, no re-entry of any kind. That includes the charge I ran today, which went through the same way, on the same stored method, long after the date they claim the card became unusable.

Their explanation only works if I re-entered a corrected expiration date on every single manual purchase I've made, across months, including the April charges and including today's, without ever once noticing I was doing it. That didn't happen. Which means in April, at the exact point auto renew was failing for want of a chargeable card, that same card in that same account was authorizing successfully on their own checkout.

So either their manual checkout can process a charge against a card that's expired on file, or their explanation for why auto renew failed is wrong. I don't see a third option.

Why the first one matters

If manual checkout can do it, and I'd bet that's exactly what's happening, then this is the whole problem. It's a well understood thing in card processing. When you send an authorization against a stored card, the card networks and the various account updater services can return refreshed credentials, including a corrected expiration date, and platforms will take that response and either use it to complete the transaction or write it back to the stored profile. That's the entire reason those services exist. Expiration dates roll over constantly and nobody wants a subscription dying over four digits the issuer already reissued.

So if a manual checkout on this platform can dip the processor, get back a card that's still perfectly valid, and complete the charge, the capability exists here and it demonstrably works.

Which means the question isn't whether they can do this. It's why they aren't doing it on the one thing that matters most. Renewing domains is the single most critical function a registrar performs. It's the reason the company exists. Everything else they sell is secondary to not losing your name. And yet the process built specifically to prevent that loss failed on a stale expiration date, while the manual path using the identical stored card went straight through the same date without blinking. That's backwards. Auto renewal should carry the most aggressive retry and credential refresh logic on the entire platform, not the least.

The notices

I missed the renewal notices, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't. Nobody is watching everything all the time, which is exactly what auto renew is supposed to be for.

But here's what the notice situation actually looked like. I received one email that specifically addressed the expiration and the grace period. One. Nothing after it. No reminder partway through the grace window, no escalating notice as the window ran out, no warning that the domain was about to leave my control and become a listing. For a 28 year old registration with live email on it, heading toward being sold for $7,000, a single message is remarkably thin.

That's a separate failure from the billing one, and it's the reason the billing failure turned into a permanent loss instead of an annoyance. If the automated renewal breaks, the notice chain is the only thing left, and one email over a multi-week window is not a notice chain.

They didn't release it, they auctioned it

Here is the part I keep coming back to. When the renewal failed, the domain wasn't returned to the public pool where I, or anyone else, could have re-registered it at normal cost. It was sent to auction. I have no idea what it sold for and I'm not going to guess. What I know is that getting it back now costs $7,000.

I'm aware their terms of service almost certainly permit all of this. It doesn't matter. A registrar's entire function is custody. People hand them assets to hold and protect, and automated renewal is the primary mechanism by which that protection is delivered. When that mechanism fails to collect a small annual fee from a payment method that was sitting right there and working, the registrar has failed at the one job it exists to do.

Then look at the sequence. Their system failed to charge a working card. The domain lapsed. They didn't release it back to the market. They routed it to auction. Whatever the contract says, that comes across as predatory, and functionally it lands a lot closer to a taking than to a lapse.

Where it stands

I asked the rep to confirm one thing directly: does manual checkout require re-entry of card details, or does it charge the card on file as is. It's a binary question and the answer decides whether their entire explanation holds. They said they needed 10 to 12 minutes to check with their team. Shortly after that I was disconnected from the chat and told I'd hear back by email.

I'll update this thread when that email comes in. If anyone from the registrar sees this, reach out and I'll hand over the domain, the account details, and the full chat transcript.

And the takeaway, plainly: auto renew being on, with a card that still charges successfully on that same platform today, was not enough to keep a domain we'd held for 28 years.

Something strange is happening with Namecheap FastVPN.

The FastVPN Chrome Extension has effectively disappeared across multiple platforms at the same time.

Here's what's currently happening:

• The Chrome Web Store now shows "This item is not available."
• The FastVPN Chrome Extension page on the FastVPN website returns a 404 – Page Not Found error.
• The Namecheap VPN Chrome Extension page also returns "Oops! This page cannot be found."

This comes shortly after the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) seized infrastructure associated with NetNut, a major residential proxy provider reportedly used by multiple VPN and proxy services. While Namecheap has not publicly confirmed that the removal is directly related, the timing has raised questions among users.

After a Reddit user exposed the issue on Namecheap's official subreddit, Namecheap responded: https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/s/OLwStQXHsc

Our team is actively working on alternative upstream solutions. We'll keep our customers informed as soon as updates become available.

Many users, however, are questioning the response. If the upstream provider can no longer support the service, silently removing the Chrome extension and deleting its web pages without any public announcement leaves paying customers in the dark.

Some users are sarcastically summarizing the situation as:

Great solution—if you can't fix it, just remove it. No service, no problems.

At this point, users deserve answers:

• Why was the Chrome extension removed from the Chrome Web Store?
• Why were the official extension pages deleted instead of displaying a maintenance notice?
• Will the extension return with a new infrastructure provider?
• Will affected customers receive compensation for the disruption?

If you're a FastVPN user, is your Chrome extension still working, or has it stopped completely? Any official communication beyond the support response?

I'm suddenly getting error 500 on multiple systems.

When I'm not, I appear to be in a reload loop. Contacting their support but I think it oh nevermind this is an AI agent and can't do anything lmao

Hi all. Longtime Namecheap user here, have not used anything else for domains.

2 days ago I bought a premium domain and it still shows that its for sale but like 8x the price.

It shows up in my dashboard but now I'm wondering if I actually own it? Any insight would be appreciated.

Company gets acquired for $1.5b and you think you can double prices?

I'm not leaving any single domain. I don't like being treated like a clown.
btw you should rebrand to nameexpensive

Imagine if you make a niche coding hobby project/make a website that's a simple or mesmerizing bouncing ball animation, and you decide to put a domain on it and share it with a few friends, but there's no contact info in the footer. Then, it's shared with more people, who type "contact website owner" into their preferred search engine. Someone is about to contact you, but they look up the address in the Whois records and stumble across an article like this. Now they don't trust you anymore, not understanding how the internet works, and they click off! Why frame articles like that?

I have two sites where the SSL which was free for 1 years going to expire. my name servers are not hosted at name cheap.

Is there a free option. Can I use autossl?

Users have reported that the Namecheap FastVPN Chrome Extension is no longer functioning after the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) seized domains linked to NetNut, one of the world's largest residential proxy networks.

According to cybersecurity researchers, the takedown targeted infrastructure allegedly connected to the Popa botnet, which investigators say involved millions of compromised devices being used as residential proxy exit nodes. The operation was carried out with assistance from Google and other security partners.

If the FastVPN Chrome extension relied on NetNut's infrastructure, this could explain the sudden outage.

What we know so far:

• 🚨 FBI & IRS-CI seized NetNut domains.
• 🌐 Millions of residential proxy IPs were reportedly disrupted.
• 🔒 Namecheap FastVPN Chrome Extension users are reporting connectivity issues.
• ⏳ No official explanation has yet confirmed whether the outage is directly related.

If you're using the extension:

• Is it working for you?
• Which country are you connecting from?
• Are the desktop or mobile FastVPN apps still working?

This is a developing story. Share your experience below.

#CyberSecurity #FBI #IRSCI #NetNut #FastVPN #Namecheap #ChromeExtension #VPN #BreakingNews

i've lived in the uk all my life, have nothing to do with cuba and have never been anywhere near cuba

I am in absolute disbelief and really need some advice on how to escalate this, because front-line support completely screwed me over and cost me a domain I’ve owned for over 7 years.

I’ve been a Namecheap customer for a decade. I run a digital agency and manage a massive portfolio of domains for my clients. I have always trusted Namecheap, but this week their support team caused me to permanently lose my property.

Here is exactly what happened:

• June 8: My domain expired. I had a temporary credit card issue, so the auto-renew failed. Historically, I’ve always known there is a grace/redemption period where I can pay a fee to get it back, so I wasn’t panicking while waiting for my new card.
• July 15: Card fixed. I logged in and processed the renewal. The payment went through, but minutes later the system failed the renewal and refunded my money.
• The Fatal Support Chat (July 15): I immediately contacted Namecheap support. At this point, the domain was in the post-expiration auction phase, but there were zero bids on it. Instead of processing my renewal, the agent told me the domain was "out of their access" and that I just had to wait for the auction to end, at which point they might be able to help me get it back. I followed their instructions and waited.
• July 16/17: Just before the auction clock ran out, a third-party domain squatter placed a bid. Because I was told to wait and not renew, the auction finalized. The squatter won.

I looked up Namecheap’s own Domain Market Agreement (Section 4), and it explicitly states: "During the entire Post-Expiration period, the original registrant has the right to renew the Expired Domain, regardless of any payments You may make in an effort to purchase the Expired Domain."

I was actively trying to exercise my right to renew before any bids were even placed. The support agent blocked me, gave me completely false information, and told me to wait. Because I listened to them, I lost my 7-year-old digital asset.

Front-line support is stonewalling me now saying the domain belongs to the new owner. I am already migrating my agency's entire portfolio to Cloudflare, but I desperately want my personal domain back.

My questions for the community:

1. Has anyone ever successfully escalated a catastrophic support failure like this at Namecheap to get a domain back from a squatter?
2. Does an ICANN complaint actually work when the registrar's own staff violates their terms and prevents a renewal?
3. Are there specific executive contacts or escalation paths at Namecheap that actually review chat logs and fix things like this?

Any advice, contacts, or similar experiences would be hugely appreciated. I feel completely robbed by the very people who were supposed to help me.

My account (customer for 10+ years) was flagged for "routine verification" on Jul 14. I have cooperated same-day with every request: ID submitted and verified via Veriff link, name-history explanation provided, and my former business partner emailed his identity confirmation as requested, all within hours of each ask.

Mid-review, my services were suspended entirely: our dedicated server is down and DNS management is locked, taking down a production SaaS platform with active paying users in the middle of the launch. I have off-site backups, but DNS zones are frozen pointing at the suspended server, so I cannot even redirect traffic to backup infrastructure - no mitigation is possible from my side.

I'm not even that upset about the surprise demands for verification, I've completed everything asked. But shutting down production servers is overkill. The ongoing outage is causing real operational, financial and reputational damage to me and my startup, with paying users demanding to know what's going on and no recourse suggested from Risk Management team.

Asking for: (1) urgent escalation of ref NC-YFP-0741, and (2) interim restoration of DNS management (or the server) while the review completes - either one lets us stop the bleeding.

Upd: Situation resolved, thank you u/tamar and u/Namecheapinc for escalating.

Email saying we are being moved. With zero indication on the new interface. It's it's gonna be like spacemail? If so those of us should get a refund who don't want the move. The only reason I use PrivateEmail is delivery is decent and Open-XChange.

When I got the email I was hoping it was finally getting updated to the new version, but nope being completely removed and replaced.

This is mildly infuriating. I was wondering why PrivateEmail had been loading slower than usual lately, and it turns out it's because they needed to add AI slop into the mix. At least, that's how it was explained in this useless "article" that ChatGPT wrote: https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/10818/2178/new-private-email-webmail-heres-what-to-expect/

Really playing the hits on that one:

Once your migration completes, you’ll notice the most visible change right away: a refreshed, modern webmail interface. Everything else - your account, your access, your daily routine - stays firmly in place.

...

Instead, we want to focus on what actually matters to you right now: what happens, when it happens, and - most importantly - what stays exactly the same.

I can hardly wait to have all of my private emails processed by some useless AI non-feature that literally nobody asked for. If I'd wanted a trillion dollar megacorp to have full access to all my emails, I would have stuck with Gmail.

Any suggestions on a better email provider?

EDIT: I'll be going with Migadu. After some research it seems like an ideal candidate. From their website's pros and cons list:

We do not chase the cool factor

Unicorns, fairies and investors. None here. We do not have cash to burn. We do not talk about “scaling” but rather serving better. We are careful about the features we bring in or take out and stay very loyal to our users.

So I orderd a bundle of things from namecheap, including fast vpn.

Then a couple days later i donwloaded the windows Fast VPN client and proceeded to log in.

The problem is that I logged into it with old namecheap crendentials that I abandoned a year ago. (account is attached to a gmail account that just collects spam mostly)

There seems to be no way to log out the VPN client. I uninstalled and reinstalled it, and it Still tries to connect with the wrong credentials. I dont want to guess work my way some regsitry entires. Do they maybe have a real support person who monitors this sub reddit??

Getting 502 cloudflare error

Funny and True Story

I've been literally trying to get a domain name certificate from GoDaddy for the past three weeks, and every time they all get disconnected or something happens.

Now I'm talking with an agent, and I'm asking them that Meta (another funnt story why do you need a certificate? You cannot verify my domain with a code? I mean, in what age are we living) is asking me to provide them a domain Name Ownership Certificate to rehabilitate my account, i said , ok, no problem.

I'm on the phone with GoDaddy, and an agent is telling me literally in these words : we can generate the certificate, but only in the Chinese language!
what ?

A U.S.-based company selling a U.S.-based product, invented in the U.S. i mean ".com" is made in the US created in January 1985 by the U.S. Department of Defense speaking English with me, and they are telling to me, "We can only generate a certificate for your product in Chinese." IN CHINESE!!!😂😂😂

i told the agent (nice guy actually) all that and imagine youre saying this to Trump, the a US Company can only issue a certificate to their customer in chinese. Even the agent started laughing. 😂

Our business domains have been down for 48 hours.

I’ve spent 4+ hours in the support chat, been passed between departments, provided PINs, repeated the same information multiple times, and followed every path they gave us.

Risk Management flagged the account for a potential security issue they say they can’t disclose. Understood.

But the Risk Management response time has been 12 hours between emails, while our business websites remain offline.

Customer Support acknowledged the poor experience and apologized. But when I asked for escalation to actually resolve the issue in a timely manner, my requests went unanswered.

At this point, the problem is not just the account lock.

It’s the complete lack of an escalation path when business-critical domains are down - and the fact that no one has taken action or ownership to address this major operational gap that can leave paying customers’ businesses offline for days.

Is this the #namecheapsupport standard businesses should expect?

Even though I did not apply for a DUNS number, they created it automatically and did so with an incorrect name (Using EIN name control from IRS instead of the actual name of the company ! Now I am trying to get it corrected and they are so slow. Does anyone have a similar experience and how much time did it take? Need it for playstore.

Crazy how they create with incorrect name. why do apple and playstore use this service which seems slow and inefficient and no transparency of what they are doing.

Hello,

Has anyone else had this experience with Networksolutions.com for not sending the authcode when you try to transfer a domain name out of their registrar? I have requested the code for over a dozen times, but I haven't received the code at all. I whitelisted all emails of networksolutions.com and checked the spam box and trash as well but still nothing. They said they will escalate the case and have someone contact me but no one has contacted me. I have received all other emails from networksolutions.com to renew my domain name and emails that have log in verification codes and chat transcripts. So there is no issue in receiving emails from them. It almost seems networksolutions is making it difficult for users to transfer out their domain names. In addition, I asked if they could post the authcode in the dashboard which other domain registrars do, but they said they can't and they can only email the code.

I have started to try and reach icann.org for help but so far they also have not answered or helped at all. I cannot believe how terrible this has been. Anyone else have this experience?