ICANN Verification will shut down your domain!

Today we had a domain on a Godaddy account that was completely disabled entirely.  And I don't need to get into how important it was to have this domain not running because everyone's domain is important to run.  

Basically when we discovered the website was OUT, we also discovered email was out.  We logged into GoDaddy to see what was up and after logging in we see a yellow notification...

But hey, how can you receive an email if they shut down your DNS???  Now, Godaddy says that ICANN disconnects the DNS and all they can do is help get the emails sent and verified again.  And you have to do this with support because if you try to 'resend' the email you get this:

And you read that right.... {supportPhone} is their phone number.  

Okay so what's the resolve here? We actually do have one... but the trick is, you have to get a competent Godaddy support tech on the phone and you can only get this by chance! You can try calling several times until you find someone that not only understands what's going on but someone that speaks your language fluently.

Our third try with a Godaddy specialist... we found our guy!  And he was good enough to send me a direct email after our call was disconnected.

What's the fix?

You have to change the contact information on the domain.  You can only do this with Godaddy support on the phone.  And they will need assistance because that verification email needs to be canceled first which you can't do because you'll be seeing errors.

When the error is cleared and your account looks normal, you need to update the contact information to email addresses outside of the domain so that you can receive email verifications. I used 2 gmails and an icloud email address and received the verification emails right away.

Once that was done, everything came back on line.

I hope this helps!  And hey, if you need someone experienced to step in and bring some muscle to the Godaddy call, 

Not having any issues right now?

That's okay, you should check your domains immediately!  Make sure you don't need this verification right now and if you don't, change the contact email on your domains to something OUTSIDE of the domain.  because if they shut it down, you won't get emails.  It's a bit of a double-edged sword, but they don't seem to care.

We also have a great article about Domain management and how they work and how to keep it organized! Check it out here!