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Manashosting.com has found its way to this blog again, and if you want to blame anyone for bringing my attention back to this blog, you can thank them.
For the last 6 months, I have been between buying a new home, packing, moving, fixing up the old house to return it to the landlord, and fine-tuning my new house, all while trying to juggle web design clients that seem to choose the most inconvenient times to give me business. The next step is designing a desk. From that, I have learned I am no carpenter and should perhaps stay away from power tools. Meanwhile, this site was pretty low on my list of priorities. But while all of this has been going on, Manashosting.com has been doing a rather aggressive marketing campaign.
Now, before anyone wants to get into a whole argument about how I am anti-capitalist, I am going to cut the argument down. I am not against making money, so long as it is done ethically. Spamming is not ethical; in fact, it is downright invasive. Given I have a career in the web hosting industry that spans just a little over a decade, I think I have a real reason to hate spam. Between installing countermeasures, dealing with abusers, and having to delist my servers off spam lists (some of which pretty much required a ransom to remove them), I have lost a lot of time, money, and productivity that could have been used to grow my business. My hatred of spam goes beyond ethics; it extends to my wallet and lost time. So I take spam very personally, especially from a company that claims to be, in their own words, the “Oldest Successful Hosting company of India”.
By aggressive mailing measures, I find that Manashosting.com has returned to mailing my Yahoo email addresses, something they have not done since 2010 on July 17, 2013.
I would have written about it back then, mostly because it pisses them off every time I write an article, but I made the mistake of involving myself in rewriting the content for a client’s site. My brain may be leaking out of my ears because I learned a little too much about my customer’s insurance business. But today, this little email came in and reminded me what I was supposed to do last week:
Manashosting.com sent their spam to me on January 20, 2014
Dear Customer,
Thank you for your association with Asia’s No 1 hosting company, we are ” ” glad to inform you that now India’s oldest hosting provider is giving ” “reseller hosting package at just Rs 10000 for 3 years. ” ” The reseller package is been given with the below features no1 data center, ” ” 48gb DDR3 Ram, high speed,Complete up time, unlimited domain, No ” ” limitations.
Please contact us immediately at 080-42400333 or 18002580258 to avail the ” “promo .
Regards,
Oldest hosting provider
Note, ” ” equals where I removed unnecessary returns; it was as if they wrote this email on a manual typewriter.
Oldest hosting provider? Really, I don’t think so, Manashosting.com.
The header information is attached here:
Hostingupdates.tk spam headers *document missing, will update when I find the backup*
Never mind, I have never been and never will be a customer of Manashosting.com. Something is missing in this email. The odd thing about this email, like many of the emails from Manashosting.com, is that they leave out any name or reference to their company. All I have is this phone number from a company called Target Information Management. I know that it is Manashosting.com because some of the spam that has their name on it also has the same phone number. Strangely, their call center is not located out of India but in my country, the U.S., out of the state of Michigan. Target Information Management is definitely worth looking into, considering their relationship with Manashosting.com. But for now, I want to focus on their spam and where it is coming from. and if you came here because you got spam from Manashosting.com, what steps can you take against Manashosting.com?
Looking through the header information in their earlier and latest spam, I find the domain name hostingupdates.tk. I find that they are hosted by interserver.net. A company I reviewed last year tried to pay me to do a post on their company and join their hosting program. But there is no surprise that Manashosting.com is using a .tk domain.
How to Make Manashosting.com Stop Spamming
So, if you have been getting emails from a hosting company with any of the following information:
WORLD TRADE CENTER,
Brigade Gateway,
Rajajinagar,
Bangalore- 560055
080-42400333
1800-258-0258
That is indeed Manashosting.com
There are four steps that need to be taken against Manashosting.com.
- Forward the spam with headers intact to Interserver.net at abuse@interserver.net, making sure to leave the headers intact.
- After which, the next step is to get the domain name hostingupdates.tk removed from Manashosting.com control. As before, forward all spam with headers attached to abuse dot.tk with headers intact. The header information will look like this text file.
- Contact Manashosting.com’s network provider is Rackspace, which I am a little shocked to see. Forward the spam with headers attached to abuse@rackspace.com. Make sure to connect as outlined how manashosting.com is connected to the spam.
- The last and final contact should be the very provider of Manashosting.com’s domain, publicdomainregistry.com. You can reach them at compliance@publicdomainregistry.com. Which is where you can forward your complaint, as well as details that link the spam to Manashosting.com
Steps 3 and 4 are a little more complicated because manashosting.com has kept their domain and name out of the bulk of their spam. So, you will need to connect the dots for Rackspace.com and publicdomainregistry.com. The best way is to have them Google “Manashosting.com 18002580258”, which is the same number found in the spam. They can also try calling the number and ask to buy a manashosting.com account. Or you can point them to this post.
The below pics are copies of the whois info for Manashosting.com and their spam domain hostingupdates.tk.
Manashosting.com is not really that bad…… are they?
I could go into a whole timeline of events with Manashosting.com, but I did that the last time I covered them:
Since 2010, Manashosting.com has been up to the same tricks, which are not just limited to spamming my Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. Manashosting.com also likes to comment on spam forums and blogs with fake positive reviews, often for the sake of drowning out negative reviews. One of the worst sites to showcase Manashosting.com public relations spamming attempts is:
Given that I have penetrated the first page of Manashosting.com reviews, I have also been targeted with fake positive reviews. This is probable because I also have a lot of negative reviews from their past customers. The biggest blatant giveaway that they fake their reviews is that most of the comments come from the same IP address. The other is that they may seem like different people, but they put in the same email address and/or domain for many of these reviews.
Normally, I would avoid calling any company a scam, but I think Manashosting.com has earned that title. As Manashosting.com may be the worst hosting company in the world, and their business practices tell me why I should not try them.
