To whoever reads this — I no longer expect it to be anyone who has read
the rest of the thread, since none of you have.
This is the last message on this ticket. I'm gone. Twenty-seven domains
and seven Private Email tenants are moving off Namecheap over the next
thirty days. Here is what you're getting this note for: the refund
position, on the record, and the scoreboard of how this was handled, so
that when someone at Namecheap eventually asks "why are we churning
ten-year customers" the answer is in one place.
WHAT I DID FIRST
Your "upgrade" landed August 15. Webmail went down the same day. I said
nothing. Webmail went down again August 20. I said nothing. Outbound
mail sat in your queue August 30 and 31. I said nothing. WebDAV
disappeared, CalDAV started demanding a token nobody announced, spam
got through that never used to. NameCheap Branded SPAM!!!
I said nothing for almost four weeks because I get it. Sometimes a
migration doesn't go to plan, and the phone ringing doesn't help the
people trying to fix it. We've been partners for ten years. Why
wouldn't we have some patience for each other? I gave you the room a
partner gives another partner, and I ate the support calls from my own
clients while you had it.
I opened this ticket on September 9, when it became clear nobody was
fixing anything. Here is what that patience bought me.
THE SCOREBOARD
Ten replies from Namecheap, 2026-09-09 through 2026-09-19. Here is what
they contained.
Apologies: nine
Requests for my username and support PIN: two
Questions about the trace data I sent: zero
Mentions of the word "Imperva": zero
Mentions of 131.125.157.79, the failing hop: zero
Engineer names: zero
Reference numbers from the "Technical team": zero
Estimated resolution windows: zero
Replies that stayed in the same email thread: zero
Contradictory refund positions: two, in 48 hours
The highlights:
09-09 A "Shift Leader" writes five paragraphs of apology and asks me to
describe the problem. The problem was described in the message he was
replying to.
09-10 "The issue has now been resolved, and everything should be
working normally." It was not resolved. It is still not resolved. This
sentence was sent nine days before your own team told me there is no
timeframe.
09-12 I report connection timeouts across eight sites. The reply:
"some parts of the interface and functionality are different at first."
You answered a network outage as if I'd complained about a button. The
reply also opened with "Thank you for your reply.This" — the template
broke and nobody noticed, which is a fair summary of the whole ticket.
09-15 I provide login and PIN and ask for escalation. Twelve hours of
silence while I close and reopen Thunderbird four times to get one
email out.
09-16 I send a full TCP capture: 74% retransmission, congestion window
collapsed to one segment, 69.6-second RTO, path clean for ten hops and
falling apart at the first Imperva hop. Your reply confirms it was
"forwarded to our Technical team," who "do not communicate with
customers directly." Also: no phone support, "we consider email the
most effective way to provide technical assistance." The service that
is broken is email.
09-17 "We do not have an exact timeframe for when the issue will be
investigated." Not resolved — investigated. Eight days in, nobody had
looked yet. Refund offered only for unused days, and only if I cancel.
The refund was conditional on leaving.
09-18 I send a fourth capture: clean at 05:57, degraded at 13:28, same
machine, same path, same day. A 22.97-second STARTTLS handshake. This
is the capture that eliminates every explanation involving my end. No
reply for over a day.
09-19 00:15 "We've got a surge of recent support requests." Then: "we
do not have any additional information." Ten days, four captures, and
the Technical team has produced nothing.
09-19 12:45 Now the refund covers "the time during which the issue
remained unresolved." That contradicts 09-17. Pick one.
Not one of those ten replies acknowledged the status-page incidents,
the removed WebDAV, the CalDAV change, or the spam. Not one.
IMPERVA. SAY IT WITH ME. IMPERVA.
Let me spell out the thing nobody at Namecheap has been willing to
type.
You put mail.privateemail.com behind Imperva. The path from my machine
is clean for ten hops, roughly 41 ms, and then it hits
131.125.157.79 — the first hop inside Imperva's network, one hop past
eqix-sv1.imperva.com — and it falls apart. Latency at that hop swings
from 38 ms to over 3,100 ms. Every hop after it inherits the damage.
Your mail server is the last hop, so your mail server looks broken.
It isn't the server. It's the front door you bolted onto it.
On SMTP that looks like 74% of my bytes retransmitted, a congestion
window collapsed to one segment, a 69-second retransmit timeout, and
77 KB of a message that never left my machine before your side hung
up. On IMAP it looks like 46% and 82% retransmission — receiving only
survives because those transfers are small enough to limp through.
Yesterday one STARTTLS handshake on 587 took 22.97 seconds. Thunderbird
gave up. It was right to.
It is intermittent. Business hours bad, off hours clean, same machine,
same path, same day. That is the shape of a congested or oversubscribed
edge, not a misconfigured customer. I have handed you four dated
windows to pull netflow for. Four. I have handed you the hop IP. I have
handed you the packet captures. The word "Imperva" appears in my
messages eleven times and in yours zero times.
And here is the part that actually matters: it is not fixed. Today.
Right now. Ten days after I put the hop IP in front of you, the same
hop is doing the same thing, and the only evidence anyone at Namecheap
has looked at it is a line saying it was "forwarded." You don't need
me to tell you where the problem is anymore. You need to open a ticket
with your own vendor. You haven't, or you have and won't say so, and I
can no longer tell which of those is worse.
THE BURN
I want to be precise about the damage, because a refund is about to
be offered as if it settles this.
I'm not your biggest customer. Twenty-seven domains, seven mailbox
tenants. What I am is a reseller who built a business on your
platform. I am in the middle of launching a software startup, and the
money that funded it came from reselling Namecheap products to my
clients for a decade. I put them on your platform. I vouched for you.
I handled their front-line support myself so you never had to hear
from them.
Those clients have missed meetings, lost replies, and eaten spam for
five weeks. They don't call Namecheap. They call me. Every one of those
calls comes out of the hours I was supposed to be spending on the
launch.
Now I have several weeks of migration work in front of me — DNS, MX,
mailbox exports, client reconfiguration across eight sites, seven
tenants, twenty-seven domains — to make those customers whole again.
Weeks I do not have, at the exact moment I could least afford to lose
them. That is the burn. Not the outage. The timing, and the silence
while the clock ran.
A refund of a few months of mailbox fees does not begin to make my side
whole. I know it. You know it. I'm asking for it anyway because it's
the only thing your process can produce, and because you've already
admitted in writing that you owe it.
THE REFUND
Your own reply of 2026-09-19 12:45 states, in writing, that a refund is
owed "for the unused period of your subscription, covering the time
during which the issue remained unresolved."
The issue has been unresolved since 2026-08-06. I am therefore owed:
August 2026 and September 2026, all seven Private Email subscriptions, in full.
The unused remainder of each term once the tenants are migrated.
Refund item 1 within seven days of this message. If it is not processed
by 2026-09-26, I dispute both months with my card issuer and attach
your 09-19 admission to the dispute. This is not a negotiation; you
already agreed to it.
Reply in this thread with the refund confirmation. Do not reply with an
apology. Do not ask for my PIN. Do not ask me to describe the problem.
Do not tell me the Technical team is working on it.
AND FINALLY
I have referred vendors, MSPs, and my own clients to Namecheap for a
decade. Every one of them will hear exactly how this went, with the
ticket number.
Fuck you. Fuck the ticket queue that reopens a new thread on every
reply so nothing can be followed. Fuck the "Technical team" that
doesn't speak to customers. Fuck the shift leader who apologized five
times and asked me what was wrong. Fuck "your patience is highly
appreciated." You had four weeks of it before I ever wrote a word.
You had a paying customer who diagnosed your edge provider's fault for
free and handed it to you with timestamps. You had ten chances. You
used them to apologize. It's still broken. Fuck you for wasting my Saturday.
Source: r/NameCheap · by /u/Twaffling