The executive summary is: the listservs are broken. I am working on getting them back into service.
Here are the details. Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC hosts about twenty listservs, some of which are:
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- Copyright – For copyright practitioners.
- Designs – For design practitioners.
- E-trademarks – For trademark practitioners.
- EFS-IL – For users of the IL e-filing system.
- IP-transactions – For discussion of intellectual property practice on topics that do not easily fall within other listservs such as Patentpractice and e-Trademarks and Designs.
- Madrid – For users of Madrid Protocol.
- Patentcenter – For bug reports, feature requests, and tips and tricks about Patent Center.
- Patentpractice – For patent practitioners.
- PCT – For users of the PCT and ePCT.
- ST26 – For sequence listing enthusiasts.
For many years, Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC has hosted these and other related listservs using services provided by Namecheap. (Years ago I selected Namecheap for this service because Namecheap explicitly listed “Mailing lists” among the supported functions.)
Within recent days, several members of the listservs have written to me asking why they have stopped receiving postings from the listservs. During a long discussion with a succession of many different Namecheap tech support people, eventually the fifth Namecheap tech support person revealed that on December 22, 2025 (three days ago), Namecheap had very quietly imposed a very artificial and very severe throttle on outbound emails for the particular kind of hosting service that I have been using (and that expressly lists “Mailing list” function among the supported functions). The throttle meant that the “Mailing lists” function stopped working on December 22. I was no longer getting what I was paying Namecheap for in this particular kind of hosting service.
You can see the very artificial and severe throttle on an obscure knowledge base page at Namecheap. Starting on December 22, 2025, any single email having more than 100 recipients gets silently discarded.
I expressed my disappointment to the fifth Namecheap tech support person that Namecheap had not done me the courtesy of letting me know on December 22 that they had imposed this very artificial and very severe email throttle. This seemed to fall on deaf ears.
This was not a matter of my having selected the wrong type of hosting service many years ago — the type of hosting service that I had been using (called “cPanel“) explicitly advertised and continues to advertise this “Mailing list” function. It is just that Namecheap broke that function on December 22, 2025 for type of cPanel hosting service (“shared hosting”) that I had been using. (And did it without telling me.)
Yes it is not lost on me that there are many, many providers of hosting services other than Namecheap. This most recent disruption has forced me to spend most of the past 72 hours exploring other potential providers. It turns out that true “Mailing list” functions are not easy to find — most hosting services provided by most companies do not at all support any “Mailing list” functions. The handful of hosting service providers that do (or that say they do) are hard to find, and it often turns out that the “Mailing list” function doesn’t really work. There are some prodigiously expensive service providers that (it seems) could serve the “Mailing list” functions, but any migration would consume many dozens of hours of my time, and would require adaptations to different software platforms (other than cPanel), and it might turn out not to work right for one reason or another. In such an event, then yet another new and different migration would have to be made to a third hosting service.
It took even more discussion with a sixth Namecheap tech support person, but it seems that if I pay more money to Namecheap than the amount of money that I presently pay, there is a more expensive type of Namecheap hosting service (VPS hosting instead of shared hosting) that should be software-identical (using the same “cPanel” software for the functions that we rely upon) and that is free of this very artificial and very severe email throttle. The cPanel “Mailing list” function, I am told, will work as advertised on this more expensive type of hosting service.
So it is a matter of handing more money to Namecheap, and suffering through a migration of our cPanel instance from one tier of Namecheap hosting service to a higher tier of Namecheap hosting service. The migration should be nearly seamless from a software point of view, it seems, since both the old tier and the new tier will be using the same cPanel platform. I expect this migration will consume many hours of my time in coming days.
Let’s see if Namecheap tech support turns out to handle the cPanel migration competently and seamlessly.
Meanwhile, I apologize to all of the many thousands of members of the dozen or so listserv communities that our firm supports. Hopefully my time and money inputs will get us back to normal function within a few days.