We sent the email below to the few domains we believe still haven’t removed their domain from our mail server.
Hi there,
You’re receiving this email because it has come to our attention that your email is still hosted on the NinerNet mail server, server NC036.
As has become clear to many people around the world, this server is, for the most part, dead. You can still connect to it to read and back up old email, but it is not able to receive email from nor send email to external domains since 19 March 2026. You can (and should) read the updates we have posted on our status blog at https://status.niner.net , starting on 19 March 2026.
There are explanations and, most importantly, apologies posted there. I will not waste your time repeating those.
The most important thing for you to consider right now IS THAT YOUR EMAIL IS PERMANENTLY AND IRREVERSIBLY BROKEN … on our server. You can send email to and receive email from domains hosted on our mail server — including, for the moment, niner.net — but you cannot communicate with the vast majority of the Internet, including (for example) gmail.com. There may be momentary exceptions to this, but you cannot count on them.
As we advised in our post at https://status.niner.net/2026/03/23/ns036-update-9 , one of the options to host your email is an Australian company called Fastmail. Quite a number of our clients have moved to them, and we have helped a few of our clients to do so. There are multiple good reasons to use them, but here are two:
- They are Australian. They do, unfortunately, use some servers located in America, but they themselves are an Australian company. (Just as NinerNet Communications was and is a Canadian and Zambian company.)
- They have specialised in hosting email since forever, and have even pioneered some of the features you use in relation to email on a daily basis.
Even though our mail server is dead — and will shortly be shut down — our nameservers (DNS) and web servers are still 100% operational. (This indicates the relative difference in the skill and costs required in running the different servers.) However, we intend to shut them down in the near future as well. This won’t be immediate, but will be within the next few weeks, probably before the end of May 2026. You are therefore advised to move your website(s) as well. Although Fastmail’s specialty is email, they do also host static websites — i.e., websites that are not dynamic, usually using scripting. One example of a dynamic website is any website that uses a content-management system such as WordPress. If your website uses WordPress (or Drupal, Joomla, etc.), you need to find a new host that allows scripting, which is pretty much all of them these days.
For the most part, all clients have the log-in information for the control panels of the various servers we use to manage the services you host with us. If you do not, you can automatically reset this information for the web server at https://web.niner.net:10000/ . For the mail and DNS server control panels, please contact us to reset this information, which you will only be able to do for the next few days, until we deactivate (shut down) this mail server. The password-reset feature on the web server should work, but it probably only works for externally hosted domains — i.e., if you are hosting example.com and the email on example.com is hosted on our server (NC036), you probably won’t get the email telling you what to do to have the password reset. Contact us if that’s the case, from a locally hosted domain.
Also not being affected immediately is our domain registration and renewal services. These will not continue either, but we will continue renewing domains as they come up for renewal into the near future. However, once we have our email up and running, we do recommend that you contact us for the “auth code” for your domain (or domains) so that you can transfer them out to a new registrar.
We will post this email on our status website. To catch up with everything that has happened since 19 March 2026, we strongly encourage you to read the blog:
https://status.niner.net/
