One recipient of the NetSol snail mail wrote:

This week, Network Solutions sent us a threatening letter saying that the information in our account was out of date and our domain registration would be cancelled if we didn't fix it right away. My husband checked and the information was current. Then he called Network Solutions and spent 45 minutes on hold to find out that this letter was sent to everyone. Talk about shady tactics.

NetSol's letter is clearly designed to alarm customers. Big bold letters underneath the address label warn: "Urgent: Your account information needs updating - and could result in loss of domain name." The letter references a user ID number and says, "Our records show that your account information may be incomplete or out of date." As with previous messages of this sort, Network Solutions tries to further alarm the recipient by implying that its ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) that's going to take their domain names away.

The funniest part of the letter might be when NetSol states that the "personal information you provide to Network Solutions is protected by our Privacy Policy." Right. If you actually read NetSol's privacy policy, you'll find they can share all your contact information "with carefully selected business partners, including those who offer services that complement those provided by us or which may otherwise be of interest to you." That's protection?

The last time we saw Network Solutions/VeriSign harassing its customers this way, a spokesperson described the message as a "friendly reminder." But those were e-mail messages designed to get customers to log into their online account managers. What's different about this latest snail mail is that it only provides a toll free phone number as a means of contacting NetSol to update your supposedly invalid account information. No wonder callers encountered long hold times.

And that leaves us with a bit of puzzle: why would NetSol want to panic its customers into phoning them? Did the company think that while they had them on the phone they might be able to sell them some additional services? Or was the plan perhaps to use Caller ID to add some phone numbers to that contact information they share with carefully selected business partners? What were they thinking? Of course, with NetSol you can never completely dismiss the simple explanation that they just weren't thinking at all. One thing's for sure, though - it's still the same old Network Solutions.