use Perl

Some people will know that I've been having all sorts fun and games over the last few weeks trying to get a refund out of a domain registrar that charged me for renewing a domain, didn't renew it (because they'd detagged it) and then tried to charge me £50 to retag it.

Thankfully, those nice folks over at Black Cat Networks were able to take control of the domain for me and look after it for a mere 11.75 GBP and I now have my main email domain back. It's only taken six weeks.

Three things have particularly annoyed me about the whole affair.

1. The registrar made no attempt to contact me before detagging it. No warning, no invitation, nothing and then they tried to charge me a stupid amount to fix it.
2. Their renewal application is so broken that it will quite happily accept and bill my credit card for something it can't deliver. Isn't that fraudulent ?
3. In my dealings with $registrar, each email has the same standard sig on it which has been driving me increasingly mad. Remember that I'm trying to not use their service:

Thank you for using our service

$person

$registrar

To give this little rant some perl content, I've now written a little perl script that looks at my xml list of registered domains every day and emails me when one is due for renewal. Every day I find new uses for perl that make it so much more useful beyond the boundaries of cgi scripts :-)