Melbourne IT was forced to apologise to its resellers earlier this month after a blunder saw renewal notices mailed directly to 3,000 of its partners' customers.

The renewal notice encouraged the domain name holders to register directly with Melbourne IT--an action that would have seen the company robbing its own resellers of their business.

The unconditional apology followed a day later. A copy was obtained by ZDNet Australia today.

"Melbourne IT erroneously sent renewal notices directly to a number of the customers of its Resellers," it said. "Melbourne IT had intended to send the renewal notices directly to its Resellers, in accordance with its standard procedures".

"Melbourne IT wishes to apologise to you for this error," it added.

It wasn't just the resellers who received the explanation. The end users themselves were forwarded an apology as well.

[The] notice was sent to you in error. Please ignore it. It should have been sent to the Melbourne IT Reseller, Ã,«Reseller Company NameÃ,», who manages your domain name," it said. "We apologise for our error in sending you this communication directly rather than letting Ã,«Reseller Company Name"Ã,» continue to manage your domain name".

A Melbourne IT spokesperson confirmed the mistake affected multiple resellers.

"We discovered our error within 24 hours. It was an error, and we've admitted it and done our best to rectify it," he told ZDNet Australia . "Where the registrants have come to use as a result of that we've redirected them to their reseller".

The spokesman pointed out that Melbourne IT handles over two million domain names, so the mistake was in the grand scheme of things fairly minor. However Melbourne IT will upgrade some of its systems to avoid getting resellers "off-side" in the future, he said.

It's all come too late for Deon Attard, managing director of Mackay based ISP and retailer Easy Internet Services.

"It's certainly not a very good practice and it will add to the confusion in the market if domain name registration isn't something [recipients of the renewal notice] understand and they're already getting mail from all these dodgy registers," he said.

Attard says he'll be moving his customers over to Enetica. Although his business doesn't make a lot of money out of domain name registrations, he will make the change to avoid hassles in the future.

"We were pretty busy last week taking phone calls from people asking 'do we need to pay this Melbourne IT thing?'" he said. "I've certainly got better things to do".

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