We have been tracking domain registrations and got a notice in mid 2006 of transfer from Coptix to Smartech, so maybe you can find some older whois/DNS records in the abuse newsgroups that show tresspassers-w as primary DNS.

I'm not sure it is really that relevant as Coptix was never paid by RNC and mostly just managed DNS in exchange for rack space in the Smartech NOC (and according to Cross, "discounts").

Assuming you can trust the "Jeffrey" that posts to CorrenteWire which I have found no reason not to believe it, that is pretty much the history of recent Coptix adventure into misinformation. (Search Correntewire for "gwb43")

It appears Cross first started posting there, and when no one emailed him or redacted any connection from tresspassers-w to RNC, they cooked up this Rove photo prank. Josiah Roe and Cross make it pretty clear in their posts that the Rove/Coptix photo prank was because people were following the DNS trail, much like you are looking into. When no one took him at his word about the RNC and Coptix, they posted links on many "lefty" blogs about "check out this photo" Where they photoshopped the Coptix logo into a Rove photo and back edited a blog post from Feb. and edited a second blog post to add more evidence to the photo as having existed since Rove visited Chattanooga.

You can read the CTFP article about the Rove photo. Don't believe anything about April Fools prank, they posted the photo on March 30th and kept up the fake photo until well after April 2nd. They later spun it to a viral marketing campaign, but Cross mentions it was about getting even for poor journalism online.

So, just FYI, Coptix didn't like people looking into their involvement with RNC.

The most I can find on Coptix is the smear website kerry-04.org (go ahead and nslookup w3.coptix.com and check out that webpage) http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Patriots_Against_John_Kerry

I'd welcome any thing you do find on Trespassers-w, and there is a lot of disinformation, so don't take my word without checking, but I'm afraid I haven't found anything beyond secondary (maybe at one point primary) DNS service.

Thanks,
Intranets (ePM researcher)

Our conclusion
So, there you go. Deep Mail checks in. Because we're insisting on only using independently verifiable sources in our own investigation and always go for an official source when possible, we're not even going to try to verify or expand on Deep Mail's comments. We leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Will there be more from Deep Mail? Will other readers send us in information (hopefully identifying themselves)? Where will this all go?

That, boys and girls, is anyone's guess.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's author of Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours (Sam's, 2003) and coauthor of OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.