# About Nameward

Nameward watches the parts of your company that live on the public internet: your domain names, the certificates on your servers, the DNS records that decide who may send email as you, and the domains that look like yours.

## What it checks

- **Domains:** registration and expiry dates from RDAP and WHOIS, so a renewal doesn't slip past.
- **TLS certificates:** expiry on your main hosts, the hosts found in certificate logs and any you add, plus an inventory of every certificate issued for your domains, taken from public Certificate Transparency logs. Nameward also spots a certificate that was **renewed but not installed**: a new one exists, but the server still serves the old one. This is common on firewalls, VPN appliances and Exchange servers. See [Certificate renewed but not installed](/guides/certificate-renewed-but-not-installed).
- **Email authentication:** SPF and DMARC records, including SPF lookup limits and DMARC policies that only watch and don't stop anyone. See [DMARC p=none to p=reject](/guides/dmarc-none-to-reject).
- **Lookalike domains:** registered domains that differ from yours by a character or two, how new they are, and whether they are set up to send email.

Each finding gets one of three words: **Fine**, **Watch** or **Act now**. When a check can't run, it says **Unknown** rather than guessing.

## Who it's for

- **MSPs** looking after many clients' domains and appliances, who want one view, alerts per client and a monthly report.
- **Small businesses that send or pay invoices**, where a fake invoice from a lookalike domain can cost real money.
- **Small IT and DevOps teams** who want forgotten certificates, failed renewals and SPF or DMARC drift caught early.

## How it works

Nameward looks only at public data: DNS, RDAP, Certificate Transparency logs and TLS handshakes with the hosts you add. There are no agents to install and no credentials to hand over.

Before any alert goes out, Nameward checks again to confirm the problem is real. Every alert says what happened, why it matters and what to do. When everything is fine, the monthly summary says so.

You can try it without signing up: run a [free scan](/#scan) of your domain.

## Why now

Certificates are getting shorter lives. Under CA/Browser Forum ballot SC-081, the maximum lifetime of a public TLS certificate drops to 200 days from March 2026, 100 days from March 2027 and 47 days from March 2029. Web servers renew automatically; many appliances don't. More renewals mean more chances for a new certificate to sit uninstalled. Read more in [47-day SSL certificates](/guides/47-day-ssl-certificates).

At the same time, invoice fraud often starts with a domain one letter away from a real supplier's. Spotting those domains early, before an invoice arrives from one, is cheaper than recovering a payment.

## Principles

- **Outside-in only.** We look at what anyone on the internet can see, nothing more.
- **Calm by design.** Status is always a shape, a word and a colour. No scare tactics.
- **Confirmed before sent.** Alerts follow a re-check, so they are worth reading.
- **Quiet to run.** Nameward should need no daily attention from you or from us.

## Who builds it

Nameward is built by Omer Haim.

See also: [Pricing](/pricing) · [Security](/security) · [Privacy](/privacy)

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Source: https://nameward.app/about (updated 2026-10-30)