Well, I finally managed to get through to someone in the UK support area who had an ounce of sense (and a nice telephone manner) and learned two things …

1) I am not supposed to get the emails … they do and they do the transfer … this is NOT efficient but at least I know

2) They will keep the DNS servers running until the last transfer is completed

Fun huh .. now, if my fight to get an ssl certificate issued can be completed all I have to worry about is the massed hacker attack many of the sites I look after seem to be suffering (I think this might be because the web service hasn’t updated apache/php for quite a while and have no intention of ever updating it!)