Hello and Assalamo Alaikum,
Although this topic is covered by many other domainers but today I wanted to share my own perspective in this regard by giving you situation I was into.
There was a domain in early days Pets.CO (currently owned by someone else) which had an invalid email ID. I don’t remember the exact email address but it was something like name@domainname123.com and that domainname123.com was available to hand register! Anyone could have gone onto register that available name, setup an email which was showing in WHOIS and recovered the password by going through the “forgot password” procedure. That’s absolutely unethical and illegal but I am talking about a scenario of could have happened. Anyhow, I waited for that domain to get drop and grab it through backorder by companies like DomainMonster or Name.com but eventually the registrar grabbed the domain before it goes through the PendingDelete phase.
I was really frustrated with this situation and contacted the registrar and informed about the situation and as expected their response was like only the original owner can have the domain back. That’s fine but why the hell they snatched it!
Today I checked and can see the registrar and owner both are changed. It seems the previous registrar who took the domain (after the original owner didn’t renew) and might have sold to the current buyer. I have nothing to blame on new owner.
In the end, it was no one’s else loss but only of the previous owner who lost a premium domain easily worth around mid 5 figures IMO.
So it’s really important to keep your email address valid and updated in WHOIS. Although there are many other reasons for which you shall keep your email ID valid one.
Another thing to note is when setting up profile with a new registrar sometimes I may mistype my own ID so double check it. For example I use abm at abdulbasit.com and if I miss or add single letter so anyone can go and register and mistyped name and grab my domain and I wouldn’t even know it! So please make sure you are double checking email IDs you enter at any registrar.
Have you experienced something like this before?
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Very good points. You cover various topics in domaining which is why I like your blog.Thank you.
I had the same situation with a premium domain I owned. The thing with mine though that the guy made the whois as an email under the same domain, so I have to buy the email service from enom and create that email alias, then Im able to change it! I didnt do this, and had to pay the $40 renewal from enom as time was really due for renewal or it wil enter redemption! A very frustrating process and I think that ICANN must look into it as sometimes its really just phishy and scammers make a lot of… Read more »
That’s sad to hear about your incident. Yeah, surely those scammers be making money from such act and must be stopped somehow.
Thanks Ahmed for sharing though.
[…] Why it’s important to have valid email ID in WHOIS […]
Nice story.
In SEO, people use a similar technique a lot – you grab a dropped domain, set up a wildcard email, and try to restore passwords for as many social accounts and emails as you can. But Whois… Really smart, albeit very unethical of course.
Thanks Leo for the feedback and sharing the similar technique which is used in SEO and I wasn’t aware of this yet. Unethical yeah… But one must be careful in selecting which email ID to use and type in properly as many people don’t take their email IDs seriously and not aware of their consequences.