If you're reading this, then you've probably received emails from someone identifying himself as Kenneth Palm from iTime Marketing, Inc., offering to sell you an Internet domain name.
Ken Palm emailed us several times in August 2008. He wanted to sell us the domain dateofeaster.com, which he had recently acquired. Since we owned the corresponding dot-org domain, Ken reasoned that we would be eager to have the dot-com domain too, and he was willing to sell it to us for US$657.
To put that in perspective, our preferred domain registrar offers registration of dot-com domain names for as little as US$10 per year.
We own several Internet domains, including obliquity.com (the web site you're visiting right now), and dateofeaster.org, which we acquired three years ago with the intention of creating a web site devoted to the fascinating subject of how the date of Easter is calculated.
We had also hoped to acquire the domain dateofeaster.com, but someone else already owned it, and it didn't look like it was going to become available in the foreseeable future, so we forgot about it.
However, the previous owner of dateofeaster.com failed to renew the registration of the domain when it was about to expire in May 2008. Three months later, on 13 August 2008, it became available again, but we were unaware of it until we received an intriguing anonymous email four days later ...
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| May 2008 | Registration of the domain dateofeaster.com expires, and it enters a 75-day suspension period prior to being deleted. |
| 13 August | The domain dateofeaster.com is deleted from the central dot-com registry and becomes available to anyone who wants to register it. |
| 16 August | Ken Palm registers dateofeaster.com for the first time. |
| 17 August | We receive an anonymous email from a Google Mail address, telling us that we may be contacted by someone wanting to sell us the dot-com version of our domain name, and warning us not to buy it. |
| 19 August |
We receive the first email
from Ken Palm, who tells us that he has acquired dateofeaster.com at an auction
of Internet domain names, and since we own the dot-org version, he is offering us the opportunity
to buy it from him. We later learn that the asking price is US$657.
Four hours later, Ken sends a second email offering to help us to set up forwarding from dateofeaster.com to our existing dot-org web site, and urging us to telephone him at a Colorado number. |
| 21 August | Ken re-registers dateofeaster.com for a second five-day period, and sends us a reminder email. If we don't want to buy dateofeaster.com from him, he says he will make other plans with the domain. |
| 23 August | Ken sends a fourth email announcing a one-day sale of domain names. For just 24 hours, he is dropping the price of dateofeaster.com from US$657 to only US$357, but we must act right away to take advantage of his generosity. |
| 24 August |
Ken has been emailing us at an address which he obtained from the contact details for
our domain dateofeaster.org. Our registrar
pairNIC provides a valuable service called email
privacy: instead of listing our real email address in the contact details for each
of our domains, pairNIC uses a randomised email address which changes every seven
days. Messages sent to the randomised address are forwarded to our real address,
but each randomised address expires after ten days. This protects us from spammers.
The address which Ken has been using now expires. Unfortunately, it means that we don't receive any further emails from Ken, but we later learn from Graham Ellis of Well House Consultants Ltd that Ken's fifth email would have begged us to make an offer for dateofeaster.com. |
| 25 August |
We haven't responded to Ken's emails, nor have we followed any of the "buy this domain"
links in his emails. Ken finally figures out that we're not going to buy
dateofeaster.com from him, and he cancels the registration of
the domain.
Once again, dateofeaster.com is available to anyone who wants it. |
| 26 August | We acquire dateofeaster.com via pairNIC, who charge us US$60 to register it for six years. |
Ken Palm is engaged in an activity known as domaining, which involves the buying and selling of Internet domain names such as dateofeaster.com as commodities.
Domainers try to acquire recently-expired domain names, either in the hope of selling them back to their original owners (who may have simply forgotten to renew the registration) or, as in the case of dateofeaster.com, to the owner of the corresponding dot-org domain.
This is all completely legal. However, domainers take advantage of a little-known loophole: a five-day "grace period" introduced in 2003 by ICANN, the governing body of the Internet. This grace period covers the first five days after a domain is newly registered. The registration can be cancelled at any time within that period for a full refund, but the domain is fully active during the grace period.
Domainers like Ken Palm set themselves up as domain registrars in order to use the grace period more effectively. Using software developed for the purpose, they can repeatedly register a domain, cancel the registration within five days, and immediately re-register it. This gives them the use of the domain for as long as they like, for an outlay of $6.86 (the fee which a registrar must pay to VeriSign, the dot-com central registry, for each new domain) which is eventually refundable if they choose to relinquish the domain.
This practice is known as domain tasting. The domainer enjoys the use of the domain for an extended period, knowing that he can get a refund of his $6.86 fee at any time.
The domainer can try to make money in several ways. If nobody wants to buy the domain from him for an inflated price, he may set up a web site with pay-per-click advertising. If the domain belonged to a popular web site before it expired, people may continue to visit it via search engines or bookmarks. If enough people click on the ads, the domainer may make enough money to cover his $6.86 outlay, and he will keep the domain for a year.
On the other hand, if the domain had little traffic in its previous incarnation, the domainer may register it for only one or two five-day periods, and then cancel the registration to get his $6.86 fee back. The domain then becomes available again for anyone to acquire.
Domainers make their money by using automated software to manage thousands of domains. The software tracks responses to the emails in order to judge the level of interest in each domain. This is why it is important NOT to
A full WHOIS search on a domain which is being offered for sale runs the risk of alerting the domainer, because most domainers act as their own registrars, so the WHOIS search will query their computer systems.
Fortunately, it is possible to determine the status of a dot-com domain by sending a query to the VeriSign dot-com registry using telnet, as this example demonstrates. User commands and input are in red, and the relevant part of the response is in blue.
$ telnet whois.crsnic.com 43 Trying 199.7.59.74... Connected to whois.crsnic.com. Escape character is '^]'. domain dateofeaster.com Whois Server Version 2.0 Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information. Domain Name: DATEOFEASTER.COM Registrar: VIBRANT NETWORKS, INC Whois Server: whois.itimemarketing.com Referral URL: http://www.managedomain.us Name Server: NS1.ITIMEMARKETING.NET Name Server: NS2.ITIMEMARKETING.NET Status: clientDeleteProhibited Updated Date: 21-aug-2008 Creation Date: 21-aug-2008 Expiration Date: 21-aug-2009 [Remainder of output omitted.]
If you do want to acquire the dot-com domain name that a domainer is trying to sell you, your best strategy is to ignore all emails and enticements to express an interest in the domain. Run a stealth WHOIS search each day. Eventually, you will see the magic words:
No match for domain "DATEOFEASTER.COM".
which tells you that the domainer has lost interest and cancelled his registration of the domain. It is now available for you to register through your preferred registrar, for a lot less than the domainer was asking!
Copyright © 1998-2008 by David Harper and L.M. Stockman