In the past couple of days I have received some amusing email spam.
I own ten different domain names, mostly in the .net TLD. The spam emails in question all offered to sell me the domain “exnic.com” on the grounds that I already own “exnic.net” (not an unreasonable sales pitch). It turns out that this particular domain has expired and is currently “pending deletion”. This means that the original registrant has failed to renew ownership of the domain and the registrar is about to release it back to internic for resale. This process often happens and usually results in the sort of irritating website I noted a while back when looking at linuxdoc.org.
But, as I said, the domain name in question is not actually for sale yet, just “pending”, and it is always possible that the original owner will wake up to the fact that his domain has gone awol and will claim it back. The interesting thing about the emails I received was that two of them (purportedly from one “Arthur Simmons”) came from two completely different domains (“underforge.com” and “thewingsofhope.com” – both of which appear to be owned by “InTrust Domain Names”) and seemed to be competing with each other to sell me the domain. A third email came from somewhere calling itself “premierdomainbrokers.net” which at least has the decency to look like a brokerage. That email amused me because it said:
You may have received emails from other companies offering to sell you exnic.com.
That is misleading information. The domain cannot be purchased at this time.
It is actually in the pending delete stage and will be available very soon.
Oh yes indeed. Shame I’m not interested.