You want to sell me my own domain?
Today was rather interesting – got up and checked my email and sorted through the few bits of spam I enjoy getting, but one particular one caught my eye… They were trying to sell me a domain name that I already owned?!
I laughed and thought to myself, “Fools! I’m not paying you $199 for a domain *I* already own!”. I figured to back up my jovial mood I’d just check up on that domain since I don’t really use it for anything (but had planned to) to make sure everything was peachy. I ended up getting some parked page instead, trying to sell me my own domain – “That’s not right… What the hell?”. I thought maybe I had mistyped the domain, or that the domain in the email wasn’t really mine but just similar to mine…
That’s when I got out the nerd tools and did a whois lookup. Sure enough the domain was mine, but it had expired! Uhoh! First, I was supposed to get emails way ahead of time to inform me if my domains were coming up for renewal, and second… hoktar.com was about to expire today! Double crap! I quickly logged in to my registrar and renewed hoktar.com for another year – thankfully it was still up and working fine. I then checked on the 3 other domains which had apparently expired already and noticed that they had expired on February 4th! Wow, now that’s a long time to be down and me not notice. Something was up!
Turns out I never did bother to set up the managing email address for those 3 other domains which is where all my registrar stuff goes to (I had to redo my system a while back when my hdd died on me & didn’t set XP up as before since I was waiting for Vista), and on top of that bonehead move the account had a bunch of bounceback emails telling me domains were about to expire. Seems that I had also made a change to my email server configuration which prevented the registrars systems from sending me my renewal notices! And best of all, the most recent set of bouncebacks were telling me that on March 16th (that’s tomorrow) the domains would be deleted and I couldn’t renew them! A few clicks here and there and I had everything renewed and good for another year… phew!
Wow, what a huge stroke of luck that some idiot tried to sell me my own domains which caused me to renew them the day before they would expire and he actually could have sold me my own domains!
Moral of this story? Always check your renewal dates and make sure you can receive renewal notices from your registrar 
I usually prefer to just register 1 year at a time manually, so I have the choice to think about discarding any domains I no longer use. Also allows me to budget a bit better knowing when money is coming out of my pockets.
The registrar I’m with right now allows me to pool money so I haven’t had to charge my card in a few years now, but they also don’t have auto-renew features either.
This was just an odd case of one-off circumstances that ultimately almost lost me my domains. Who would have thought that a piece of spam saved me losing my domains with 1 day to spare!
Ha! Yes, a lesson learned! When I started to read your blog, I thought to myself… this guy “thinks” he owns it, but forgot to re-register it!
It happens to a lot of us, who own many domains. We forget to update our email addresses, think we updated the whois info, or just plain forget.
I always hate to “automatically renew”, because I think the are just “gonna get my credit card” again, but sometimes it’s a wise thing to do. Also, you need to have all your domains, and expiration dates printed also to review. I have lost a couple of good name because of this also.
Frank