Domain Buying And Selling

[mjserv]

I'm thinking about investing in the domain trading system. I plan on buying a domain name, building it a bit, and selling it.

What are the risks of investing in domain names?

[zen-r]

Not a lot of risk that I can think of, other than that you may not be able to sell it for what you paid for it.

Also, if you are buying a pre-used domain name, check what it was used for before. It might have earned itself a dodgy reputation, or may by now be receiving masses of daily spam.

[mjserv]

Not a lot of risk that I can think of, other than that you may not be able to sell it for what you paid for it.

Also, if you are buying a pre-used domain name, check what it was used for before. It might have earned itself a dodgy reputation, or may by now be receiving masses of daily spam.

thanks for the fast response, you are right. I checked out some domains ready to sell and if you check the web sites they are all nearly spam for example (jewl.com)

[zen-r]

thanks for the fast response, you are right. I checked out some domains ready to sell and if you check the web sites they are all nearly spam for example (jewl.com)

Yes, but what I mean even more than that is that their email accounts could have attracted a lot of spam by now.

For example, www.site.com could be on the mailing list of thousands of spammers by now. The spammers not only flood the website's email inbox with anything@site.com (eg. support@site.com, help@site.com, webmaster@site.com). But the spammers also may be sending out millions of emails to others people, all fraudulently addressed as coming from site.com.

I've had several sites over the years, & one in particular now receives hundreds of junk emails per day. Most of them are emails bounced back from other people's mail servers, which recognised the mail as spam, & sent it back to me because that's where it was fraudulently addressed as coming from. Spammers don't like to give out their own addresses, so they use other people's!

End result : some website's have email which is much harder to filter & manage, because of the amount of spam they now get. This is usually with the bigger, popular sites, but can also be with smaller websites which did a poor job of protecting their email address from the spammers.

Another thing to look out for when registering a domain, is that you don't choose a name which will be, or is already being contested by another company which believes the name infringes their own trade mark in some way.

[merrillmck]

Interesting thread ...

How do you protect your email? I've seen simple stuff like

mymail at thishost dot com

[zen-r]

Obfuscate it wherever possible.

For example, use contact forms on your website rather than just displaying your email address in clear text. This helps prevent spammers & web-crawling bots from spotting your address & adding it to the spammers databases.

A bad one is when you register your site & use your real email address in the form. Depending on what country you are in/ what extension you are registering, you may be obliged to have your details show up in the Whois - especially if you are a registered company rather than a private individual.

I used an email address to register a domain years ago, & even though I never used that email address anywhere else, it now gets loads of spam. This shows that the spammers are harvesting details from the Whois register, even though they are not supposed to be allowed to.

So either use a separate email address for the reg process, which you don't mind receiving junk in, or make use of the registrar's Privacy service. They often charge extra for this though. They then display their own contact details in the Whois, & only forward on the non-junk mail to you. I'm not sure exactly how this works.

There are also lots of really obvious tips which I won't go into great detail about here, such as ensuring your PC doesn't get viruses which could harvest your website's email address!

Please click my Reputation button (at the corner of this post) & make me -it costs you nothing!

If I've traded services/credits with you, please remember to leave iTrader Feedback. Thanks.

[masshuu]

I forget what its called, but certian large email services support it, but its a TXT field in a domains info(like A, MX, etc) that an email server uses to make sure email it receives from that domain is actually from that domain.

If you want to test this yourself, setup Microsoft IIS email server, make a simple program(php, vb, c#, etc) that sends email using this server.
Next Send an email to your self, use somthing like Example @ microsoft.com as the "From" field.

You should either never receive it, or it will go to your spam/Bulk folder. I actually had an Admin for some forums i visit did that and send out 300 emails to people from Support @ microsoft.com saying to install Linux.

I never knew till he told me. I checked my bulk folder, and sure enough, it was there.

[edit]
i found more info, you can read it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
[edit2]
heres a helpful site also:
http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html

[ichwar]

I actually had an Admin for some forums i visit did that and send out 300 emails to people from Support @ microsoft.com saying to install Linux.

I never knew till he told me. I checked my bulk folder, and sure enough, it was there.

Lol.:laugh: Are you serious? That's hilarious.

Anyways, buying expired domains can be profitable if you can get them right in front of someone else who really wants that domain. You could flip it pretty easily. Also, expired domains from reputable companies/sites could bring in a lot of free genuine traffic.

[zen-r]

Yes, agreed. There are several pluses.

But the original question asked about the risks, so I only really covered that area.