The onslaught of domain spammers emailing solicitations to acquire domain names that are dropping or pitching domains for sale seems to have increased dramatically over the last month.  Seeing that there is no rest for the wicked, I woke to find these devious elves had filled my Christmas morning in-box full of left-over fruit-cake domains (see image for examples).

The domain spamming appears to be increasing as new drop-catching services, email out domain names that may have some correlation to a domain name that the recipient of the email owns.  Companies like Intrust Domains have been soliciting people to “express interest” in a domain that Intrust then attempts to acquire.  I’m sure that anyone with a portfolio of even a handful of names has likely seen an email from one of these companies.  Clearly these spams have worked a reasonable rate of success or there wouldn’t be an increasing number of companies doing the same thing.

The sender of these emails tend to either be

Domain Opportunity which includes the address :
Backorder Division
200 E Colfax Ave # 100
Denver, CO 80203

Domain Inquiry
Marketing Development Team
111 N Canal St Suite 1890
Chicago, IL 60606

Domain Alert
The Domain Team
25 First Street, 2nd Floor
Cambridge MA 02141

Available Domain
The Domain Team
25 First Street, 2nd Floor
Cambridge MA 02141

I suspect that these are all the same group. Each email is formatted similarly and contains an opt-out at the bottom. Additionally all 3 senders above uses a link to an obscure domain name. For example http://cellsearches.com/4215015mepafu-KLY , which at the time of this writing and in all cases links to NameBind.com

Another increasing form of domain spamming comes in the form of “new” sales letters. In a similar fashion to the expiring domain spam, these “marketers” tend to email domains that they have in some way deemed related to a domain you may own, at least that’s the story I’ve been given.

As an example, in the last 5 days I’ve received over a dozen an emails about “High SEO” domains such as thehaj.org, lacieheart.com, golfstandbags.com, smallbusinessservices.net and zipbags.com from “Robert Parker” robertparker.tm@gmail.com or “ADAM SMITH” adamsmith.tm@gmail.com, Michael Thomas thomasmichael.tm@gmail.com and ”George Hunt” georgehunt.dn@gmail.com, who happen to have the same phone number : +91.939.277.4412

When I emailed and asked where they got my email address, they informed me “My email program found your email address from the whois data of similar domains.”   There’s no telling what “similar” domains means.

I’m all in favor of receiving an email about a domain opportunity that I might be interested in and I’ve been inclined to send out the occasional email about a domain I’m selling.  I’d like to think that these emails would be highly targeted to the recipient and may even be coming from tools like Estibot’s lead generation tool, but the recent ones I’ve been flooded with seem far too obscure and untargetted to be sourced via this tool.

This new breed of “domainer” seems to pay no mind to who they are emailing or why. The pitches are canned and automated at best, some containing the mistakes of non-native English speakers. Rather than sending out a targeted message, it seems domain spammers, like those spamming prescription medicine offerings, find it much easier to flood every possible in-box with their ridiculous pitches.  I suspect that much of the email harvesting that these spammers do comes from checking the new whois information of sold domains harvested via DNJournal.com or Namebio.com.

All signs indicate that there’ll be an increase in these emails in the coming year. Unfortunately, the results of this will likely also increase the number of domains bought under privacy as well as the number of domain sales that go unreported.

What do you think about this issue?

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