Late last month I pointed out how Network Solutions acquired a group of drop-catching registrars owned by eNom.
The list of ICANN-accredited registrars were used by SnapNames to allocate resources to, in order to catch domains.
Today, July 12th, SnapNames utilized Network Solutions as the official registrar for domains caught on my behalf.
SnapNames and Network Solutions are both properties of Web.com.
Although I’m not sure what happens behind the scenes, the end result was rather comic, and here’s why.
Network Solutions sent out emails for recent transactions, notifying the owners that their domains, that were caught by the former eNom registrars, were now to be found at NetworkSolutions.com.
We”ve placed your newly acquired domain name in a new account at Network Solutions. To begin managing your new domain, please find your username and password information below.
Please take a few minutes to update your account with payment information and auto-renewal settings to ensure that your domains renew as intended on their expiration date.
Once again, thank you for choosing SnapNames®. We are committed to providing the best solutions, services, and support to help you succeed online.
I didn’t bother to check what ghost domain is in that Network Solutions account, for a simple reason: I’ve already pushed the domain to my primary eNom account, within hours of it being caught via SnapNames.
How is this possible?
While transfers of domains between registrars are not allowed within the first 60 days of registration, there are no such limits when pushing the domain from a sub-registrar (eNomNZ.com, in my case) to the primary eNom registrar.
In this case, it’s interesting to see what kind of verification was performed by Network Solutions, prior to sending out that informative email.
Such mergers can be confusing and entertaining at the same time! 😀
Affected some of mine today. Name servers altered in the move to Registrar PPC pages. Check your landers.
Garth – You are correct, the DNS was changed to eNom servers. That’s unheard of.
Another “funny” part: Today I received an email from Network Solutions asking me to verify the email address for that eNom domain, or risk having it deactivated per ICANN rules.
What a mess.
Enom trying to capture revenues from that departure of domains? Wonder if people with real websites affected? Sleazy move.
Wow, great catch. Very smart for noticing this!
It’s been exceptionally irksome for me, because for whatever reason my normally reliable Rackspace mail often isn’t seeing the new registration emails from this tangled mess at all. I believe it may be a continuation of the email foulups from Enom once Demand Media diddled with them. That destroyed their email forwarding, and nowadays it’s even hard to receive auth codes to certain email addresses. Just a terrible mess this all this. Shades of Registerfly.
Anyway, back to your discovery… could you kindly share more explicit instructions on how to do this? We perhaps look to see who the catching registrar in Whois, and then use the lost password feature there, is that right?
Thanks!
David – The issue I mentioned affects those that used SnapNames to catch domains, and these domains were transferred to eNom-controlled registrars.
As long as you didn’t move/push these domains out to the primary eNom.com account, they are now transitioned to Network Solutions.
The WHOIS will display the exact “eNom” registrar (now operated by NetSol) but you should have already received an email regarding that transition.