How GoDaddy annoyed me for 30 days

It’s important to state that GoDaddy was my primary domain registrar after I broke the chains of Network Solutions in 2000.

Positive things arise from competition, all while monopolies bring down entire industries. Throughout my early active use of GoDaddy – and prior to discovering Stargate around 2002 – I witnessed my domain portfolio climb into three digits.

While at GoDaddy I also had my first ever domain sale and it was there that I transferred my sole hijacked domain after it was temporarily stolen while at Network Solutions. In addition to that, I helped GoDaddy squash a serious security bug and also witnessed the GoDaddy appreciation of humor two years ago.

In other words, just because I don’t use GoDaddy anymore doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the past; business decisions are sometimes quite simple.

However, GoDaddy has annoyed the heck out of me for the past 30 days. How so?

A month ago I received an email asking me to authorize transfer to GoDaddy of an important domain that I own – which sits safely at Fabulous.  The email read in part:

Dear GoDaddy.com, Inc. Customer,

GoDaddy.com, Inc. received a request on 12/20/2010 for us to become the new registrar of record.

You have received this message because you are listed as the Registered Name Holder or Administrative contact for this domain name in the WHOIS database. If you are not the Account Holder, or you are transferring the domain to a new owner, please forward this email to the appropriate Account Holder so that they may complete the transfer process.

It then provided a transaction ID and a security code that’d initiate that transfer of my domain. I left an important detail out: I never initiated that transfer.

After the first three emails arrived, I contacted GoDaddy and explained to their tech support that I never authorized such a transfer; whoever was doing this was basically trying to fool me into approving the process.

I asked them to stop the process and GoDaddy’s response was that they could not. Every week, I got one such reminder email telling me how the transfer is in danger of failing if I did not log in and approve it.

What pissed me off was not the fact that I was receiving emails attempting to gain authorization to transfer a domain to GoDaddy. As it is, whoever attempted this transaction could not have completed it without further knowledge of the Auth/EPP code and without first unlocking the domain itself.

My domain was secure – the whole time at Fabulous.com.

What ticked me off was GoDaddy’s refusal to terminate this transaction, despite the fact that I alerted them to it. Were they hoping that despite all this whoever initiated the transfer would forget about the fees they paid?

I was told that the process would automatically end a month after it was started, and so it did. Four weeks and six email reminders later, it stopped.

It’s one thing to get renewal reminders at GoDaddy, attempting to also sell a dozen different services, it’s another to get “spammed” for domains that are with a different domain registrar.