Spam or not? The rotten side of domain steak

Currently, there are several active threads over at DNForum, related to spam sent to domainers.

According to Wikipedia, spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.

With regards to domainers, we all get excited when domain offers arrive in the email; but several such offers aren’t true but simply “pings” to gauge one’s selling price.

When these emails arrive without any indication of a legitimate attempt to contact us, they are borderline spam. Most bulk emailers out there harvest email addresses from the WHOIS information of domains. Since the WHOIS contact information needs to be current and active, there is no real way to avoid receiving such emails along with individual inquiries or system-generated emails from the Registrar.

The type of bulk email that targets domainers and which deserves to be classified as spam, is that which resembles a dictionary attack. Having created a list of A to Z words or compounds, spammers query the domain and email its owner. Sequential emailing means that if you own a domain that starts with A and another that starts with B, you will receive an email from the spammer for A, first.

How soon you will be receiving that second email for domain B depends on the pacing of the spammer, which can be slowed down on purpose, in order to avoid detection and banning by the ISP or email/hosting provider. Sometimes it could be minutes or hours, other times it could be days.

The only difference in such sequential spam emails sent out to domainers seems to be the domain listed, sometimes the offer price also – but the wording is essentially the same; often times, it’s grammatically incorrect and contains obscure phrases: Google “Best gards” and see what I mean.

An example spam email targeting domain owners is below. While most such spam emails come from Gmail accounts, due to the easy method of creating new email accounts, some serial spammers register a new domain with WHOIS shield on and use a free hosting package – usually with GoDaddy – to send out their boilerplate spam without any discrimination.