Domainer spamming: “Everyone is doing it”

If you’ve been receiving email inquiries for your dictionary word domains from a range of Gmail addresses, you aren’t alone.

These “pings” harvest your email from the WHOIS, and mass-email domain owners with inquiries of questionable syntax, made by people with bogus names.

I ended up receiving 30 such emails a week, and took a better look at the email headers; it wasn’t hard to locate the actual perpetrator, who used his HostGator account to blast emails via a mass-mailing script.

After filing several reports at HostGator’s abuse department and getting no response back – another reason to never use HostGator if they support spammers – I used DomainTools to scour the recent records of the primary domain sending out this garbage.

As it turns out, an otherwise respectable domainer/broker runs this mass-emailing venture as a side job; after I left a comment to his public Facebook – which he deleted – I got a private message, that pretty much claimed “everyone is doing it.

Our friend went on claiming that the spammer identities are real employees, and that he gets very few complaints from people willing to sell the domains he inquires about. He also asked me to get off my high horse, and let a “hard working man earn a living.

I find all these responses to be childish attempts at justifying a practice that belongs at the very bottom of the food chain; spammers aren’t “hard working men” but lazy phucksticks that deliver junk to people’s mailboxes.

I have no problem with direct inquiries that include a real person’s name, with a direct contact, and a “handwritten” email that addresses me. I despise script-kiddies that consider themselves “brokers” and give the domain industry a bad name at the same time.

Spamming: Not everyone is doing it, and those that do it get ostracized by the domain community, sooner or later.

Comments

  1. Leonard Britt says

    I have no problem with targeted inquiries i.e. I own a .TV domain and someone has the equivalent .COM at a reasonable price. However, what I find annoying is when the message title is a .COM domain I own and they are offering an inferior extension for $499.

  2. Leonard – In this case, the spam email claims to be a buyer. He even quipped, that my reaction is due to wanting more $$$ than what they offer. Nope. I don’t sell domains to spammers, period.

  3. “an otherwise respectable domainer/broker”
    Theo, who is this guy?

  4. Yes spammer sucks, you can even raise this complaint to domain registar, as domain registrars take action on domains being used for spamming,

  5. Andrea – At this time, since they said the emailing has ceased, I’ll cut them a break.

    VAT PS – You are correct, although it depends on the registrar. eNom does lock out domains that engage in spam, not sure what GoDaddy does.

  6. Theo,
    Very diplomatic (and smart) reply, Mr Mystery 😉

  7. I’d join a crowd of folks with torches and pitchforks to name and shame these people. I get loads of these — although they kinda come in waves.

  8. The lastest spam I’m getting now is for search engine submissions. I get them a day or two after registering a new domain. I sent in abuse notice to enom, three weeks later I got a response back from NameCheap stating I need make the complaint to the spammers hosting company which was some no name outfit located in Panama.

    I didn’t make any complaint to the host because I no longer had the spam messages, they auto delete from my spam folder after 7 days.

    Any business that hides who they are using spoofs emails, using a bogus name which can not be found is not worth doing business with. I really hope you decide to expose the head domain for sale spammer at some point.

    If a so called broker sends me a message I always search for their info first before making any response. If they don’t have a website or a social profile their message will just remain in my junk folder and auto delete after 7 days.

  9. If I get another email from the phuckers at Matt Collins, sending from intelend.co instead of their .com because they know they’re spamming and don’t want to screw up their .com address, I’ll send it to the department of justice: http://www.justice.gov/spam.htm

    That’s who I thought you were talking about, Acro. They’re vermin.

  10. christopher brennan says

    i know it is not email related but how many phone calls can you get from someone claiming to represent google places.

  11. Acro,
    Couldn’t agree more. No, not everyone is doing it, just these scumbags and the domains they are trying to push are absolute crap. You shouldn’t be apprehensive to out these chumps so they can be properly ostracized by the domaining community, by making an example of a few of them, perhaps “everyone” else would think twice before sending their next batch of emails.

  12. Too bad you’re not shamming them by outting their identities. I am so sick of eem

  13. I’m tired of the marketing team from Intelend.com (and spamming from Intelend.co) doing this crap. They give us all a bad name. Shame on them.

    Just because other people are doing it doesn’t make it right, and just because it gets results doesn’t make it legal.

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