Last week an email showed up for NotRenewing.com. Subject line: "notrenewing." Nothing else. It landed straight in spam, which turned out to be exactly where it belonged.
The message claimed to come from a domain registration center in Shanghai. A company called Baoming Ltd, they said, had applied to register "notrenewing" as an internet keyword, plus a stack of Chinese domains: NotRenewing.cn, .com.cn, .net.cn, .org.cn. These registrations "conflicted" with my company name. Was Baoming Ltd an authorized distributor or business partner of mine?
Sounds official, right? It's a scam.
This one's been making the rounds for years. The applicant's name changes, the "registration center" changes, but the script doesn't: somebody is about to register your brand in China, and lucky you, they're giving you a chance to stop it.
Hey, quick note - If you have domains you are not going to renew, list them on NotRenew.com, the $99 flat fee, no hassle, marketplace and make some money before it drops.
Reply and say you've never heard of Baoming Ltd, and the pressure goes up. Now the other party is "moving forward," and you should really register those domains first to protect your brand. And wouldn't you know it, the registration center would be happy to handle that for you. At a price several times what the names would cost through any registrar you've actually heard of.
The whole thing runs on urgency. Nobody likes hearing that another company is about to grab domains matching their business, and words like "conflict" and "urgent" do exactly what they were chosen to do.
Here's the part that makes it work: there's just enough truth in it. Someone genuinely could register an available version of your name under another extension. That's real. But no mysterious registration center is obligated to warn you first, and you don't need to defensively register every variation of your brand across every extension on earth. If that were the job, none of us could afford to be in business.
My advice is boring, and it fits in three sentences. Don't reply. Don't click anything. Don't buy domains from the stranger who invented the emergency.
If a country-code extension actually matters to your business, check availability yourself and buy it through a registrar you already trust. Base the decision on whether the name has value to you — not on a deadline somebody in your spam folder made up.
In this case, Gmail nailed it on the first try.