Disaccredited registrar restarts familiar marketing emails.
RegisterFly, a once-ICANN-accredited registrar that imploded in a wave of scandal last year, has restarted its familiar email marketing campaigns.
The company was famous for sending e-mails with too-good-to-be-true prices, including .com domains at far below wholesale prices. These emails were usually sent weekly. For example, here are some of the offers in these emails:
6/6/06: $2.75 .net domains
6/20/06: $3.25 domain transfers
The latest ads have more reasonable offers, such as $7.99 domain transfers and $6.99 .nets.
As a reminder, RegisterFly is not an accredited registrar. Despite a disclaimer on its site, it did not willingly give up its ICANN status; it was stripped by the organization for non-compliance. The company entered into a last second agreement to transfer its domains to GoDaddy to save its customers from losing all of their domains. I do not recommend registering domains through RegisterFly.
Doug Mehus says
I concur with that statement 100%. As a former RegisterFly customer forced to get my domain names out, I agree wholeheartedly. Interestingly, eNom’s role in the whole debacle was despicable. They were not at all accomodating, to people using RegisterFly’s WHOIS protection service or to people (like me) that managed to get their WHOIS information unmasked. They still required photo ID (which I didn’t have as I don’t drive) even though I e-mailed them from my administrative contact e-mail address. Their Business Development Manager Elida Flores was absolutely no help, with her canned responses. Plus, eNom took forever to terminate RegisterFly’s reseller status.
I won’t use eNom or RegisterFly again. I’ll stick with GoDaddy.com or, failing them, possibly DomainDiscover or Tucows.
Cheers,
Doug