Others just send the email, but have not registered the domain and hope you don’t know enough to see if it’s registered, or even to verify that you are being contacted by the real owner. In these cases you can just register it right away.

But it bothers me that people refer to these as “scams”. When someone offers you a domain name, even at insain prices, that is not a scam. Scams are illegal acts and you can report them to the authorities. Asking or charging excessive prices for a domain name is not against the law.

The trademark domain scam from China should be illegal if it’s not, because they are LYING when they say someone is trying to register your trademark. In the other cases, they are not LYING to you, they just are not telling you information that you could use to get the domain for $8.

We may not like that someone has a domain we think we should have, and we may not like the idea of someone making large profits from an $8 domain, but as the OP said, they would not even have known about the domain if the spammer (and I generally consider these to be spam) had not told them it was available. So how much do people think it IS worth to be told about domains like this? Is this a service that has any value? If you just register the domain yourself, you will have a nice feeling that YOU have taken advantage of someone else’s efforts. Hey, I’ve done the very same thing. “Thanks for letting me know about the domain, I just registered it myself…! ”

So while we may not like these non-scam emails, will we be missing them if we no longer get them any more? Perhaps we should encourge them to ask for donations from the people they contact? I think many people could consider what they do a useful service and be willing to donate a few bucks if they let me know about a domain they want. Many thousands of domains expire each day and donations could reach significant amounts.

…shucks…an’ besides that, these junk/spam e-mails are also great idea starter/ generators for legitimate ways to harness the power of the Internet.

Well, this isn’t a trademark; it’s a popular variant of my first name, so no problems there.

This is good information to know; I think that I had checked the whois and it was registered, but it never occurred to me that it was being tasted and would be dropped or left to expire.

Thanks again!

*

I just looked.
They must have dropped it yesterday or today.

I just reg’d it.

[...] Here is the original [...]