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Don’t respond to “Good luck with that”

by — Domain Sales 19 Comments

It’s just a waste of your time.

Quote box that reads "Good luck with that!"

Have you ever received this response when you quote a price for one of your domain names?

“Good luck with that.”

It’s a bit of an insult. Like someone is calling you crazy.

It could be tempting to respond to the person and tell them why you aren’t crazy but I don’t think it’s worth it 99% of the time.

For example, this weekend I received an inquiry on CandyCorn.com. I looked up the inquirer and saw that it was a really small business in a really small town. I almost didn’t respond because it didn’t seem qualified. But you never know, so I quoted $35,000.

I got the “good luck with that” response.

I could huff and puff and tell them why I’m not crazy and educate them on the value of domain names…but why? It would be a waste of my time and their time. It’s better to just move on.

The exception would be if someone comes out with a decent starting point offer. For example, if someone who seemed qualified offered $10k for the name but said “good luck with that” to $35k, it might be worth discussing domain value to see if we can close the gap.

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Sedo makes expired list downloadable, Name.com changes happy hour

by — Expired Domains 2 Comments

Download lists to look for good domains, and you now have longer to buy discounted domains at Name.com.

Picture of downloadable list option on Sedo

Sedo’s expired domain lists are now downlodable.

A couple of quick news items for you on this Monday morning…

Sedo made its expired domain name inventory list downloadable. The marketplace auctions off expiring domain names from registrar 1&1 which is part of the same company as Sedo. But sorting through the list to find good domains is difficult. Now you can download the list and run it through services like Estibot to find the best domains. I also hope this means that expired domain data sites like ExpiredDomains.net start to provide data on these domains.

Also, Name.com has ended its Happy Hour sale concept in favor of monthly specials. The Name.com Happy Hour was a special promo (usually on one top level domain) that ran for a short time on Thursday afternoons. It’s a lot of effort to schedule time to register a domain to save a few bucks. Now, Name.com has a week-long sale each month. The kicker is you need to go to the sale page and get the discount code to get the discount. You’ll pay more if you try to register one of the sale domains and don’t use the discount code.

This month’s sale includes 30 new top level domains, most from Donuts’ portfolio. Donuts owns Name.com.

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WordPress Plugins + 2 more predictions – DNW Podcast #219

by — Podcasts 0 Comments

How to avoid bad WordPress plugins.

dnw-podcastThis week on the DNW podcast meet Mika Epstein, a WordPress engineer at DreamHost. She explains what to look for in WordPress plugins to make sure you aren’t opening up a backdoor to your website. We also hear predictions from Natasa Djukanovic and Braden Pollock.

Plus: NameSilo acquisition, much ado about ado.com, .homes, domain hijacking, hosting merger, NameBio and more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:24 — 23.6MB) | Embed

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Subscribe via iTunes to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, view on Google Play Music, or click play above or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)

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Newspack could solve one of WordPress’ problems

by — Uncategorized 1 Comment

WordPress-for-newsrooms could help small publishers avoid the IT guy.

There’s a problem with WordPress: it’s too complicated for the typical small business owner. It’s also too complicated for the typical small news publisher.

So it’s exciting to hear that Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Lenfest Institute for Journalism, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Civil Media are all contributing financially to an effort by WordPress creator Automattic to create Newspack. Google calls it “a fast, secure, low-cost publishing system tailor-made to the needs of small newsrooms”.

This sums it up nicely:

Journalists should be writing stories and covering their communities, not worrying about designing websites, configuring CMSs, or building commerce systems. Their publishing platform should solve these problems for them. So while Newspack publishers will have access to all the plugins created by the WordPress developer community, the core product is not trying to be all things to all publishers. It is trying to help small publishers succeed by building best practices into the product while removing distractions that may divert scarce resources. We like to call it “an opinionated CMS:” it knows the right thing to do, even when you don’t.

It will be exciting to see the finished product. Hopefully, this is a sign of things to come: easy-to-use installments of WordPress.

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Understanding SPF, DKIM and DMARC for email

by — Uncategorized 1 Comment

A primer on email authentication.

photo of person checking email

Domain names are necessarily intertwined with email. The domain name connected with an email address is a signal for email services about the sender’s reputation, assisting the mailbox provider (MBP) and ISP when it determines what’s legitimate and what’s junk.

There are a few authentication mechanisms that domain owners can put in place to reduce the chances of phishers and spammers from spoofing their domains. In this post I’ll run through these at a high level; in later posts I’ll go more in-depth and explain how to set these up.

There are three main authentication mechanisms that domain owners can put in place.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Think of SPF as a way to whitelist certain IP addresses that are validated to send email on behalf of your domain. You can tell email providers that only mail from a certain IP address or range of IPs is valid. Email from other IP addresses might be spoofed.

SPF is a way to reduce the chances that phishing and other emails that appear to be from your domain (but really aren’t) make it to the inbox. If you have a domain that you don’t use for email but people continually spoof it, you can add an SPF record that states that no mail should be sent from the domain.

Implementing SPF at its most basic level is quite easy. It requires adding a TXT record to the DNS.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

DKIM is more complicated than SPF and allows the sender to digitally sign certain components of the email.

With DKIM, the domain owner publishes a key in the public DNS. The outgoing email server signs the message. The recipient mail server uses the public key to check the signature and make sure it is valid. If so, then it shows that the signed fields have not been altered in route and passes DKIM.

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC)

DMARC is a way for email senders to tell mailbox providers what action to take if an email fails authentication under SPF or DKIM and provides a reporting channel from mailbox providers back to senders.

A sender can tell the email recipient server what to do if a message fails authentication: let it pass through, quarantine it in the junk folder or reject the message.

Implementing DMARC is a journey, with companies typically publishing a DMARC policy with a ‘none’ policy setting to take inventory of mailstreams coming off their domain and gather reporting back from the participating mailbox providers. Once organizations have a clear understanding of legitimate vs. illegitimate mail coming off their domain, they can take action with their DMARC policy setting by selecting either a ‘quarantine’ or ‘reject’ policy.

Even if a company uses DMARC but tells the recipient server to take no action against mail that fails SPF or DKIM (policy=none), it will still benefit by using DMARC. That’s because email services will begin providing reports to the sender about the email it processes. This data includes IP addresses, rDNS, sending domain and other information helping senders track down either incomplete SPF or DKIM records or sources trying to spoof the company’s domain.

Like SPF and DKIM, DMARC involves a DNS record.

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