In 2021 we bought a small regional haulier and over the next two years folded it into our own brand. Its staff moved to our email addresses, its website was redirected to ours, and in 2024 its domain name came up for renewal. The finance team asked whether we still needed it. Nobody could think of a reason, so we let it lapse.
This August a supplier rang our credit control team about an odd request. Somebody writing from an address on the old domain had asked for a copy of a statement and for the supplier's portal password to be reset. The domain had been picked up within days of expiring by a company that collects lapsed names, and sold on. Its new owner had set up mail to accept every address on it.
We then had to work out what those addresses could still receive. Quite a lot, as it turned out. Two customers had never changed the address they sent remittance advice to. Four supplier portals, a fuel card account and an account with a vehicle hire company still had users registered at the old domain, each of which would send a password reset to whoever owned it. A tachograph analysis service had been sending its monthly reports there the whole time. None of those accounts appeared in our directory, because they had been created by the haulier's staff on other companies' systems, and the only thing connecting them to us was the domain.
The haulier's people had moved to new addresses. Their old addresses kept working for everybody else's systems, and when we let the domain go we handed them to whoever came next.
We bought the domain back, for a good deal more than ten years of renewals would have cost. Every account that used it has been moved to a current address or closed. All our domains now sit in one registrar account owned by my team, and none may lapse until we have checked the mail logs for at least a year to see what still arrives. Retired domains are kept and parked, with incoming mail rejected and published records stating that nothing is ever sent from them. Keeping all eleven costs about four hundred pounds a year.
A domain is cheap to hold and very hard to get back. Letting one go gives away every address on it, along with everything that still trusts those addresses.
– Serguey Shinder
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