#WeekendWisdom 012 Old Unused Domains
Welcome to #WeekendWisdom number 12. This week we’re going to talk about old unused domains.
Why might you have old unused domains?
Has your business gone through a rebranding exercise recently where you’ve changed the domain for your website and your email accounts? Perhaps your business name has actually changed? Maybe you’re a partnership which used to be called Smith and Jones, which may have had the domain smithjones.com. You’ve now added a new partner, so the new partnership is called Smith, Jones and Murphy. So you now register smithjonesmurphy.com as your website and email domain and you start using that.
Do you continue to pay for the registry for smithjones.com? I would say you should do.
What happens if you let a domain registration lapse?
If you don’t continue to pay for the registry of smithjones.com to be registered to your business, there are people out there that watch the registries and wait to see when a domain becomes available to purchase, when it expires from its previous owner and they will then purchase those domains and then when they have those, they can setup email accounts as that domain name.
What can they do then?
So they could potentially set up an email account that spoofs one of your old legitimate accounts and they can send emails that look like it came from your old business domain. Or they may be able to use the email accounts to get into other services that you may have registered using that old domain.
So the advice here today folks, is that if you do add a new domain to your business, maintain the registry of the old domains in your ownership.
So that’s it for this week. Let’s be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.