Please critique my spam

July 1, 2009 3:42 AM

Received the following email yesterday in regards to my domain name. My first reaction was to hit delete, but I thought I'd just make sure I wasn't ignoring something I shouldn't be ignoring.

Is this spam? Are they waiting for me to respond defending my "property" at which time they'll hit me with a pile of SEO crap for a "small fee"? Is it a scam? Legit? My domain name is {suburb}massage.com. I also have {suburb}massage.com.au and {suburb}remedialmassage.com My registered business name is {suburb} Remedial Massage. I'm in Australia. Obviously there are many places called {suburb} and many businesses offering massage in those places.

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are a domain name registration center in Hongkong,mainly dealing with domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection. On June.29,2009 we received a formal application from a local company of your country who is applying to register some domain names with the keyword “{suburb}massage ” and register it as their internet keyword. After investigation,we find that you are the original user of the keyword. As this refers to your company name or trade mark, and in order to avoid the confusion and dispute on the internet, we inform you and would like to know your ideas, if you agree about this issue, we will finish the third company's registration, If you don't agree the third company to register, please inform me.looking forward to your reply.thanks for your understanding and cooperation.

Should I respond to this or just hit delete?

posted by goshling to computers & internet (10 comments total)

vote = delete
posted by terrapin at 3:45 AM on July 1

See this post from yesterday for discussion of a similar email:
http://ask.metafilter.com/126167/Have-the-com-what-about-the-net
posted by syzygy at 3:45 AM on July 1

I fail at the web. 2nd try with link...

See this post from yesterday.
posted by syzygy at 3:46 AM on July 1

Conclusion from last thread: If you wanted these domain names anyway go to a different registrar who gives you the cheapest price and snap them. Also make a mental note of not taking anything your current registrar say to you on face value ever again because this is definitely an underhand ploy to get you to buy more at best or an outright attempt to swindle you at worst.
posted by london302 at 3:53 AM on July 1

Gah, missed that thread from yesterday.

This email wasn't from anyone I currently have domains registered with (as far as I can see) and I already own the domains I think are relevant. I did wonder for a bit if this "keyword" thing was something important (or a mistranslation of something important, since the email claims to come from Honk Kong). I guess I should probably expect to receive more of these emails in the future.

Thanks for confirming that my initial cynical response of "fuck off" was correct.
posted by goshling at 4:10 AM on July 1

Yup, that is exactly the e-mail I get for every domain I own that I mentioned yesterday. Word for word. It's a mail merge.

There is no inquiry from another party. They just send these to everyone who owns a (whatever).com to sell them another domain.

Delete with extreme prejudice.
posted by rokusan at 4:22 AM on July 1

Just delete it. People that do these scams often try to get you to overpay for a foreign domain name. If your address is www.mysite.com, there will be one of those for every country. EG, com.au com.uk, etc, etc.
posted by Mastercheddaar at 6:27 AM on July 1

Yep, definitely a spammy mailmerge, delete it with abandon!
posted by ceri richard at 7:02 AM on July 1

I received a slightly different version of this from an "internet domain registrar" in Shanghai, and wanted to give me the first refusal to register a .cn version of my domain. What's interesting is I responded (it was worded in a way that was asking me if the chinese company looking to register was my overseas distributor), and had several more emails from the registrar and the chinese "company"... all in an attempt to convince me I needed to register those domains NOW.
posted by danny the boy at 10:25 AM on July 1

I received the virtually the same e-mail a few weeks ago from an alleged Chinese registrar. I ignored it and nothing bad happened.

I just checked the the .cn sibling of my .com -- it's a "this domain name for sale" page belonging to "Netlon China." They can have it.
posted by faster than a speeding bulette at 1:56 PM on July 1